The Royal Canadian Mounted Police staged a high-profile raid on the HQ of the Conservative Party last week, looking for documents to corroborate allegations of electoral violations in the 2006 race that brought them to power.

The exact allegations are somewhat complex; basically federal parties can only spend X million dollars on their national campaigns, but that limit doesn't include each individual member of parliament's personal election race. The claim is that the Conservatives violated the spirit of this law by routinely playing up this loophole, and running ads that were clearly national in scope, yet filed under the "local stuff" budget. More than anything else, the episode just shows how goofy a lot of Canada's campaign finance laws are, but the Liberals are already crying bloody murder over the investigation. At least one former minister has already gone so far as to claim the election was basically stolen due to this improper advertisement registration.