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Thanks to a court case former Conservative leadership candidate Kevin O'Leary is launching, I now have a "news hook" upon which I can hang one of my favorite topics.

So prepare yourself; you're about to be lectured on what's wrong with Canada's campaign finance laws.

But before I get to that lecture, let's briefly go over O'Leary's relevant case.

According to media reports I've seen, O'Leary is suing the federal elections commissioner and Elections Canada over fundraising rules that limit how much of his own money he can spend to pay off outstanding campaign debts.

And yes, he' still faces campaign debts even though the leadership race was more than a year ago.

In fact, O'Leary apparently still owes more than $400,000 to several campaign suppliers.

He says the reason he can't meet his obligations is that given our tight campaign finance rules —  individual contributors can only donate $1,575 a year to a leadership candidate his fundraising process is agonizingly slow.

Plus, those same campaign finance rules make it so he can only use his own money to make a one-time advance of $25,000.

Hence his lawsuit.

And of course, O'Leary's debt problem is by no means an isolated occurrence.

In fact, failed leadership campaigns and massive debt seem to go hand in hand.

For instance, seven years after the 2006 Liberal leadership race, failed candidate Ken Dryden still owed $225,000, while Hedy Fry had a $69,000 debt and Joe Volpe had yet to pay off $97,800.

So clearly something is wrong with this picture.

Simply put, people running for elected office shouldn't face the prospect of incurring crippling debts.

And keep in mind, running a campaign is expensive; there's all kinds of costs renting an office, paying staff, buying ads, printing signs, conducting research, etc.

So yes, falling into a debt trap is easy.

This is why, in my view, it'd be good for democracy if we simply ended campaign contribution limits and allowed donors to give their favorite candidates whatever amount of money they wished.

I realize the immediate reaction to this proposal will be something along the lines of: "But if did we away with donation limits it would mean the richest candidate would always win."

Indeed, this "stopping the rich" notion is the rationale used to justify all attempts to control and to regulate money in politics.

It's why we have limits on how much money political parties can raise, it's why we have limits on how much they can spend; it's also why we even have tight limits on how much money independent organizations can spend on political ads during elections.

Yet, for all that, I have never seen any evidence to suggest that the rich can somehow "buy" an election.

If anything, there's evidence to the contrary, since on many occasions the biggest spenders in elections have ended up losing.

In my view, the only thing money allows you to do is to get your message out to the public; if that message is unpersuasive or poorly articulated, it won't resonate with voters no matter how much money you spend.

The other thing money allows you to do, of course is to raise your profile and to increase your name recognition.

That's important if you're not a "celebrity" or if you're not an already well known politician.

And that leads to another problem with restrictive campaign finance rules they make it more difficult for "outsiders" to mount an effective leadership race, they help ensure that "unknown" candidates remain unknown.

To me, that's bad for democracy.

If anything we should be encouraging people with new ideas and new visions to participate in the democratic process.

Anyway, that's my rant.

I realize nothing will come of my idea, since after all it's in the interest of established and incumbent politicians to keep the system the way it is.

Maybe O'Leary's court challenge will change this, but I doubt it.

*News alert* Perhaps I was being a bit too pessimistic; just as I was putting the final touches on this column, I saw a media report stating the Ontario Progressive Conservative government will liberalize election finance laws, with contribution limits rising from $1200 to $1600 by 2020

Hey, it's a start.

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