Nothing causes voters to raise a cynical eyebrow or hold a politician in disrepute more than the source of funding for election campaigns.
It doesn’t matter whether it is a wealthy developer like Rob Macdonald tossing $960,000 in the Non Partisan Association kitty (making it the biggest single donation in Canadian municipal political history) or the
Canadian Union of Public Employees giving Vision Vancouver $185,000 to help them in their campaign as we saw in 2011.
The assumption is that the donor is expecting something in return. He’s got you in his pocket. He’s in bed with you. And politicians and their parties are regularly ridiculed for a practice suspected of being corrupt.
That was the perception played upon this past year when the Courier’s cartoonist Geoff Olson went after Vision for the steady flow of campaign funds coming from all sides.
Olson delivered what turned out to be an award-winning drawing depicting, one can only assume, Mayor Gregor Robertson in bed. We see two porky men (one labeled “Big Unions,” the other “Big Developers”) taking their leave and getting dressed as Robertson declares, “This isn’t how it looks.”
But the fact is that while all of this limitless donating, suggesting dangerous liaisons, is totally legal, none of the major political parties in the city wants this practice to continue. Yet, for one party to stop voluntarily, could place their opponent’s party at a distinct advantage.
In 2002, the first year the sum total of Vancouver’s municipal election spending exceeded $1 million, council began lobbying the provincial government to legislate against any campaign donations from unions or businesses.
There have been repeated requests ever since usually following unanimously supported council motions, all to no avail.
Meanwhile other jurisdictions in the country, including the federal government itself, have not only made these types of donations illegal, there have been caps placed on individual donations as well.
But here in British Columbia: nothing. And, as you know, Vancouver election spending and donations are now more than five times what they were a dozen years ago and far more than anywhere else in the country.
Then last year, Christy Clark’s Liberal government struck what it called a Special Committee of Local Election Expense Limits. The committee’s final report was released at the end of June and formally introduced in the Legislature last week.
But before you get your hopes up, there was a catch. In spite of repeated requests from many municipalities in general and Vancouver in particular, the mandate of the committee did not allow it to consider the source of donations. That is to say: “The Special Committee shall limit its consideration of campaign finance topics to forming recommendations on expense limits for local elections.”
So any representations, and there were a number including at least one from Vision Vancouver, that asked for legislation to prohibit anyone but individuals from making donations were simply ignored by the Liberal majority on the committee.
Nor would there be amendments to the Vancouver Charter to allow the city to make the changes to block these types of donations on its own.
But it gets worse.
Instead, the Special Committee recommended a funding formula for local elections based on the municipal population. On Tuesday at council, a unanimously supported motion introduced by Green Party councillor Adriane Carr once again asked the province to amend the Vancouver Charter to allow the banning of union and business donations.
The pre-amble of the motion presented an analysis of impact of the Special Committee’s proposed funding formula. It concluded that any and all electoral organizations running a full slate of 27 candidates could spend up to $2.9 million each, making it as high if not higher than the total amount spent of $5.9 million by all parties combined in 2014.
Rather than cutting off or even slowing the flow of corporate and union donations, the province will keep the floodgates open.
It seems to matter little that cynicism among the electorate will only grow as a result. After all — and here is a point not lost on anyone — if Christy Clark changes things municipally, what will people say about her Liberal party that itself gains mightily from this unrestricted flow of funds into its own coffers when provincial elections roll around?
@allengarr
