Canada's Conservative Party raided

You have to give Canada's conservative political party credit for being more honest than the major one in the U.S.: It calls itself...the Conservative Party.

The differences seem to end there though, for Canada's Conservative Party appears to be nearly as lawless and corrupt as the Republicans. The party is now in trouble for serious campaign spending violations during the parliamentary elections of 2006.

Canada has a national spending limit on ads. This limit is not voluntary. It's a binding instruction or directive (as a certain person might say)! In other words, it's the law, and it's mandatory. But when the Conservatives reached the limit, the party transferred the money to 66 local party offices - which then transferred it back to the national party to buy TV and radio ads.

Elections Canada - the agency that oversees national elections - says this scam was the Conservatives' way of evading the law. The ads they produced don't qualify as local ads because they were almost identical to the national ads. So the cost of the commercials has to be counted towards the spending limit.

So now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has raided Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa to carry out a search warrant on the party as part of this ongoing investigation. How funny!

The RCMP is Canada's national law enforcement, a bit like the FBI is in the U.S. and A. Another difference between the GOP and Canada's Conservatives is that the U.S. government is so corrupt that you're not likely to see the FBI raiding the Republicans any time soon, even after the GOP illegally jammed phone lines on Election Day to dissipate voter drives.

(Source: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/04/15/rcmp-tories.html)