While they may not be as powerful as U.S. political action committees, there’s a new form of campaign fundraising in Canada that works on the same keeping-up-with-the-Joneses rationale as the American campaign behemoths.

The newest one, HarperPAC, has been launched in response to the left-wing group Engage Canada.

“The inspiration for a lot of this came from the fact that the left has been doing this provincially and now federally and we had to respond,” Stephen Taylor, HarperPAC’s spokesman, told iPolitics.

The Conservative strategist who single-handedly created the #BoycottTims social media campaign has launched a new project, this one meant to influence a much larger outcome.

While Engage Canada may have a similar mandate, Taylor’s political action committee is the first to include PAC in its title.

Engage Canada calls itself a non-partisan grassroots organization, despite being run by former Liberal and NDP strategists, and its intent, which is to make the Conservative party “unelectable.”

Political Action Committees are popular fundraising mechanisms in the U.S. and now, thanks to Taylor, that style has entered Canadian politics. In the U.S., PACS are used to pool campaign contributions from donations to fund campaigns for candidates, or to rail against opponents without being legally linked directly to a candidate.

The U.S. Federal Election Commission defines a PAC as “a committee that makes contributions to other federal political committees. Independent-expenditure-only political committees (sometimes called “super PACs”) may accept unlimited contributions, including from corporations and labor organizations.”

Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert famously protested the much-maligned U.S. campaign finance bodies in 2012 by setting up his own PAC.

In Canada there are few, if any at all, legal restrictions on where a non-profit corporation without charitable status can raise its funds. Non-profit corporations in Canada do not have to open their books to anyone the way that political parties are obliged to. While there are reporting requirements for groups that spend money to advance a viewpoint during an election, there is no restriction on how much third party groups spend outside the election writ period and no obligation to reveal how much money is spent or where it goes.

In a press release, Taylor describes HarperPAC as “a group that aims to defend the interests of everyday Canadians against the tide of cash from professional leftist agitators and big union bosses that has been earmarked to take down the Conservative government.

“Unions in Canada have amassed a war chest of millions and plan to relentlessly attack Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. We are leveling the playing field.”

“Justin Trudeau represents dangerous and unpredictable change, while Thomas Mulcair’s NDP is eager to implement the same disastrous economic formula that ruined provinces for whole generations,” Taylor says in the release.

According to Taylor’s release, “HarperPAC will raise money from concerned Canadians from every corner of the country to push back against such attacks. The group is purchasing advertising to inform Canadians of the important choices they face on election day in October.”

HarperPAC’s site shows the group’s mandate, along with a quote from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and an opportunity to add your email to a list to “fight back.”

Also on the site, are photos and short bios of eight “advisory council” members, which consist of former chiefs of staff, former senior staff in the Harper government, and also the former Attorney General of Alberta.

Shortly after the site launched, Taylor tweeted a link to the group’s very first Trudeau attack ad.

This isn’t the first private group to launch a campaign aimed at fundraising in support of the Conservative government. In March, iPolitics reported that the Conservative Party of Canada’s former executive director, Dan Hilton, set up a new organization called Conservative Voice to raise money and promote the government, while bypassing the legal limits on fundraising faced by political parties.

In an interview with iPolitics’ Elizabeth Thompson in March, Hilton said Conservative Voice is “simply a group of people who are trying to level the playing field and make sure that the right’s perspective is adequately represented in papers and the media.”