I'll try to be brief. In a direct way, the answer is no, they cannot do that.
The difficulty, as I indicated when I testified on Bill C-76, is that although we have prohibitions, it's difficult to trace the source of funds for third parties. Third parties use funds that come from organizations that may come from other organizations, and so forth.
There is not a disclosure of the original sources going back to individual donors being Canadian citizens or permanent residents, as there is for parties and candidates. Doing that raises difficult issues from a charter point of view.
This is something that I'm looking into. I will be making recommendations to Parliament sometime in April. I intend to address and propose some avenues—