I was recently directed to a commentary made about campaign fundraising on Werner Patel’s Blog that made it clear that municipal campaign finance rules are not well understood. This has created an environment ripe for abuse by our elected officials.
Council currently has control of the campaign finance bylaw (35M94) which sets the rules of the game for political fundraising in a municipal election campaign.
This has led to the following unethical schemes among members of council in recent memory:
• One Alderman brought forth a notice of motion requesting funding for a charitable organization which council approved and then accepted a campaign donation from the same organization.
• Several candidates accepted campaign donations from institutions or organizations wholly owned by or under the control of Calgary City Council such as ENMAX.
• Several Aldermen made campaign donations to each other and reported those donations as campaign expenses.
• Several Aldermen received tens of thousands of dollars of donations where the donor’s names were not disclosed.
• Candidates are only required to report the net proceeds of a fundraising event, rather than a full disclosure of every donor and expense pertaining to that event.
• At the conclusion of a political campaign and or political career a candidate can keep any surplus from campaign fundraising as personal tax free money.
• After filing campaign returns, there is no independent audit of those returns done by the City Auditor.
There have been minor tweaks meant to hold off the inevitable public outcry, but the new rules council has created for itself are a superficial joke, with a heavy reliance on voluntary compliance.
Council’s half-hearted solutions to this mess include a $5000 limit on campaign contributions, a request that institutions, organizations or agencies “wholly owned by the City of Calgary” not contribute to campaigns for election to Calgary City Council, asking candidates to voluntarily disclose contributions of $100 or more on nomination day and asking candidates to voluntarily agree to donate any surplus to charity.
Looking at the list of financial shenanigans our Aldermen are involved in, I’m confident that any voluntary solution is destined to be ineffective.
What we should be pursuing is a major overhaul including a push to the Province to make donations tax-deductible political contributions subject to audit, as opposed to the current categorization of “personal gifts”. A bold move like this would have significant implications for accountability and transparency of contributions.
The campaign finance rules (bylaw 35M94) can be found here
Another great source of information is an article from FFWD Weekly found here
