Illegal donations mean Summerland has no legitimate council
Thousands of dollars spent by the seven winning candidates during last year’s municipal election in Summerland came from anonymous donors.
But that’s illegal and the penalty for candidates who take anonymous donations of more than $50 is disqualification from holding office and from running again until after the next general election.
It’s also illegal to give anonymous donations of more than $50.
Candidates, elector organizations and campaign organizers who receive anonymous donations greater than that amount are required by the Local Government Act to give that contribution to the municipality or regional district.
But it’s harder to find the givers than the takers.
All six Summerland councillors and Mayor Janice Perrino admitted in their campaign financing disclosure statements that they took donations from unnamed individuals, groups or corporations that exceeded the legal threshold.
“I guess Summerland doesn’t have a council any more,” said Kennedy Stewart, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University, whose specialty is civic politics.
Perrino spent $7,913 on her campaign with $1,127 of that coming as anonymous “in-kind” donations of newspaper ads, flyers and cards. She also recorded another $170 in anonymous cash contributions of $50 or less.
In-kind donations are those that involve a person, company or group providing service or the use of a property at no cost. For example, a hotel owner could provide a meeting room at no cost to a candidate. But under the act, if that meeting room normally rented for more than $50 he or she could not donate it anonymously.
For the newspaper ads to be considered “in-kind” donations, they would have had to be provided at no cost by the newspapers’ owners. But if those ads were worth more than $50, the candidates would not have been able to accept them without naming the newspapers’ owners as donors.
Councillors Gordon Clark and Bruce Hallquist both filed disclosure statements claiming $513.91 from “anonymous for reasons of privacy” for newspaper ads and the printing of flyers and cards.
Clark and Hallquist both noted that amount was one-seventh of the full cost of the ads and other printed material.
But the question is: Who is responsible for enforcing the law and firing the mayor and council?
Stewart says nobody is. Municipal clerks act as chief electoral officers, but they have no powers to enforce the act’s provisions.
It’s a striking example of how miserably flawed the Local Government Act’s election provisions are.
Earlier this month, Penticton Herald managing editor James Miller confronted Summerland council at its weekly meeting about the anonymous donations. He also asked them about the Citizens for Smart Governance, which endorsed all of them.
(His fine example of crusading journalism is available on a video at vancouversun.com)
Citizens for Smart Governance broke the act by failing to register as an elector organization, even though it endorsed a slate of candidates and bought ads urging voters to support them. The group also failed to file a financial disclosure statement.
Perrino was not at the meeting. She is away, recovering from back surgery.
Clark, the acting mayor, admitted to Miller that he identified himself with the group and had indeed claimed $207.89 on his financial disclosure as his 1/7th proportion of an ad that ran above the Citizens for Smart Governance name.
But Clark said he had no recollection of who actually constitutes the group and didn’t know of any formally appointed chair or president of Citizens for Smart Governance.
Miller’s conservative estimate of how much the Citizens for Smart Governance spent on newspaper advertising alone is $3,000. One ad in the Penticton Herald that ran the day before the election, for example, cost just over $1,000.
The Herald ran more than one ad from the group, which also placed ads in two other newspapers: the Summerland Review and the Penticton Western News.
The Citizens for Smart Governance also distributed flyers.
Ironically, one of its ads for Perrino in the Summerland Review urged voters to choose her because “Janice Perrino is not beholden to any special interest group.”
The reality is that because of all the anonymous donations, nobody really knows who funded a considerable portion of the Summerland council’s election campaign.
It has left Perrino and her council open to speculation about its contentious two-pronged decision to, first, amend the official community plan (less than a year after it was approved following four years of public consultation) and then to upgrade the Rattlesnake Mountain site to an urban growth area from a future growth area, making it easier for it to be developed.
“The whole slate thing stunk,” Miller wrote in an editorial calling for an independent audit of election expenses.
The problem is, there’s no provision for that in the act.
The fact is that the provincial legislation has no provision for enforcement of any kind by anybody despite having all kinds of clauses about penalties that range from disqualification from holding office to fines of up to $5,000 to up to a year in jail.
With no one in charge of ensuring that municipal elections are free, fair and transparent, B.C. is more like Afghanistan than any of us would like to believe.
To date, the position of the B.C. Liberal government is that it’s up to citizens to complain.
But even that isn’t very effective as David Wilson from Central Saanich, David Marley, Michael Lewis and Vivian Vaughn from West Vancouver and Sonya Paterson from Langley can attest.
All of those individuals filed complaints with police. In Central Saanich, it was RCMP who investigated because the local police chief was a director of the Peninsula Co-op, which failed to register.
The RCMP recommended 19 charges be laid. The B.C. government’s criminal justice branch decided it was not in the public interest to press charges and that there was not a substantial likelihood of conviction.
The same thing happened in West Vancouver. Local police recommended charges, Crown counsel said no. Earlier this month, Marley and Lewis wrote to Attorney-General Mike de Jong asking that the decision be reviewed by senior ministry staff.
Langley RCMP sent Paterson a five-page letter explaining that charges were not being recommended because the act is pretty much a shambles.
The gaping holes in the legislation have not gone entirely unnoticed by municipal and provincial politicians.
At the Union of B.C. Municipalities’ convention this fall, the city of Vancouver put forward a motion calling for legislative change.
In his speech to that convention, Premier Gordon Campbell announced a “task force” headed by UBCM president Harry Nyce and Community Development Minister Bill Bennett would review the legislation and make recommendations by May 31.
“It is a bit of the Wild West out there compared to provincial and federal elections,” Bennett admitted in a radio interview this week.
He said there has not been “the kind of comprehensive reporting that should have been taking place” and that there are “some serious gaps in terms of accountability, transparency and spending limits.”
But aside from public hand-wringing, nothing has happened.
The government has yet to appoint the other task force members. It has no terms of reference. No budget.
And soon, it won’t have any time.
dbramham@vancouversun.com
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Illegal+donations+mean+Summerland+legitimate+council/2275145/story.html
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