Endorsement ads came as surprise, says Summerland mayor
Susan McIver -special to the Okanagan Saturday
December 05, 2009
A scheduled telephone interview with Janice Perrino ended abruptly when the Summerland mayor refused to answer further questions about the controversy facing her council over financial disclosures from the 2008 municipal election.
“I‘d like to tell you my story,” Perrino said in her first interview with the Okanagan Valley Newspaper Group since the meeting of Nov. 9 when Penticton Herald managing editor James Miller questioned council on the disclosures. (She had been at home since early November, recovering from surgery.)
It was revealed that the mayor and councillors had declared cash transactions as in-kind campaign contributions and had exceeded the $50 limit for each anonymous donation.
On Nov. 27, a front-page opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun suggested Summerland council has no legitimacy because of illegal donations during the 2008 campaign.
Absolute shock was how Perrino described her reaction to learning of the questioning over election expenses.
She said that in an attempt to be as open and transparent as possible, and on the advice of the municipality‘s chief electoral officer, she had listed anything of benefit to her campaign.
“We did not try to hide anything. We now realize that we were under no obligation to do so (list the anonymous advertisements),” Perrino said.
During the campaign, a series of advertisements endorsing the current council members appeared in local newspapers, sponsored by a group calling itself Citizens for Smart Governance. Local businessman Mark Ziebarth has since taken credit for the ads.
Perrino claimed that as soon as the ads from Citizens for Smart Governance appeared during the campaign, she contacted the Penticton Herald to find out who had placed them.
The only ad sponsored by Smart Governance in the Herald ran on Nov. 14, the day before the elections.
Ads by the same group began to appear in the Summerland Review on Oct. 23.
Perrino said that after the election, she contacted the Summerland Review and the Herald.
Representatives of both newspapers would not say who had paid for the ads.
“It is the policy of the Penticton Herald to respect client confidentially by not releasing the names of individuals who paid for a particular advertisement,” said Andre Martin, general manager of the Herald.
Martin suspects the policy would be identical at most daily newspapers throughout Canada.
Perrino wants the provincial task force recently appointed to review municipal election laws to address whether newspapers should be allowed to take advertisements supporting candidates without their approval.
Patrick Smith, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University, told CBC Radio that by not publicly disassociating themselves from the anonymous ads, council members had placed themselves in a position of conflict.
Perrino‘s response in this interview was, “These were third-party ads done by other people. I did not take cash donations. I asked, specifically, the Penticton Herald who placed the ads, and they would not tell me.”
When asked about Coun. Sam Elia having identified Ziebarth as a donor, Perrino said, “I was not prepared to put down a name until I knew that was the name the Penticton Herald had. And all you and Mr. Miller had to do was to walk down to the classified department and to ask who placed the ad.”
The Herald‘s client confidentiality policy covers inquiries from the editorial department as well as the general public.
Perrino asked why no one from the Herald had contacted her until early this week. However, she would not say why no council member had responded publicly to Miller‘s questions until the Vancouver Sun article appeared more than two weeks later.
“I beg your pardon. The article (in the Nov. 11 Herald) was quite derogatory, and it is very clear that you‘re into a smear campaign. . . . I‘m done with this interview!” Perrino said.
Perrino is expected to be back in the mayor‘s chair for council‘s next regularly scheduled meeting on Dec. 14.
http://www.pentictonherald.ca/top_story.php?id=228864&type=Local
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