How Ontario reached tipping point on money politics
Public disgust over fundraising excesses is too easy if it’s not matched by public engagement over what replaces it.

Thestar.com
April 5, 2016
By Martin Regg Cohn

Finally, Ontario is talking about going further - and faster - on fundraising reforms.

After details emerged last Tuesday in the Star of secret annual targets for top Liberal cabinet ministers to raise mostly corporate money, Premier Kathleen Wynne spent the week telling reporters she planned to start phasing in unspecified changes by fall.

But it didn’t go far enough, and she finally appears to be getting the message. Facing public fallout - and under fire from an opposition that has finally found its voice - Wynne is promising to make up for lost time.

Now she is vowing to move up her timetable, promising this week to consult her opposition rivals - and committing to legislation by a new deadline of June. No longer equivocating, the premier is specifying she’ll follow Ottawa’s lead in banning all corporate and union donations outright.

Queen’s Park also announced Monday that municipalities across the province would gain the authority to ban corporate and union donations if they so desired - just as the City of Toronto decided in 2009. That opens the door to major GTA municipalities, whose politicians derive up to half of their donations from land developers, to take long overdue steps to clean up campaign financing (though it’s difficult to predict whether local councils will take the hint).

The sudden push to catch up with history comes a decade after Parliament banned corporate and union contributions outright. But beyond the premier’s belated recognition that they must ultimately be outlawed, we still don’t know precisely what will replace current fundraising methods.

Nor do we know exactly what the opposition parties will press for, because they have been largely silent until now, nursing their own self-interested political and financial calculus. Rather than propose future remedies, rival politicians prefer to harp on accusations of past rapaciousness.

But that takes us only so far. We’ve known for a while that the Liberals had raised the dark art of fundraising to new heights - my colleague Robert Benzie first reported in 2013 that stakeholders from the nuclear industry raised $100,000 at a private Yorkville soiree for Wynne and Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli. A column last year revealed how the Liberals held an “exclusive” fundraiser for the Ontario Long Term Care Association, pitching “face time” with the minister in charge, Eric Hoskins.

Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca held another of those focused fundraisers for stakeholders just before Christmas, with the Liberal party printing up forms for $1,000 donations from members of the Ontario Trucking Association to see the very politician responsible for overseeing them as a minister of the Crown.

And in 2013 the Star published a leaked email from Progressive Conservative labour critic Randy Hillier warning his fellow MPPs they were “walking on thin ice” by helping one of Ontario’s biggest constructions firms advance its legislative agenda: “In caucus, it was stated quite explicitly that following a successful EllisDon fundraiser...our party would continue to benefit financially with the advancement of this legislation.”

Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown says he favours the federal ban, but he is no slouch at courting big corporate donors while he still can: Brown is hosting his own high-priced soiree at the exclusive Albany Club for 10 supporters at $10,000 a head - that’s a handsome $100,000 for a night’s work - according to a source who was not authorized to share the invitation (Brown’s office confirmed the dinner date but said it did not know the precise amounts).

His 2014 campaign for the PC leadership also benefited from several $10,000 donations (and one at $25,000) from numbered companies, which casts its own unflattering shadow on the whole process.

Andrea Horwath set a ticket price of nearly $10,000 when her Ontario NDP hosted Alberta Premier Rachel Notley for a posh fundraiser in February, sparking an uproar because of donations from blue-chip corporations that do business in Alberta - where such contributions were banned by Notley last year. Those corporate executives were able to rub shoulders with the Alberta premier by paying Horwath’s asking price, suggesting that the NDP knows a workaround when it sees one.

The NDP’s evasive manoeuvre illustrates the risk that outright bans will drive fundraising underground. Another concern raised by defenders of the current system is that companies or unions will still get their way by having their top executives make personal donations instead.

But if private individuals want to donate money in their own name - subject to contribution limits and disclosure rules - that’s fair game in a democracy. That’s entirely different from allowing numbered companies or blue chip corporations to distort the democratic process by promoting their vested interests with generous contributions. If companies can’t vote, they shouldn’t be able to donate.

In any case, stories about behind-the-scenes fundraisers with stakeholders and ministers have come and gone, with no lasting impetus for change. That appeared to change last week, when public disgust reached a tipping point as details emerged of how cabinet ministers are expected to meet annual targets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ending Ontario’s outlier status, so long after Toronto and the federal Parliament imposed bans, is easy enough. It merely requires political will - and public pressure.

But public disgust over recent excesses is too easy if it’s not matched by public engagement over what replaces it. More on those choices in my next column.