"More transparency needed for civil election campaigns" by Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun June 1, 2010

More transparency needed for civil election campaigns

By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun June 1, 2010


There will be greater transparency, significantly better oversight of civic-election financing, and a move away from citizen-complaint-driven enforcement of the rules, if the B.C. government puts in place the recommendations of its appointed task force.

Released Monday, the recommendations are aimed at eliminating the kind of electoral shenanigans that occurred during the 2008 civic vote and resulted in court cases and police investigations in municipalities such as West Vancouver, Central Saanich, Langley and Summerland.

Anonymous donations would be banned.

Elections BC would have oversight and enforcement powers, and more authority will be given to local electoral officers to do things such as take down illegal signs.

All election ads must say who paid for them.

Financial disclosures must be filed within 90 days of the vote and made available online. Currently, municipalities set their own rules about allowing citizens to view the documents, and the disclosures don't have to be filed until 120 days after the vote.

For the first time, the financial-disclosure rules would apply to referendum votes on a wide variety of issues, from rezonings to capital spending to annexation and expansion of civic boundaries.

Still, citizens would largely continue to vote blindly, because there's no way for them to find out who backed a candidate or issue financially until after the election.

While the task force focused mainly on transparency measures, it also recommended capping election spending by individual candidates, parties and interested third parties, to ensure that running for office isn't only open to the rich and well-connected.

However, task-force members -- representatives of the Union of B.C. Municipalities and Liberal members of the legislature -- ducked both controversy and trouble by not suggesting what limits might be appropriate or how they might be applied.

If the spending limit covers the entire term, would disclosures be required only 90 days after the election or would there be annual disclosures?

(Community Development Minister Bill Bennett suggested Monday that mandatory disclosures might be too onerous in small municipalities, but "timely disclosures" would be required. He didn't say what timely means. Is it a month? Six months? Two years?)

In municipalities with civic parties, would the spending cap apply to candidates' nomination campaigns?

And those are just some of the questions that need to be answered. As the task-force report concluded, "the actual design of the expense limits will take significant work."

That work will now apparently be done over the next few months by government staff in consultation with the UBCM so that legislation can be passed next spring. There will be no opportunity for public input.

The task force also balked at recommending contribution limits, refusing even to ban foreign donations despite that being a unanimous recommendation from Vancouver's mayor and councillors.

Both Bennett and Surrey councillor Barbara Steele, a UBCM appointee to the task force, argue that improved transparency is the best regulator of contributions.

It's a view not widely held, as is evidenced by the donor cap at the federal level, limits in most provinces -- not B.C. -- and by a recent trend in other provinces to limit municipal election spending.

Yet neither Bennett nor Steele could explain why transparency is enough -- other than it might discourage citizens from voting next time for a mayor or council member who might, for example, have accepted $500,000 from either a public-sector union or a developer and then voted in line with the donor's best interests.

As for foreign donations, Bennett said the amount is insignificant and not worth worrying about, even though in the 2008 election in Metro Vancouver, total foreign donations far exceeded anonymous donations, which the task force recommended banning.

There's no argument that the task-force proposals to make civic elections more transparent and hold election participants more accountable for their actions are good things.

But the measure of the success of this whole exercise will be determined by if and how the Liberal government fills in the blanks on the spending cap, and whether it has the courage to go further and restrict electoral donations -- not only at the local level, but at the provincial level as well.

dbramham@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun


Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/More+transparency+needed+civil+election+campaigns/3096063/story.html#ixzz0phtode3m

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/More+transparency+needed+civil+election+campaigns/3096063/story.html