Spending has little to do with results
There's an old saying attributed to the Danish fur trappers who first began settling Greenland in the 1620s that, "The next mile is the only one a person really has to make."

For U.S. Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, that "next mile," i.e. defeating Senator Barrack Obama in the increasingly bitter Democratic primary, isn't an easy task. But there's no questioning Clinton's tenacity in seeking to cover the distance.

While the Clinton-Obama race is clearly helping Republican Senator John McCain's chances in the fall general election, and is almost mesmerizing for those of us who, alas, are political junkies, Clinton's recent 10-point win in the Pennsylvania primary also serves as a rebuke to those in this country who seem to believe that, everything else aside, good old fashioned money can buy you an election victory.

This issue is particularly relevant given the scurrilous actions of Elections Canada in recruiting the RCMP - and tipping off the media and the Liberals - to raid the federal Tory headquarters - wearing flak jackets, as if the Tories were somehow going to fire guns at them - on a questionable premise regarding the technical workings of Canada's absurd election spending laws.

Ever since his days as head of the National Citizens Coalition, Stephen Harper has been a harsh critic of Elections Canada's approach to election spending practices in this country.

The Tories and Elections Canada are currently in a court battle, yet Elections Canada chose to use their power to send in the cops who, in turn, seized everything they could see, whether it had anything to do with the alleged overspending - of $1million over the allowable $18 million on advertising - in the last election by the Tories.

The Tories claim they did nothing wrong. Elections Canada says they did. Time will tell. But the point here, getting back to Clnton and Pennsylvania, is that the predictable - and downright dumb - claims by both the Liberals and NDP that the relatively small Tory excess, even if the charges against them are true, completely altered the outcome of the election. Indeed, several senior Liberals brazenly claimed that without this Tory spending, they would have won the election, not the Tories.

Oh please. In 1992, during the referendum on the Charlottetown Accord, the "yes" side outspent the "no" side by a margin of roughly 21 to one, yet the "no" side easily won the day.

In Pennsylvania, Obama spent $8.1 million advertising himself, compared to Clinton's $3.2 million, yet Clinton won by about 10 percentage points. It is this mistaken belief in this country of the direct link between advertising dollars spent and number of votes tallied which led to the outrageous and profoundly undemocratic "gag laws," a set of laws with impose antediluvian restrictions on how much money either private citizens or groups can spend on "election advertising."

The laws are so restrictive that any person and/or group not an official political party is virtually shut out of the political advertising arena for fear that some rich person or wealthy group could "buy" the election on behalf of their favorite party and/or issue.

It's total nonsense, not backed up by any empirical evidence or research, a law that Prime Minister Harper, in his previous aforementioned job with the NCC, fought continually to have tossed out.

The law is based on the premise that voter are so gullible - stupid even - that watching an election ad during their favorite TV soap opera is going to convince them to rush right out and vote for the party running the ad. Not bloody likely.

Yes, money does help. Getting your message to more people isn't a bad thing. It's just not the sort of thing government bureaucrats should have any business controlling.

Harper used to rail against it. But, as further evidence that out-of-power views often change dramatically when people get into power, Harper has done nothing to act on his promise to get rid of these undemocratic "gag laws."

Harper is right in suggesting that Elections Canada is using its power as a grudge match against his earlier criticisms, and we can only hope that if he garners a majority in the next election - and given the weak Liberal leadership that's a real possibility - he'll not only get Elections Canada out of the business of telling political parties where they should spend their advertising dollars, but he'll nuke those dreadful gag laws" and restore free speech to those Canadians who care enough about the political process to exercise it, whether they are on the right, the left, the middle or somewhere in cyberspace.