While citizens and groups become increasingly frustrated with the refusal of Elections Alberta to consider Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian group as a third-party advertiser, Lukaszuk is becoming increasingly bold in flaunting the rules set out for campaigning.

In an article posted by the BBC on July 11, Lukaszuk was quoted as saying, "We will do everything we possibly can to win this referendum." Perhaps he didn’t realize Albertans can read foreign articles.

The premise of the alleged loophole that shields Lukaszuk’s group from financial reporting is that he and his group aren’t actually campaigning in the upcoming referendum. Lukaszuk has been playing semantic word games to pretend his group is simply promoting broad concepts of national unity, but his own words continue to put a lie to that claim.

His group has been opening campaign offices and calling them such, yet claims they aren’t running a campaign. In a Facebook posting, he said: “To win a referendum, we must get out the vote.”

In a bulletin from Elections Alberta, they said using terms such as “choose” and "vote" could indicate campaigning. Yet Lukaszuk’s placement of thousands of campaign signs that say “choose unity” apparently doesn’t count as campaigning to them.

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Even other federalist groups are getting upset with the apparent immunity from electoral law that Lukaszuk’s group is enjoying. They are asking themselves why anybody should bother with compliance when word games played with your campaign theme can exempt your group from regulations. The entire campaign may soon turn into a free-for-all if Elections Alberta doesn’t enforce its rules with groups like Forever Canadian.

Being exempt from third-party advertising rules offers a significant advantage to groups. They have no maximum spending or contribution limits, and they don’t have to disclose who is funding them. Lukaszuk could be bringing in money from foreign sources and in unlimited numbers with the intent of influencing a referendum in Alberta, and citizens have no way to know it. His group could be collecting well beyond the $607,000 cap that other groups are bound by, and people may never know how the money is spent.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian group is clearly campaigning in the upcoming referendum. The only people who can’t see this are working at Elections Alberta.

The electoral agency is losing more credibility every day as it stringently applies rules to third-party advertising groups campaigning in good faith, while ignoring Thomas Lukaszuk’s campaign. This selective enforcement also will give room to whoever is on the losing side of questions posed in the October 19th election to claim the results are invalid because campaign laws weren’t applied equally.

How much more blatant will Lukaszuk have to get before Elections Alberta acts?