Follow the money in campaign financing - and find a way to keep it clean
“Parties require financial support. Anyone who suggests otherwise fails to appreciate their role and character,” said Ontario’s chief electoral officer, Greg Essensa.

thestar.com
Aug. 26, 2016
By Martin Regg Cohn

Take the money out of politics: The slogan has a seductive, if unreal, appeal.

Lawmakers were back at it this week trying to clean up Ontario’s fundraising morass. By putting their legislative amendments where their mouths are, rival MPPs went through the motions of ritual purification in hopes of absolving their parties of past sins.

Their overweening earnestness - politicians publicly vowing to be more Catholic than the Pope, more abstemious than the Prohibitionists - obscures the reality of how we got here. And where we’re trying to go with the cash flow.

All three parties have taken turns in government presiding over (and profiting from) scandalously lax campaign finance laws that cried out for modernization. Even in opposition, no party has hesitated to exploit every available loophole rather than trying to shut them down.

Not until the media revealed the extent of the excesses did the politicians find religion - agitating and flagellating after the fact for reforms. There’s nothing wrong with such cascading cause and effect in politics, but let’s not lose sight of the objectives, and objective reality.

This isn’t about taking the money out of politics.

It’s about taking the money out of the shadows, regulating it, scrutinizing it - and, yes, subsidizing it. Seen through that lens, Ontario is belatedly moving out of the dark ages, despite the cries of darkness emanating from some quarters.

Listen to Ontario’s chief electoral officer, Greg Essensa, who in his latest appearance before the legislative committee this month called on MPPs to act coherently in their planned overhaul of the government’s proposed campaign finance law:

“Parties require financial support. Anyone who suggests otherwise fails to appreciate their role and character. They all require financial resources - money is an essential element in politics.”

Essensa wanted MPPs to go further in curbing excesses, without losing sight of the essential fact that without money, politics is dead. In the aftermath of his appeal, all three parties came closer this week to a grand compromise, though you wouldn’t know it from some of the political rhetoric and media coverage.

Consider where we’re coming from: At present, any single big business or union - from big brewers to even bigger banks - can funnel up to $33,250 into the party and candidates of their choosing in an election year. In a leadership campaign where party members choose a potential future premier, donations are unlimited.

By all-party agreement, the most execrable excesses will soon be history: Corporate and union donations will be banned in Ontario, as they have long been federally. And our seemingly limitless limits on donations are being dramatically reduced.

The government’s initial plan this spring - in the wake of Toronto Star stories detailing secret quotas and fundraising targets of up to $500,000 for Liberal cabinet ministers - was to cap donations by individuals at $7,750 a year in total. This week, the Liberals proposed reducing that cap even further to $3,600 a year - half of what they last called for (and barely one-tenth of the existing maximum).

By any measure, that’s progress. Is it sufficiently progressive? Interestingly, the Liberals’ latest proposed cap of $1,200 a year per party, or candidate, is less than what the New Democrats called for this week (the NDP prefers the higher federal limit of $1,550 a year).

Others are advocating for the much lower Quebec limit of $100 a year from any donor - which sounds admirable but is impracticable here. Yes, Queen’s Park is the country’s second-biggest government, ruling over Canada’s richest province. But Ontario’s low profile can’t compete in the public eye (or pocketbook) with incessant media coverage of the federal scene, or the nationalist spotlight on Quebec. Massive donation lists, Bernie Sanders style, are a long way off.

As chief electoral officer, Essensa understands that reality, which is why he repeated his call for public subsidies to replace some of the foregone private (and corporate) donations. To their credit, the Liberals have quietly proposed an increase to the per-vote subsidy to compensate for their latest plan to decrease donation limits, which seems only fair.

On other campaign financing rules, such as so-called “cash for access” - notably the embarrassing Liberal fundraisers that brought stakeholders together with top cabinet ministers, first exposed by the Star in 2013, again in 2014, yet again in 2015, and once more in January and March of 2016 (first reported by the Globe and Mail, as it keeps proclaiming to its readers, only in 2016) - the devil is in the details, and the disagreements are devilish. More on that in future columns.