Bolton councillor explains outside campaign donations
Political science professor says residents should be calling for legislative change when it comes to campaign fundraising

caledonenterprise.com
June 8, 2015
By Matthew Strader

Campaign financing is supposed to be a road map to the ideals of a candidate. Look at who funded them, and you’ll know who they are in the ‘proverbial’ pocket of is the common refrain.

An examination of one Caledon councillors 2014 election purse showed that the majority of it came from outside of Caledon, but Ward 5 Regional Councillor Annette Groves said it is simply a product of her old list of donators, and many of those listed do business in Caledon.

Groves raised $23,045 for her 2014 campaign. According to her paperwork, $22,945 of that came from contributions. And perusing her list shows a number of donators with addresses outside of Caledon.

Her individual donators total eight, with seven of them having addresses listed outside of Bolton, such as Kleinburg, Toronto and Concord.

One of those is Pierro Carbone, owner of Garden Foods, while others are family connections and Caledon landowners, Groves explained.

And many of them are involved in major land holdings in Caledon, including Fabio Mazzocco who represented Argo Development and the preferred option land for Bolton Residential Expansion at Regional Council just a few weeks previous, and Sylvio Degasperis, who stewards TACC Construction Ltd.

And her corporate donators are littered with construction and development companies, with 16 of 27 listing addresses outside of Caledon.

Interesting as well, five of the 11 corporate donations Groves received from inside Caledon were returned by her campaign.

The councillor said the returned donations represented situations where she didn’t want to see the donor get in trouble. Many of her donors will split the money between companies, or family names, and when redundancies happened, instead of taking a chance, she simply returned the dough.

And discussing the influence created by money, Groves said there is none with her.

“We simply went back to the old lists and mailed out to old supporters, whoever responded, great,” she said. “If there are a lot of developers, that certainly doesn’t mean I will be a developers’ candidate.”

Groves said she believes her list lacks more local content because she was not the incumbent in 2014, and returning to the race as a challenger saw much of her local support go to her opponent.

Peter Loewen, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, said financial statements such as this are simple signs of a broken system. The politics of Caledon, he couldn’t comment on, he said, but what the numbers tell him is the public should be calling for legislation change.

“Organized concentrated interests can often get there way when up against diffuse interests of lots of citizens,” Loewen said, saying organizing into effective groups can be daunting for the public, while it’s good business for unions and major corporations. At the federal level, they’ve been banned from financing campaigns. The same rule should simply trickle down, and then there aren’t any morality questions at all.

“At the provincial level they’re allowed, and it’s the wild west at municipal level,” Loewen said. “To get the ears of councilors, the way to do it is give lots of money. The one thing we can say is that everything that is done may be legal and above board, but we have examples of better systems, where we don’t allow unions and corporations to influence the system with money.”

All candidate expenses are available at caledon.ca.