OTTAWA (CP) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper's vaunted ethics legislation could make it illegal for anyone who's donated more than $5 to the Liberals this year to attend the party's leadership convention in December.

Under the proposed Federal Accountability Act, individuals will be prohibited from donating more than $1,000 per year to a political party, down from the current limit of $5,400.

Trouble is, delegate fees to attend a political convention count as a donation. And, in the case of the Liberals' leadership convention, the fee is $995, just short of the proposed annual donation limit.

If the legislation goes into effect in the fall, as Harper's Conservatives hope, the rules will be changed in the middle of the Liberal contest and thousands of Grit donors could become ineligible to attend the convention.

"This is madness . . . . This is the most anti-democratic piece of legislation I've ever seen," fumed Stephen MacKinnon, the Liberals' national director.

"It is passing strange that the Conservatives, with their Reform tradition, want to be the party which silences the voices of party activists in national political parties."

A spokesperson for Conservative House Leader Rob Nicholson, who is shepherding the act through the Commons, dismissed the Liberals' fears of the bill's impact on their convention.

Genevieve Breton said delegate fees are meant to cover the actual costs of staging a convention. Thus, they are not considered a donation and are not subject to the donation limit.

"Basically, they were just wrong in what they thought," she said of the Liberals.

But Elections Canada, which implements and enforces political financing rules, backed up the Liberals' interpretation.

Spokesperson Valerie Hache pointed out that a current provision in the law stipulates that a fee paid to attend a political convention does in fact constitute a donation "to the extent that the person paying the fee is not receiving a good or service that has any commercial value beyond its political value."

Any portion of a convention fee that covers lodging, meals or travel does not count as a contribution.

In the case of the Liberals' leadership convention fee, MacKinnon said the entire $995 will count as a donation for most delegates, who pay their own hotel, travel and meal bills on top of the fee. For those delegates travelling more than 700 km to attend the Montreal gathering, a portion of the fee will include a travel subsidy; that portion won't count as a donation.

The Tories' legislation does not propose to change the current provision regarding convention fees. Indeed, when Liberals on the committee examining the accountability act proposed an amendment to exempt convention fees from the $1,000 donation limit, Conservative and NDP MPs joined forces to shoot it down.

Liberal proposals to increase the limit to $2,000 or to delay implementation of the act until Jan. 1, 2007, were similarly rejected.

MacKinnon said the Tories seem intent on harassing the Liberals and disrupting their leadership race. And he said it's particularly petty given that the Tories timed their 2004 leadership race, which Harper won, to avoid new rules banning corporate donations and limiting individual contributions to $5,400.

The previous Liberal government passed those changes in the fall of 2003. But the Liberal legislation specificied that the new rules would not apply to any leadership contest that was under way by Jan. 1, 2004, when the law went into force.

The Tories officially called their leadership race on Dec. 23, 2003, allowing them to avoid all the strict new rules.

"They conducted their race without any of the regulation we are applying," said MacKinnon. "It was an unregulated race."