By way of comparison

Tim Naumetz points out what strikes me as a surprising trend of potential NDP leadership candidates expressing concern about the cost of participating in the race:

“Money is a big deal,” Nova Scotia NDP MP Robert Chisholm (Dartmouth-Cole Harbor, N.S.) told The Hill Times on Thursday. “I don’t think any of us, anybody that’s considering running, wants to put themselves in a situation where they come out of it with a huge debt. It’s a very serious concern, so that’s probably the biggest thing at the moment.”
...
Mr. Chisholm signalled Thursday he is close to assuring himself he will have enough financial support to spend what one MP described as a minimum of between $200,000 and $300,000 to have a chance of winning or finishing well.

“I’m moving in that direction, doing things that are getting get me closer,” Mr. Chisholm said.

Mr. Julian was the first to indicate financial backing, limited under the Canada Elections Act to maximum individual contributions of $1,200, was the central concern of prospective candidates. Elections Canada only since the May 2 election increased the political contribution limit from its previous level of $1,100, according to an automatic inflation adjustment formula within the Elections Act.

“No one wants to be another Ken Dryden,” Mr. Julian told The Hill Times during the NDP caucus meeting in Quebec City last week.

Of course, there's no risk of the NDP leadership race developing into the type of big-money arms race that the Libs' contest became in 2006. After all, the spending cap is set at roughly the same amount of money spent by even the Libs' mid-tier candidates. Which means that Chisholm is probably right to think that a candidate can stay in the race without spending much more than $200,000.

With that in mind, guess which leadership contestant who couldn't crack 5% of the delegate support was nonetheless able to raise $212,247.16 for his own campaign? Yes, that's right.

That means that the NDP's ground rules are already set up to keep any of the party's contenders from falling into the same trap as Lib candidates who had to plan for million-dollar campaigns to have any hope of contending. And by the same token, the cost of a campaign shouldn't serve as a barrier to any of the MPs whose names are being bandied about.