That's the big question.
I think the answer is, number one, that the CRA is running the charitable sector on an honour system. There just isn't nearly enough auditing. When you have 80,000 charities and only one-tenth of 1% of them are shut down a year, it's just negligible.
Specifically with regard to elections, the two things I saw in the investigations that I was part of were, first, that organizations were having an influence via activities that aren't regulated. For example, online activities, or creating a donor base, or developing video content, or creating websites, editing reports, writing speeches, coaching and providing strategic guidance aren't regulated. None of those were reportable expenditures.
The second issue is the time frame. What I saw is that so much of the election preparation was done years in advance. By the time the two-year mark came around—that is, two years before an election—the groundwork was already laid. If you compare that with the timeframe for reportable expenditures, it's a matter of months.
It's very easy to circumvent the rules by making your expenditures before the reporting period even begins.