The perception of how municipal election campaigns are orchestrated is sometimes imagined as a cigar smoked-filled lounge at a gentlemen’s club, where the city’s business elite agree upon their mayoral and council candidate choices in between sips of fine brandy.
Of course, money will flow like water from the aforementioned cabal, affording first-rate staff and political campaign collateral to promote these candidates to the voting public.
While this may actually have happened somewhere in the past, the reality of local government elections is much cruder. Identifying quality candidates is pain-staking work, raising funds is a slog and getting the public out to vote for your candidate is tantamount to shoving an elephant uphill.
Now recently legislated rules around how we fund election campaigns add a whole new wrinkle.
The Local Elections Campaign Financing Act (a.k.a. LECFA) sets limits on what cannot be contributed in terms of financial or in-kind services to a political campaign. The legislation aims to ban corporate and union donations. However, the rules allow services and labour to be contributed — provided they are paid for at fair market value.
Elections B.C. is responsible for ensuring the compliance by candidates and elector organizations (EOs), and no doubt this is taking up a lot of their resources to manage.
What candidates and EOs such as the Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Greens, COPE and the NPA are grappling with now is how to abide by LECFA’s requirements.
For example, it is not uncommon for candidates to have their campaign materials — such as flyers and brochures — donated by a supporter.
However, if that graphic design, photography or printing is provided by someone who makes their living as a designer, photographer or printer, those would be considered professional services, and would have to be paid for at full market value.
To give those things away would be considered a corporate contribution, and therefore in breach of the legislation.
In recent months, the Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»District Labour Council (VDLC) has been very public about its efforts to broker a deal between left-of-centre EOs for an agreed upon slate of candidates. Last weekend, members of the OneCity elector organization voted their allotted number of candidates based upon this VDLC-led deal. It is expected that Vision, COPE and the Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Greens will follow suit.
Given the new rules about corporate and union donations, the work done by VDLC does raise questions as to how negotiating a slate does not amount to a union donation, given that staff time was involved, presumably use of their office, and of course the news release it issued on VLDC letterhead after the deal was reached. So far, they have been silent on the matter.
When the legislation was being debated last November, B.C. Liberal MLA Todd Stone pressed Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Selina Robinson for clarity on what constituted a contribution from a corporate or union donor.
“What we’re trying to address here [with the legislation],” said Stone, “is the undue influence that third-party organizations, whether they be unions, whether they be business organizations, have on the political process when it comes to in-kind… donations; when it comes activities that are not disclosed that involve knocking on doors, that involve canvassing, that involve doing surveys and sharing that information discreetly with candidates and elector organizations.”
In his view, the legislation did not address the potential influence of third party contributors who offered candidates their support.
Robinson was unequivocal in her response to Stone.
“Third parties need to be independent,” replied Robinson. “They can’t gather data and feed it to a particular candidate. Then they’re working for the candidate.” She added, “All those need to be listed and declared and put in disclosure as part of campaign contributions. Our expectation is that everyone will follow the guidelines as they’re laid out.”
Given the intense and ongoing interest on all sides in the outcome of the October election, it is hard to imagine that no staff time and resources of businesses or unions are currently being allocated toward one or more campaigns across the province. Elections B.C. has the unenviable task of trying to sort it all out.
Every campaign candidate must get up to speed on what constitutes a campaign contribution and what does not as it includes a lot. Maybe even the brandy and cigars.
