Total Combat

“We have so much money,” a Harper aide would admit at the end of the [2006] campaign’s first week, shaking his head in amazement. “We have shitloads of money. Way more than we can spend in a campaign. In a way we wouldn’t have minded Martin’s preferred schedule, which was to go in February, because we could have run this huge pre-writ campaign” — a blitz of television, radio, and newspaper ads, and direct mail, all of it unregulated by Elections Canada spending limits because it pre-dated the dropping of the writ.