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The fall election campaign has not yet officially begun, but of course it has begun in every other sense. Parliament has not been dissolved, the parties have not yet nominated all of their candidates, but the advertising campaigns are well under way.

Some of these are actual partisan advertisements, paid for by the parties. If not yet subject to the spending limits that kick in once the writ has dropped, they must at least be paid for out of funds raised and regulated in the usual way: that is out of individual donations, whose amounts are capped and whose sources must be disclosed.

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But much else is outside even this loosely drawn ambit. There are the raft of government advertisements, paid for by the taxpayer but nakedly partisan in their promotion of the Conservative party’s interests. Virtually everyone agrees that these are an outrage and should be subject to restrictions of the sort imposed in Ontario, requiring all such ads to be vetted by the auditor general (or some similar office) for partisan content.

More problematic is the current wave of advertising by so-called “third party” groups. Some bear ostensibly non-partisan names like Engage Canada (on the left) or Working Canadians (on the right); others, such as the new HarperPAC, which announced itself to the world this week, make no bones about their allegiances — though disavowing any formal connection.

The ads, on either side, are about as tendentious as mean-spirited as one would expect nowadays — though no more so than the ones the parties take direct responsibility for. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they make a mockery of the campaign finance laws. It’s one thing to run ads saying “Cut taxes now” or “No to free trade,” but when the point of the ads is quite avowedly to support (or more usually oppose) parties and candidates by name, then what we have are partisan ads in all but name.