You all remember Suzanne Anton, don’t you?
Of course you do.
The former NPA park board commissioner and city councillor —who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2011 — is now the provincial justice minister and attorney general.
Anton’s name came up twice Monday in the B.C. Legislature.
It wasn’t related to her current job but her time at city hall, where she and other councillors of all political stripes made it quite clear several times that spending limits are needed to put a stop to the multi-million dollar civic election campaigns.
She was reminded of her stance on this topic by NDP MLAs Spencer Chandra Herbert (Vancouver-West End) and David Eby (Vancouver-Point Grey).
As memory serves, Herbert was a COPE park board commissioner and Eby made an unsuccessful attempt to become a Vision Vancouver council nominee.
So with those political ties up front, it wasn’t a big surprise to hear Eby and Herbert single out Anton and go on to slam her current party for failing to introduce spending limits this fall.
“Even the attorney general on the Liberal side voted in support of banning corporate and union donations,” said Herbert as he stood in the Legislature. “She stood strongly and said that this must happen. Her party, the NPA, said that this must happen.”
Then he went on to reference the $960,000 that developer and party fundraiser Robert Macdonald — a good friend of Anton’s — donated to the NPA in the 2011 campaign.
Eby picked up on the Macdonald connection.
“That donation went directly to the campaign of the current attorney general when she was running for mayor at the time for the city of Vancouver,” he said. “I think that’s a very important detail because I’m trying hard to understand why this government has not given the power to the city of Vancouver, under the Vancouver Charter, to implement municipal finance reform.”
And on it went.
But I noted neither Herbert nor Eby mentioned the much-publicized $25,000-a plate lunch condo king Bob Rennie hosted recently to raise money for Mayor Gregor Robertson’s re-election campaign.
Nor was there mention that Robertson received donations from the U.S. when he battled Raymond Louie in 2008 to become Vision’s mayoral candidate.
Nor was it mentioned that up until Macdonald’s donation, it was actually Vision Vancouver that received the single biggest donation from an individual.
That was $169,000 in 2005 from John Lefebvre, who later got into trouble with the FBI for conspiring to transfer billions of dollars to overseas gambling companies.
So, yes, the finger-pointing should be directed at more than the NPA. Heck, there was a time COPE even took donations from developers.
Anton didn’t respond in the Legislature and left that to Coralee Oakes, the minister responsible for introducing the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act (Bill 20) and Local Elections Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 21).
For the record, Oakes has said spending limits will be phased in at a later date but the point made by her critics is that government had almost four years to make a change.
“We believe that it’s not just the highest spender that will get elected,” Oakes said. “When we did analysis from across the province of British Columbia, it wasn’t always about the person who spent the most that was successful.”
Tell that to the independent candidates.
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