On small print

Kady O'Malley points out that the Cons are now requiring potential candidates to "enter into any reasonable financial arrangements with the Conservative Party of Canada concerning the payment for the provision of campaign services by the Party to the candidate". And it's not hard to see how that kind of requirement would set up the groundwork for an even more extreme version of the Conadscam scheme.

Remember this from the time of the last federal election campaign:

(T)he documents assembled by the Elections Canada investigators to justify a search of Conservative headquarters last week say the party brass was not pleased when local campaigns refused to take part in what has become known as the in-and-out scheme.

"There were two outright refusals - Beauce and Brome-Mississquoi," Michael Donison, who was then party president, wrote in a December, 2005, e-mail to Conservative officials. "We have discussed and understood Beauce but what is with Brome? Why should they be allowed to just outright refuse?"

With that position looming in the background, the new language would seem to send a signal that as far as the Cons are concerned, candidates in the next federal election campaign will be contractually prohibited from refusing.

Mind you, it's highly debatable whether the Cons could make a "reasonable" demand of anybody to participate in a scheme that's already under investigation. And it's worth wondering as well how any candidate could make a binding commitment to enter into unspecified future agreements when campaign expenses have to be approved by the candidate's then-unnamed official agent to become valid.

But the Cons are clearly far less concerned with those kinds of matters - not to mention the legality of the entire scheme - than they are with adding one more restraint to keep future candidates in line. And neither potential Con candidates nor Canadians at large can have much reason for optimism about what that says about the Cons' priorities.