Premier Christy Clark might have talked herself into a fall sitting of the legislature that nobody in her government particularly wants, with her qualified response to concerns about B.C. Liberal Party fundraising.
A burst of concern arose about the exclusive access to the premier that party donors are buying by way of $10,000 tickets to fundraising events. That prompted Clark to take a small step toward recognizing the issue. She did the bare minimum. There was no thought of regulating or limiting donations. There was no mention of halting the lucrative private appearances, as Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has done.
Her response was to entertain the notion of requiring quicker disclosure of the donations that supporters are making at the events. Show-and-tell time for political parties now happens once a year, when all names and amounts are filed to Elections B.C. and posted publicly. (They file additional reports in election years.) Clark suggested more transparency might ease concern, by posting the donations much more quickly than that.
The government asked chief electoral officer Keith Archer for advice, and this week he offered some thoughts. His report suggests that if Clark is serious about the step, it will have to be taken soon, and as it requires legislation, a fall sitting of the legislature would be in order.
Other parts of the report make it clear it will involve a lot of extra paperwork, to the point where you wonder if it’s even worth it.
Citizens now learn who gave what to whom once a year, as part of a massive information dump by Elections B.C. that probably doesn’t get the scrutiny it deserves. It takes time to find the names and amounts, and more time to research what issues might have been relevant to the donations, as much as a year earlier. The electoral-financing report usually gets reported as a one-off comparison of who took in the most cash, with passing references over the year to donors if their names are germane to political issues.
The new system would see regular reports from each party days or weeks after each fundraiser, about who coughed up how much.
It’s hard to see how that will make much difference. Everyone already knows the general lay of the land — wealthy people and corporations back the Liberals; big unions, many of them public sector, back the NDP. Getting that reaffirmed on a regular basis won’t change much. There will be a lot more guessing about whether current issues prompted specific donations.
Where it will make a difference is in Elections B.C.’s budget. It will cost $100,000 to $150,000 more a year to track all those reports, plus setup costs of up to $250,000, depending on how frequently the reports are required. The more transparency — as measured by the time between the donation and the public report — the more expensive it is.
It would amount to a steady drumbeat — on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis — of reports on how the B.C. Liberals take in much more money than anyone else, which isn’t likely what Clark had in mind when she pitched the idea.
All parties have the same limits come election time, so the advantage isn’t apparent during the campaign. Parties can spend to a maximum of $4.6 million and candidates are limited to about $73,000. There were limits in place for 60 days before the campaign as well, but they were abolished in 2015 as an indirect result of a Supreme Court decision that did away with limits for third-party advertisers.
So for all but one month every four years, parties can spend what they please, and the B.C. Liberals do just that.
Disclosing sooner where it all comes from would require a quick sitting of the legislature to change the law. But that’s a week or so of question periods that could go for or against the government.
And the debate would be similar to the argument over local election limits that were imposed this spring. Much of that revolved around the question of why they only tackled half the problem — limiting spending without limiting contributions.
