Local Elections Expense Limits — Issue No. 4 — Saturday, November 8, 2014 (HTML)

470 Hamber Foundation Boardroom, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
580 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C.

Present: Jackie Tegart, MLA (Chair); Selina Robinson, MLA (Deputy Chair); Gary Holman, MLA; Marvin Hunt, MLA; Linda Reimer, MLA; Sam Sullivan, MLA

3. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions:

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
LOCAL ELECTIONS EXPENSE LIMITS


CONTENTS
Page
Presentations	69
N. Goldstein
P. Smith
C. Henschel

J. Tegart (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Jackie Tegart. I’m the member for Fraser-Nicola and the Chair of this committee, the Special Committee on Local Election Expense Limits. The committee was appointed by the Legislative Assembly on October 9 to make recommendations on local election expense limits.

The committee will be conducting its work in two phases. The first phase is on principles for the relationship between electoral organizations and endorsed candidates with respect to expense limits. The second phase is on expense limit amounts for candidates and third-party advertisers. The committee will be submitting its report on phase 1 to the Legislative Assembly by November 27, 2014. Its report on phase 2 will be submitted by June 12, 2015.

Today’s public hearing is part of our review in relation to phase 1. In October we heard presentations from the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development, the Ministry of Education and Elections B.C. Subsequently, we launched a public consultation process to gather input on principles in relation to local election expense limits.

A provincewide news release was issued, calling for presentations and written submissions. We announced at that time that five public hearings would be held to hear from stakeholders and concerned citizens. In addition, key stakeholders were invited to participate by either making a presentation or making a written submission. We have also facilitated the making of written submissions through an on-line questionnaire.

Today we’ve allocated about ten minutes for the presentations, to be followed by an additional ten minutes or so for questions. The proceedings are being recorded by Hansard Services, and a transcript of the entire meeting will be made available on our website.

I’ll now ask committee members to introduce themselves, starting with the Deputy Chair, to my left.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I’m Selina Robinson. I’m the MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville.

G. Holman: Good morning, everyone. Gary Holman, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands.

J. Tegart (Chair): Thank you very much. With that, I will now turn the floor over to our first invited presenter, and that’s Norm Goldstein.

N. Goldstein: Thank you very much. I do have other hard copies in case somebody is missing a hard copy.

Thank you for this opportunity. It’s been a discussion in our province and amongst candidates for quite a while now about how to fix up or, in our opinion, improve how things are run for the campaigns. What I’m going to talk about…. I will talk about, of course, expense limits. I’m also going to mention one aspect of contributions, although I know your work is with expense limits.

Each district, of course, will have its own expense limit respectively. Richmond and Vancouver are very different environments. I put out here three examples: for a trustee, $4,000 for a campaign; for a councillor, $8,000; and for a mayor, say, $10,000. Now, of course, you can spend a lot more than that, and people do.

I know that our incumbent mayor, I think, had $100,000 left over for the coming campaign. It really is kind of a club clobbering anybody who wants to run against him. Unfortunately, it’s a sad truth in our society that the more ads and signs and name recognition you have, the more likely you’ll get elected, regardless of, really, what you’re offering.

I’ve come from a few all-candidates debates, and they’re interesting. You get to see the personality. But really, not a lot of people get to see the results of those all-candidates debates.

I remember last year I attended, along with my colleague Carol Day, a meeting organized by the Hon. Coralee Oakes down here in Vancouver. It was very interesting. We were asking for campaign expense caps right then and there. I guess there was a very short time frame, and what ended up was that the term got extended from three years to four years. We’re not sure whether that’s good or bad. We’ll see how that works out. But it would have been a lot better had that been with the expense limits as well.

There are three groups. There are candidates, electoral organizations and third-party organizers. I guess the theme here is that there needs to be a central location where the spending is kept track of for each candidate. If a candidate is running by themselves, there’s no real complication. You just keep adding up how much they’re spending, and that’s it.

The complication, of course, comes from third-party organizers, and that’s a big loophole. Even with the restriction that you’re supposed to keep an arm’s length away from any third parties, we know that’s not the case.

We’re suggesting here that third-party spending also be kept track of centrally by Elections B.C., or which-
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ever organization it is, for each candidate. When an elector organization is spending money for a candidate, they have to report that immediately to, say, Elections B.C. That way the total per candidate can really be kept track of, and that covers off the loophole of just any number of third-party organizers spending what they want on whatever they want.

Now, the advantage of elector organizations is that it’s easier for people to run. That’s why I joined, right? It’s good people, and it’s easier. It’s also easier for the electorate in that it’s easier to comprehend three electoral organizations than 15 candidates. So in no way would I suggest getting rid of organizations, that kind of stuff.

For me, the advantage of third-party organizers is that…. You don’t want to limit freedom of expression. You can’t tell people not to express themselves, but it’s the way that you allow it to happen and to keep track of what they’re spending.

Now, there are future directions. Maybe consider what people are spending on as well, but that’s a further complication. I don’t see that as a primary thing. Of course, after the election there’s the post-election disclosure, and that’s when you find out what people are spending on. It’s something to consider — whether to keep track of that as well during the election. It might be too much of a complexity. I’m not sure. It’s something to consider.

The other thing is on disclosure of contributions. Is that something that you’re willing to discuss right now, the contributions of all…? Okay. Thank you. I know you’re on the expenditures.

In Richmond we’re the only party that is actually disclosing our contributions in real time. On our website you can see who has contributed to our campaign up to now and how much they’ve contributed. We’ve made that challenge to the other parties in Richmond to do the same.

We feel it’s a very important part of knowing who you’re voting for. Whether you’re being supported by seven conservation societies or by two or three developers, it’s a big difference in who it is you’re voting for. Of course, that gets disclosed after the election, but it’s like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped as far as informing the elector who it is you’re voting for. That’s something we would encourage.

It can be done individually by candidates, and it can also be done, again, centrally by Elections B.C. That’s another complication to consider. But I think the concept is a good concept.

Federally, we know that no corporate contributions, I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — are allowed in federal elections. I’m not sure how old that law is, but we feel that it’s a good law. It can apply locally as well. I’m not sure what the downsides — how the federal and local scenarios compare in that or whether it’s only really applicable for federal and whether it makes sense or not for local.

I feel that it does. I mean, we know that in Richmond there’s huge development going on. There are no accusations of corruption here, but there’s the appearance of such from certain parties having a lot of developer contributions. It creates an uneven playing field as to how much we want money to determine the outcome of elections, versus issues and policies of the candidates who are running.

M. Hunt: A number of short questions. How many candidates are you running in this election? I’m talking of RITE Richmond.

M. Hunt: Eight plus one, okay. How many elections has this organization worked in Richmond?

N. Goldstein: I joined for the last, previous election. I believe they must have done about five elections before that, roughly.

M. Hunt: Okay. Recognizing that the challenges of elections are interesting, your thought on a running disclosure — particularly the expenses, the incomes and that sort of thing. I found in elections that you tend to have to spend the money early, and the money comes in, in the last week of the election. A lot of people are checking which way the wind is blowing and then hop on, depending on…. They want to be part of the winner. The last week is when money seems to roll.

So I’m having a little difficulty. The concept of what you’re saying is clear, but I’m having difficulty with that in the real world. For example, you’re proposing a three-day delay, which is reasonable, because you can’t get it instantly. But I’m just seeing that as almost unworkable in the real world, or not revealing. Any comments on that?

N. Goldstein: I do. That’s an excellent comment you just made, sir. I mention it in here. I’ll mention it now again. I forgot to mention that I would suggest another rule is that there’s no borrowing money in a campaign. If you spend money, you have to have it. It has to have been contributed in the first place.

M. Hunt: No borrowing at all — that’s an interesting one. Okay, good thoughts.
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The last one is the spending limits you have for Richmond. Recognizing — I totally agree with you — that every community is different. I’m from Surrey. These numbers couldn’t possibly work in Surrey.

I’ll just give you a simple example. Two years ago when I ran as an independent, my signs were $10,000, my brochure was $10,000, getting the brochure into the mail was $15,000, and I didn’t even cover all of the addresses in Surrey. Newspapers, another ten grand. And I haven’t even talked about phones. So there I’m already at 45 grand. This is me running in this as an independent, to try to get the message out to Surrey.

I’m just wondering. Are the numbers you’re giving me realistic? Or are you just giving me low numbers to try and force things into a more personal election?

N. Goldstein: The numbers I gave you…. I’ll tell you, for RITE Richmond, the trustee candidates contributed $3,500, and our councillor candidates contributed $7,000 to our campaign. We’re not contributing any more than that, and we’re running a fairly decent campaign. But I recognize what you’re saying: different regions, different styles of campaigns. I don’t envy the committee their work — in the second phase, especially — in determining amounts. That’ll be a provincial big project, for sure.

M. Hunt: But from your perspective as RITE Richmond, you are happy with those kinds of numbers being an effective campaign in Richmond?

N. Goldstein: Absolutely. It’s more than we’re spending right now on this campaign.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the efforts that you put into your presentation, Mr. Goldstein. I, too, am interested in what you have to say.

I appreciate the idea that caps be relevant, but given the size of this province and the different size of community, I think that’s probably going to be one of our biggest challenges: trying to figure out how to do that. If you have any suggestions on how to do that, we’re all ears.

What I’m interested in is how you envision and how you see the relationship between those who run an individual campaign, those who run with an electoral organization, and third-party advertisers. If we’re going to be looking at expense limits for those three different categories, what do you envision the relationship would look like between these three different groups? Do you have a sense of that?

N. Goldstein: Yes, currently we know there’s a law limiting the relationship between a candidate and a third-party organization regarding coordinating the campaigns. With what I’m suggesting here, that law wouldn’t be necessary anymore. In fact, you could even encourage that kind of relationship. The third-party organizer would only facilitate the spending of the money, because they’re all reporting their spending into a central location. Whether it’s spent by the candidate directly or whether it’s spent by the third-party organizer — it wouldn’t matter.

It would get rid of that kind of loophole. What’s happening now is…. There’s the law which limits the connection between the two parties — the candidates and third-party organizers — but the reality is you have covert communications so that people know what’s going on.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I just want to clarify. When you say third-party organizers, are you talking about third-party advertisers?

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): Okay. So if I can just push a little bit to sort of get some clarity. Maybe I’ll shrink it down a little bit.

You have an individual running a campaign, and they have an expense limit. You are proposing, as a councillor, let’s say $8,000. That’s an individual councillor. They’re just running their own show. They’re making all their own decisions. And then you have, like in your case, five candidates.

Should those five candidates, then, have $40,000 as the cap — that they each bring $8,000 and that would play out as part of their elector organization that’s now going to be spending the dollars? They would just have five times as much to spend. Or do you think there should be a different sort of formula in terms of the relationship?

N. Goldstein: Whenever an organization is spending money, be it an electoral organization or a third-party campaigner, they should say who they’re spending the money on. It really is per candidate. So if the elector organization is spending, say…. Let’s say there are two people in the elector organization, and it’s spending $5,000 on signs. If the signs are equally divided for the two people, then it would be $2,500 per candidate.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): So you’d see it as just a wash. If the individual has an $8,000 expense limit cap, then it carries over with the elector organization — that everyone carries the same expense limits.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): In terms of the principle, because that’s part of what we’re trying to explore. You
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talked a little bit about the principle of fairness. We’ve been hearing yesterday, as well, from a number of different folks, that everyone should have equal access, a level playing field. That was an important principle for people that we heard from yesterday.

If I’m understanding your position correctly, that is equal access — having everyone the same, regardless of whether they’re running as a candidate, whether they’re running as a group. I’m assuming that that’s a principle that’s important.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. It was really good, really clear, for the most part.

Just so I understand. I think, for the first time, I’m kind of coming to understand the importance of how you’ve got the candidate, you’ve got the electoral organization, you’ve got the third-party organizer. If you don’t have some kind of limit for each of those, and if you limit one, then it’s like the marketplace, right? The market will find a way to get around that. So you’ve got to, in some way, cap them all.

As I understand it, you’re saying that there should be a candidate cap, and that the electoral organization and the third-party advertiser have to say which candidate or group or whatever. In the end it would come down to so many dollars per candidate, whether it’s the candidate spending it, the EO or the TPA.

G. Holman: It all comes back to that. Of course, there could be some economies, and there are other advantages of having electoral organizations, which you’ve described.

Okay. I think, for the first time, I’ve kind of finally internalized that point. We’ll see what the committee says about it.

What about third party…? Well, two questions. One is: you say that the electoral organization or third party should submit the amount they wish to spend on candidates beforehand and get that approved. I’m wondering about the necessity of that. If you’re subject to that cap, I’m wondering why, necessarily, they would have to do that.

N. Goldstein: I agree. That’s not an essential thing. It depends how careful you want to be and where you want to put in that check. You can put in the check later on, and if somebody goes over the amount, then you can apply the appropriate penalties. Or if you want to be more careful, but maybe a little bit more red tape during the election, you could check the cap beforehand. That’s something, obviously, to discuss amongst….

G. Holman: Then in terms of third-party advertising, there’s one other kind of advertising, just on issues generally. There’s a tricky issue there. Presumably, and maybe you’ve said this here, on an issue that you can’t attach to a particular candidate but it’s a particular issue…. Sam and I were talking earlier about bike lanes. If there’s a group out there really feeling strongly about bike lanes but you don’t necessarily attribute it to a candidate, presumably you would say, “Okay, that’s fine, but there still should be a limit on that as well.” Is that in here in words?

N. Goldstein: I haven’t discussed newspaper articles and this kind of issue — advertising that you’ve discussed. I mean, I agree that’s another issue. It’s something that you’ll have to, I guess, consider in legislation — where you draw the line.

G. Holman: Then the tricky bit, too, can be if a candidate or a group of candidates have identified themselves so clearly with an issue, and then you’ve got a third party…. Like, say, the bike lanes, right? There’s one person or one group that’s really strongly identified. Is it really fair to say that that third party should have a separate limit? Really, you’re just contributing to that person’s campaign. That’s where it gets tricky.

N. Goldstein: It’s a very good question. I don’t have an answer, how to draw those lines.

L. Reimer: Thank you very much for doing the presentation. I appreciate you taking the time to come out and provide us your feedback.

You haven’t spoken a lot generally with respect to principles for setting expense limits, but that’s inherent in some of the suggestions you’ve made, I gather. Sometimes when we talk about principles for setting expense limits, we’re talking about increasing accessibility, fairness, transparency and that sort of thing. Could you speak more in general terms as to what you would like to see — forgetting about the specifics, just in general terms?

N. Goldstein: Within each region…. I haven’t thought in terms of accessibility. I only have thought about the size of the region, the different demographics within the region. All these increase expenses. I don’t have any other principles that I’ve thought about to suggest to this committee in any way. Do you have any particular questions about this?

L. Reimer: What’s important to you with respect to democracy? Is increasing accessibility — so the ability for more people to run? The transparency piece? The accountability piece?
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N. Goldstein: There is actually an issue that we are discussing in Richmond right now about term limits. There’s been a debate where term limits of two terms per candidates should be imposed or self-imposed. I’m dead set against it. I don’t know if it’s relevant here to say a few more words? Okay.

First of all, it curtails the freedom of who you nominate and wish to elect. Secondly, in our situation of local candidates, it favours people who have backers with deep pockets. The reason is that when you have term limits, it increases the turnaround of councillors, so you have more newcomers coming into the political fray, so to speak. When you have newcomers, they’re very dependent on getting quick name recognition, ads and so on. When you have rich backers, financers, for newcomers, those newcomers have a distinct advantage.

The flip side of newcomers is people who’ve been around for a while. They’ve made their name over several years through whatever local activities they’ve been doing, be it social organizations, land conservation. It takes many years to develop that kind of reputation and experience. If you’re turfed out after two times automatically, you can’t expect to have a few of those people waiting to come in. They’re few and far between. You would lose those people.

It’s quite the contrast with the American situation for presidency where you have a two-term limit, but always, those candidates come with big machineries behind them. They’re not like people off the street happening in local politics. It’s a very different situation.

L. Reimer: You have suggested some limits for trustees, councillors and mayors. I’d like to know sort of what you’re basing that on. You mentioned that you’ve been with your organization for five terms — I believe you said.

L. Reimer: Second term. How many candidates have won, traditionally, with RITE Richmond? You’re adhering to these limits currently, right? Have there been a lot of RITE Richmond candidates elected using these sorts of limits? Yesterday we saw a graph that showed the more you spend, the more likely you are, basically, to get elected, as you’ve just said.

N. Goldstein: RITE Richmond has been evolving over the years. It started off only for trustees. Later on it took on councillor candidates. This is the first term that we’ve actually had a campaign manager and a social media director.

Last year we were relatively disorganized. We had much smaller campaign limits for ourselves last year. We elected three trustees and no councillors. This year we’re more organized, with the limits I’ve laid out. I feel the campaign is going quite well. Who knows, of course, how it’s going to pan out at the polls?

We could use some more money for more ads and more signs, but we feel with the money we’re spending right now, it’s quite a decent showing.

J. Tegart (Chair): Just one more and then we’ll…. We’re a little past time.

L. Reimer: My question relates to third-party advertising. Traditionally, third-party advertisers are people who are not associated with the campaign — you may not know that Joe Smith is going to put an ad out in your favour type of thing.

By suggesting that a third-party organizer work within the cap of the candidate, you’re really suggesting that, in a sense, according to the definition we currently hold for third-party advertisers, there be no third-party advertisers because, in a sense, they’d be a part of the campaign. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Are you saying in essence, then, that we don’t allow third-party advertisers in the traditional sense of third-party advertisers?

N. Goldstein: I guess you could put it that way. Since the relationship would change so drastically, you could view it that way. But you could have an organization that’s been around for a while — a third-party organization. They have their own machinery, and they don’t want to join officially with your electoral organization. They want to stay separate.

You can just have an agreement. “Okay, you guys spend, maybe, $5,000 on us, and you go do your thing.” That would have been precluded previously, I believe, under the legislation, but now it wouldn’t be an issue. The covertness that occurs anyway wouldn’t be an issue.

P. Smith: Good morning, and thank you for the invitation. I’ll start with an apology. I’d thought that this week I might have enough time to gather some of my thoughts in written form, and they’re going to follow this presentation today. My apologies for not giving you some of those ideas ahead of time.

I want to just maybe make a couple of points, with some emphasis on the first task of the committee, which
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is principles. They’ve already been spoken about this morning, and I think they are the central ones that drive this. Let me give me you a couple of places where we can illustrate that.

The other thing I want to do is to look at some of what needs reforming at the pre-voting stage but also at the after-voting stage. Maybe I could start with that, with regard to one of the values of transparency.

The process of public recordkeeping for what you’re trying to get at as a committee — the question of contributions and the disclosure that candidates have to put in place — is a pretty messy business.

I don’t know whether any of you…. I send my students out to their city hall, because I teach local government, and ask them to go and look at such things. They’ll come back and say: “Well, we couldn’t get access unless we made an appointment. We’re not able to make any copies of this.” Some of them were told by city clerks who looked after these things, mostly in city halls, that the information belonged to the candidate, that it wasn’t a matter of public record, which seems to me one of the oddest kinds of notions of this.

Then we have the legislation that says municipalities must maintain those records for seven years. Virtually all of them destroy them at the end of that. I’ve had a couple of PhD students that could have wandered in, and it probably would’ve been very helpful to a committee like this to look at trends over time. But there is no over time. The thing disappears every…. So we can only go back two elections.

There are a whole bunch of difficulties around that. It’s gotten better, and I think the trend line is important. It’s gotten better in the sense that most municipalities now post this information on line, which is a new departure. I think that’s very helpful in terms of the value of transparency. But there doesn’t seem, to me, any reason why, now that we’ve arranged that this will fall under the auspices of Elections B.C. — like we do in New Brunswick or in Quebec or other provinces….

This should be a matter of permanent public record. If anyone is curious to look at, over the last 20 years, whether there’s been any change to the patterns of how, particularly, local political parties are financed, it’s possible to do so. We kind of defeat ourselves with regard to transparency by saying the records don’t need to be kept.

When I would send students out to city hall, in the last three years two municipalities had destroyed the material before it was legally allowed to be destroyed. It was just kind of in the way, and they just sort of said, “Nobody asked for this,” and they got rid it. I think the transfer to Elections B.C. as a kind of independent arbiter of this is an important one.

I want to say a couple of thoughts, as well, if I can, about the question of contributions and spending limits. My sense is that — it’s the dilemma that I heard you already refer to this morning for the committee — this is not particularly a problem — with one exception, in the smaller municipalities, which is the majority of them in British Columbia.

It is increasingly a problem. Best estimates are that the donations and spending in the city of Vancouver will probably be about $6 million. That seems like a lot of money awash in a system that’s unregulated — or under-regulated, at the least. But it’s a perfectly logical extension of an at-large system in large municipalities like Vancouver, like Surrey, where, as you say, even doing a simple mailing costs you a good deal of money.

Advertising does matter, and all the studies that colleagues of mine do, and others, support that conclusion. So we need to get a little bit of a handle on this. In a couple of ways….

Let me just pose a question for you. One of the things, it seems to me, that needs some fixing and that may relate to what you end up recommending is establishing what a campaign period is. I mean, will you have particular rules just for the campaign — and when is it?

We know in provincial terms and we know in federal terms when the writ is dropped and when the campaign begins and what kinds of rules then apply because we’re now in campaign mode. But increasingly, I think, the trend line in other jurisdictions that are, perhaps, a bit further ahead on some of these questions than British Columbia is at the moment is to also try and monitor spending, expenditures and contributions outside of campaigns.

I noticed in yesterday’s and the day before’s news, with regard to the city of Vancouver’s electoral organizations disclosing their campaign contributions, that I think they both went back to January 1 of this year. So you get a picture of more than just what you might say is the campaign period from after Labour Day to November 15 or something of that order. You get a better picture. It’s kind of an incomplete exercise, but at least I think it was a recognition that this value of transparency is much more important in the public mind.

The flip side of this is that we have democratically troubling participation rates. In Metro Vancouver it’s about 33 or 34 percent, and I think part of that is related to the existence of fairly long-established local political parties. But in North Shore municipalities it’s down to about 20 percent. I live in Burnaby. It’s about 23 percent, I think. So there’s a significant disconnect between voters and municipal government, which is most often described as closest to the people. It’s an interesting dichotomy.

My former colleague, now my Member of Parliament, Kennedy Stewart would say that actually in an at-large system without local political parties — what our previous presenter mentioned — to help voters organize themselves, the rational action would be to just stay home and not bother to vote. The number of people that could
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name and know something about all six members of the local school board, never mind the council and perhaps the mayor — there are going to be very few.

The role of parties is an important one and may be something that the committee would like to look at with regard to financing. If you go to something like the Lortie commission on political parties in Canada, they came to the conclusion that parties play an inherently positive role in our government and are worthy of public subsidy. That may be another way you’re going to get at some of this question of funding — to actually fund.

As I said, this is an issue in large municipalities. It’s not so much an issue in small municipalities. The cut point would seem to be a community of about 10,000. At 10,000 and below, the tendency is for turnout out to be above 50 percent. Then we get down to North Van, 20 percent. Most of the municipalities in Metro — 23, 24, 25, 28 percent — up to Vancouver — 33, 34 percent.

It may be that with regard to setting limits…. Again, I realize this is one of the dilemmas for the committee and for the Legislature, thinking about new legislation. It might be that you set a limit which is less regulated or under-regulated for those municipalities where the pattern is that money isn’t awash in the system.

You members may all have had an opportunity to talk to Paul Fraser and, over your lives as politicians, also with Ted Hughes and Bert Oliver. All three of them would regularly report that the largest amount of non-jurisdictional business they got was from municipal councillors looking for advice on potential conflicts of interest. It suggests to me that local councillors are aware of the intersect of funding and the possibility of appearances of conflict. I agree with the previous presenter; there’s very, very little evidence of real conflict. I think it’s mostly appearances of conflict and potential conflict.

Justice Parker in the Sinclair Stevens inquiry made a simple point with regard to potential conflict. He said if you’re in a situation of potential conflict and you don’t act to get yourself out of it, you’re actually in real conflict. There’s a need, I think, to get at some of that.

Maybe I’ll stop there and take a bit of my time and let folks pose a question or two.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): It’s always helpful to have somebody who’s actually done some research and has a scope and a breadth that is beyond, I think, what any of us have, so I appreciate you being here and helping us in this venture.

You mentioned something about when money is awash in the system, it ought not to be. It’s the principle, I’m assuming, of equal access — right? — that anyone should be able to access and participate in forming local government. The question I have is: how do we determine when money is awash in the system versus when it isn’t?

I guess in a small community you could, theoretically, have one donor give $10,000 when you only need $1,000 to actually distribute. You might make an argument that that’s way too much money; it’s not proportionate to what you would need to win. But then you can have the same thing — for example, in Coquitlam, where I’m from — where a $10,000 donation would be great, but that one donation isn’t going to help you win, necessarily, take you over the top.

Do you have any suggestions on how one would make that determination or what principle we might want to turn to, to help inform the decision about how we do these expense caps across the province?

P. Smith: A couple of thoughts on it. One can be to limit who can contribute. It could be residents. I used to make a joke that Kim Jong-un could give the mayor of Vancouver or the mayor of Surrey or Burnaby $1 million and nobody would know about it until four months after the election. As it turned out, in the last election in Vancouver someone did give $960,000. So I was right on the amount; I was just wrong on Kim Jong-un.

I think it can be who can contribute, and then it can be particular limits on contributions. I think the trend line — you see that in senior jurisdictional legislation — is to remove corporate and union donations.

If you look at the two biggest contributors in Vancouver this year so far in terms of the public disclosure that came this week, the head of Rocky Mountain trains on the NPA side and CUPE on the Vision side — a difference of $350,000 versus $150,000 or $160,000 or so. You would delete those possibilities and then perhaps put some upper limit on what people can contribute.

Again, I realize the dilemma, and I’ve spent some time trying to think about how you build a piece of legislation for the whole province when you’ve got, really, two kinds of things going on. So that would probably be the major thing to try and do — just put an upper cap on what the limit could be and limit it to people in the community. I think that would go a fair way.

M. Hunt: Three questions. First of all, you said — if I have your quote somewhere in the ballpark — that for small communities this isn’t a problem, with one exception, but you didn’t tell us the one exception.

P. Smith: Sure. It comes up in the context of the point I made about Conflict of Interest Commissioners. It’s not unusual that the people that go to the Conflict of Interest Commissioner looking for help and advice with regard to ethics are councillors from smaller municipalities who feel that even though they have limits, just in practical terms, on contributions, somebody may be appearing before council who’s made a contribution. They see themselves in a potential conflict, and they want some advice.

You can think of this in a whole variety of ways. Many
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of the smaller municipalities will have something like a Buy Local policy. That may include…. Well, it would include buying locally. So if the municipality is going to buy five new trucks and there’s only one automotive dealer in town and that automotive dealer might be politically engaged, you begin to get appearances of potential conflicts.

M. Hunt: Okay, so you are saying the exception wasn’t as in a municipality. Your exception was with the issue of conflict of interest. We have the classic one of the credit union where all the members of council were members of a local credit union and the credit union wanted rezoning, and all of a sudden they’re all in conflict. But again, you don’t have that in the large one because it’s simply insignificant, you know, in the numbers.

Okay. The second question is…. Again, you picked the arbitrary number of $10,000 as your exemption number. I would think that that would be a low number. I would think even doubling that to $20,000 or $25,000 would be…. Why did you pick the number 10,000? Is it sort of a fluxing number there, or is it somehow distinctive, that 10,000?

P. Smith: Good question. It’s partly because I get students from all over the province. I tell them that one of their tasks over the semester would be to go and look at their municipality, try and learn something about their municipality. They would come back with reports and information on things like election financing from some of the smaller municipalities in B.C. It seemed to me if there was a pattern…. I mean, $10,000 was an arbitrary point, but in elections in many municipalities people are spending under $10,000 — in the smaller municipalities.

I wouldn’t have any difficulty if it were $25,000. I think the question is…. When it gets to $5 million and $6 million and it’s under-regulated, that seems to me increasingly problematic. Some of you are long enough in the municipal political tooth to remember a time when elections were…

Last question. If we went down the road of no contributions from corporations and unions, how do we deal with the in-kind volunteer? They’re supposedly volunteering for my campaign, but really, they’re a full-time employee of so-and-so. He simply sent them to me, and he continues to pay them while they’re volunteering for me.

P. Smith: It’s a problem. It’s not as easy to get at because it’s not always that visible, and it can add up to a reasonable amount of money as a kind of in-kind contribution. You’re absolutely right. I don’t have a very good answer in terms of that, other than it’s something that, if we can, we should be conscious of. It should be part of the transparent reporting.

Even if it’s not known generally to the public, it is known to the candidate. Part of the onus on this is on the candidate and on the candidate organization to report and to have an organization like…. I think finally we’ve got that right with Elections B.C. being the oversight for this. I don’t mind if the local election is run by the city staff. I mean, they’re perfectly adequate and capable of doing that well, but the recordkeeping has really been problematic over the last bunch of years, and so we’d get a better result. That’s a good question.

S. Sullivan: A few questions. The idea that…. Well, I’ve certainly seen campaigns where money couldn’t buy an election. My observation is more that donations don’t create winners; winners create donations. If you have a good strategy and you’re well positioned and you’ve done a good job, created good candidates, you get donations because people want to be on your side. I don’t necessarily see them as causal. I’ve seen lots of pretty famous examples of money that got all wrong because somebody screwed up on their strategy halfway through.

The political culture, the assumption underlying all of this and a lot of what you’re saying, is that if people give money to the political system and contribute in the way that they can, probably something bad is happening. They’re potentially dangerous to the system.

I’m so happy when people work, donate. You know, like you said — $6 million. That’s $10 per citizen. That’s outrageously low. Is that all that people can afford for their government — to participate in the political system? Like, I’m thrilled when somebody wants to come up and give $100.

It would be an interesting study to ask candidates, maybe a year after the election, who actually gave to their campaign. Could they actually name the donors? I bet you’d get a very small number. I can’t name the donors. There’s nothing evil going on. It’s actually wonderful, virtuous, brilliantly good to have people come and say: “Here’s $100. I want to be part of my political system. I think it’s right.”

Wouldn’t we be better to look at the people who aren’t giving? Isn’t that the problem — not getting involved?

S. Sullivan: Just my observation. The people who get involved in politics and run as candidates are thrilled when they do — good people. The assumption that they’re that shallow or that they can be purchased by a small donation — or even if it’s a large donation — and that they would actually go against their better judgment…. Is that actually seen? Do we have examples of this? I certainly….

P. Smith: I was thinking historically. I’m going back to John A. Macdonald and the Pacific scandal, and we can think of more recent instances where Conflict of Interest Commissioners have intervened.

S. Sullivan: Have we ever had an example of corruption in a municipal government in the last ten years in the greater Vancouver area?

P. Smith: No, and I think that says a lot. But I think we’re also naïve if we assume that the only place that money in the public sector gets corrupted is Montreal, when we have huge amounts of money and public spending that go on. B.C.’s conflict of interest act includes more than just real conflict.

You’re absolutely right. I have nothing but respect for people that offer themselves for public office, who serve, and also who contribute, but the $100 contributor is not the question. It’s the $100,000 contributor that gives the appearance. I think in some ways it produces a kind of cynicism, that there is corruption — even as you say, and I agree, that we have relatively little evidence of it at all in B.C.

S. Sullivan: I don’t think the Canadian Rocky Mountain Rail Tours is expecting a benefit from the city of Vancouver. Peter Armstrong is passionately committed to the political system. He’s got money, and I guess he’s put it into it, but I’ve never, ever suspected that Peter has a special project he’s trying to get approved or anything like that.

S. Sullivan: He’s to be commended. The guy is willing to put his own cash in. He’s worked almost full-time for years. This guy is so committed.

Anyway, just the assumption that…. The political culture is that there’s an assumption that if you’re giving money and you’re contributing, you’re probably doing something for the wrong reason, and it’s probably bad.

P. Smith: I don’t think so, but I think, given the relative lack of regulation, there’s more potential for people to think that. In some sense, we’re helping those municipal councillors who go to the Conflict of Interest Commissioner and say, “Help,” because they recognize there’s a potential.

I think being able to change the law, for them to say: “There’s not even going to be the appearance of that….” Peter Armstrong can give $1,000 and be as engaged, or be twice as engaged, as he wants to be.

Again, the figure may not be $1,000 as the individual limit. If you looked at yesterday’s figures and the day before’s figures for Vancouver, there were about 250 or 300 people, I think, that gave above $10,000, but you can start to see kind of cut points in the thing.

I agree with you in terms of the relative standing of municipal politicians in the province, but I don’t think it’s ban all contributions because they’re bad. It’s saying that some have the potential to be more troublesome than others.

J. Tegart (Chair): Okay. We’re a little over time. Gary’s got a question, and Marvin has begged one more. Then I beg the patience of the next….

G. Holman: Yeah, we are taking advantage of you. Thanks for spending the time with us.

G. Holman: You did make the point, I think, that spending limits in smaller municipalities are not a big deal. There doesn’t seem to be a big problem. It’s the larger centres. But you’re not necessarily advocating not having a spending cap for smaller municipalities, are you? I mean, we’ll see from your written submission.

P. Smith: I think if we have the transparency, the availability for local voters — and other interested folks like myself, who wander in from time to time — to get that information, that’s going to be partly sufficient there.

Personally, I could live with the idea that if you spend under a certain amount in an election, you don’t need to…. Perhaps, with your point about if it’s a $10,000 or a $25,000 limit and you have one donor and they do the whole limit, that may be more important to know than whether there are 100 people that give $10.
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There is a municipality in my constituency where a third party spent around $17,000 or $18,000, and it was an issue. For that municipality it was disproportionate. The candidates might spend — even the high spenders — $5,000, and $17,000 in that municipality has made a difference.

There’s a kind of a pre-emptive aspect to it as well. It’s sort of that if spending limits aren’t a problem in small municipalities and you set it reasonably enough, then it’s still not going to be a problem. I mean, the rule is there, but it’s not…. In any case, we’ll see.

The other question I had, too — and something we’re struggling with — is electoral organizations and third-party advertisers. Not so much…. Well, if there are limits that apply to them, should there be? And secondly, how do you relate that to the candidate limits?

The previous submission suggested it really all should come down to a limit for each candidate. That would be fair, if each candidate had the same limit. If there are electoral organizations or third-party advertisers that are identified with that candidate, that should come under the same limit as well. That was that view. Do you have an opinion about that?

P. Smith: I think that’s right. I think there’s something on the line, though, that becomes potentially problematic, again, which is third-party advertisers that aren’t associated and, in fact, specifically say that they’re not associated.

I live in Burnaby. My television screen for the last month has been filled with happy Kinder Morgan ads, with people striding through Burnaby saying: “We love this place. We live here.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone has a right to have an opinion on the pipeline and Kinder Morgan and whatever.

My understanding is that the Chief Electoral Officer has already been asked about whether…. Given the position of the mayor with regard to Kinder Morgan and cutting down trees on Burnaby Mountain, where I work, and all of those kinds of things, the Chief Electoral Officer was asked whether this advertising should be included in the reporting under the campaign law. His initial response was that it’s a more generic position, so it shouldn’t be. I think some of the people that were involved in posing that for the Chief Electoral Officer have gone back to him with more information.

This is a large Texas corporation that is spending money during an election on an issue that’s locally sensitive. Trying to regulate some of those things is pretty difficult. The courts, when they…. It seems to me our local, provincial and federal legislatures have all recognized that third-party spending is problematic or — back to, Sam, your point — potentially problematic. We don’t regulate it well enough.

G. Holman: So in your view, third-party advertising that’s not necessarily related…. That is a tricky question in and of itself, but it seems to me we could have language in the legislation that tries to give some guidance about whether it’s related or not. Let’s assume it is unrelated. Should there be a limit of some kind, in your view, on third party — even assuming that it’s not related at all to candidate spending?

P. Smith: Personally, I’d support one, but my sense is that our courts are disinclined to go very far down that road. Given that, then regulating it in some other way and making sure that it’s reported and transparent — so back to your values again — I think having that information in the public realm is helpful.

J. Tegart (Chair): Okay. Marvin has promised that it’s simply a question for you to contemplate and perhaps get back to us.

M. Hunt: Well, actually, there are two that I’d like you to consider. Since you said you’re going to give it to us in a written submission, if you could consider these. One, of course, is the 10,000 number for population. Since you’ve got such a social laboratory in your class in this province, I really value that. Is the number 10,000 realistic, or should it be up or down from there?

The other one is the concept of contribution limits. Since you’ve had your students go back, where was there a feeling that this starts to become an issue? Is it a number, or could it be a percent of your limit? Could the issue be that if that was a percent of the spending limit, that’s where it starts to cross, where it crosses 25 percent, whatever the number is?

M. Hunt: Well, I know. But this is just a comment. This isn’t going to be a question.

You see, one of the challenges with the Kinder Morgan one is that Kinder Morgan has been working at getting a social licence to do their thing. That’s one issue. Now you have two mayors, at least, that have chosen to make it a campaign issue. So whose fault is it? Is it the candidates’ fault, or is it the third party? Anyhow, that’s another debate.

P. Smith: Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’ll try and get this out to you this week.
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J. Tegart (Chair): Craig, you’re up next. Thank you very much for your patience. If you beg, we’ll let you leave by lunch. As you can see, there’s a great deal of interest. The more we learn, the more complex it becomes. So welcome.

C. Henschel: Thanks for coming here and listening to the three of us. My name is Craig Henschel. I’m a member of a small group of voters in Burnaby and New Westminster called Burnaby–New Westminster Voter Equality. Our primary interest is in voter equality.

Usually we look at electoral systems. I met in this building for a year during the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, so I have a certain history here and about electoral systems and looking at voter equality. That was an enormous part of our adventure.

When we talk about finance contribution limits, I think, Selina, you were looking for a principle to make decisions by. In all the things we do, in all of our democratic decisions, our whole process of governing, there’s one point in time when we are all equal as citizens. That’s on election day and the campaign leading up to it. At that point the idea is that we’re all the same. We’re all equal. We’re to be treated equally. We all have an equal say.

I think that’s self-evident. It’s a natural law thing. It’s in section 3 and section 15 of the Charter. Beverley McLachlin has written about this in the Supreme Court Saskatchewan reference. So voter equality and not having undue extra influence over the policies and laws which affect us…. Everyone should be having equal say in those policies and laws, at least at this one particular time, this moment in time every four years.

We can do that with electoral systems. We can do it with boundary shaping but also with financial contributions. If one individual can donate $400,000, assuming there’s no corruption involved in that at all, that person can sway 300, 500, 1,000, 10,000 votes with that financial contribution. A person who cannot afford a $5 contribution can’t sway any votes other than just in their day-to-day conversations.

In that respect, there needs to be a financial contribution limit to keep the playing field level, and I think the limit should be something which almost everyone can afford — you know, $50, $100, $200 tops. Then we don’t have a problem with one person overwhelming the electoral system and actually ripping it out from beneath us and stealing it from us, stealing our democracy. I don’t think that’s what we want. I don’t think it’s helpful.

That’s without any ideas that there’s any kind of corruption other than corrupting the electoral process itself. It’s not saying there’s any quid pro quo or anything, but that is a corruption of the electoral system. So we need financial contribution limits.

They should also be limited to voters. Elections are about voters. It’s a time when voters get to speak. Corporations, unions and other organizations which assemble cash to have influence over an election shouldn’t be in the financial contribution business.

It should just be voters contributing with a limit that most voters can afford. Then I think that probably campaign spending limits, overall, may not be required. There won’t be a lot of money in the system to sway. There’s won’t be a pile of money sloshing around, and we won’t be asking the question that they do in all the murder mysteries: “Follow the money trail. Why was this decision made? Why was that guy killed? Why did this happen? Follow the money.”

We won’t have to ask that question. None of those things will be bothering us, because there won’t be a lot of money, and it’ll be evenly spent. Sam talked about how good campaigns raise cash, raise money. Well, good campaigns do raise money from a lot of different people. Bad campaigns rely on large donors, people that donate a lot of money, because ideas are not sufficient to win campaigns.

If we want elections to be about ideas — about voters choosing the best ideas, the best ways that policies and laws will affect them…. If we want that to be happening, then we need to make sure that the campaigns are good, that they’re raising money from a lot of people because the ideas are good and they’re directed at the voters rather than at a few donors. We all know that money makes a big difference in campaigns. We see it all the time.

I’ve inadvertently signed up for a bunch of different political parties’ e-mail lists. I get requests every day: “More money. We’ve got to have more money, more money.” Why? Because it matters. In municipal politics there’s a corruption of the electoral system, the voting day system, the campaigns. But then there’s a possibility…. No one wants to hear about this or talk about this, I don’t think. There’s the opportunity for corruption. We see it in Montreal and Quebec.

It only takes people who are not honest to take advantage of systems that are not regulated. Even for people who are just sort of dim…. We see that in the Mike Duffy scandal in Ottawa, an unregulated expense system caused huge problems. It may cause the government to fall. Who knows? It’s insane that there are regulations that are missing which are so easy to write up and put in place.

They are just missing, and then people slip into these traps of just forgetting to do things — not because of intent, necessarily, but because they don’t get it. They don’t understand conflict of interest. They don’t understand about spending money or not spending money or what they’re supposed to do. Not all politicians and not all of us are perfectly knowledgable and educated. Most councillors and municipal politicians have other jobs. They’re doing something else, and this is more of a part-time thing. They don’t have the sensibilities that the professional class of politician and civil servant have.

If you’re looking for a principle on which to guide your decisions, make that one day — election day, and the
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campaign leading up to it — a moment of voter equality, where no matter who we are or how much money we have, we’re all equal. A person with millions and millions of dollars, who can throw $100,000 or $400,000 at a campaign without worrying, and the guy down the street sitting and sleeping on a sidewalk — on that day we’re all equal. No one’s opinion is better than another person’s opinion. If we believe in that, then I think we need to have financial contribution limits which are at a level that everyone can afford.

M. Hunt: I find your presentation interesting. I’m going to go back to Kinder Morgan as an example, because candidates aren’t equal in an election. If you’ve got everybody contributing…. Let’s use the number $500 instead of your number $200. Well, either number; it doesn’t make any difference. What it is, is that the incumbent mayor will always win. The incumbent mayor, on one television newscast, will wipe out the entire amount that all of his competitors have, the ability to raise money.

Now I’ve got the mayor out there yelling over this particular issue. We can use Kinder Morgan because we’ve seen the two mayors there. I’m just using that example. I’m not saying positive or negative. I’m simply using them as examples where, in that 15 or 30 seconds on the news, they have just got earned media.

They’ve got this tremendous value of media that has now exceeded the spending limits. So how do…?

I see that in your system the incumbents will always win. The incumbents can get themselves into the newspaper. They can get themselves into the media. They can get themselves into those places where their message is distributed very, very rapidly and very quickly and effectively. Whereas, the little guy…. “I want to take on that mayor. I have some really good ideas. I have a much better widget here, and this is the solution. But nobody’s ever going to hear me, because you’ve got me down at, really, an unaffordable election. I can never even afford a newspaper ad.”

C. Henschel: Well, you obviously don’t live in Burnaby. I do, and I’ve watched elections, the last four or five elections. The mayor always wins. We have a slate of the same party winning — council and school board and the mayorship — completely and totally.

The only ads I get are from the mayor’s party and from the current council, because no one thinks it’s worthwhile trying to change. The electoral system doesn’t allow it when they’ve got block voting in a multi-member district like Burnaby. You’ve got eight councillors and a mayor. You can’t actually challenge that unless you’ve got more than 50 percent of people wanting to change the people who are elected.

C. Henschel: My solution will not solve your solution, where people get earned or unearned media. Who, because they have a position of power…. The incumbency issue is going to be there no matter what happens.

But we’ve got a situation now where our current officials get a lot of cash which doesn’t come from out of their own pockets — it’s all donated; at least in past elections it has been — and the other people don’t get any, or very little. There aren’t signs from the other parties up, or very few of them.

We don’t actually have a kind of democratic process right now. Earned or unearned media — someone who is an upstart can get that. All they have to do is put their ideas forth, and they’ll show up in the news. Of course, Kinder Morgan — that issue is being played very well by the mayor.

C. Henschel: Yeah. But earned media or exposure of the incumbents — that’s something we’re not going to get around. In fact, they have a record, and that can be challenged. But when they have enormous amounts of money…. Because people know that…. Okay, wealth. If I want to have influence or if I want to support that bunch of people, I’m going to give them a lot of money. They know who to give it to. They don’t even have to give it to a bunch of different parties.

But going to the principle of equality between voters, the most egregious example is in Vancouver, where donors give almost $1 million or $400,000. Obviously no one else, or very few other people, can afford that. That’s people taking advantage of a system which is unregulated, changing an election from being about voters who are equal at election time — at the one time in our whole human endeavour in a democracy where you think people are equal and have an equal say in the laws and policies which affect them — and saying: “Well, that doesn’t matter. That’s not important. What matters is how wealthy you are and if you think you have an interest in the outcome.”

S. Sullivan: I’m very interested in comparative political science, where you look at different types of soci-
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eties and how they govern themselves, especially when you look at the traditional village. They don’t have democracy. They have elders. Usually there are engaged people. There are mechanisms that they use. Certainly, certain people have much more say than other people. In fact, our society doesn’t actually differ that much when you get right to it.

We have this hierarchy of engagement. About 5 percent to 10 percent of the population are actively engaged, and then about 50 percent to 70 percent are completely unengaged. It varies — different levels of engagement.

When you talk about every vote being equal — if 70 percent of the people don’t even vote, certainly there is an example of not equal. A lot of those votes, the 5 to 10 percent, are actually informed, very engaged voters.

What we’ve noticed is that when the voting rate goes up, and you start getting more less-engaged people involved, it is much easier to sway through slogans. You can use advertising or a little sloganeering that will sway a larger number of disengaged people.

The idea that we just want every person to make a vote, even if it’s an uninformed…. Some people actually don’t vote because they say: “Look, I don’t really know. I didn’t study this. I don’t know enough. I’m not going to actually mess up the system by putting my vote in and giving an uninformed vote and, perhaps, swaying the system unnecessarily.”

I just wanted to get your comment on the ideal of everybody votes and every vote counts and everybody is as engaged as other people.

C. Henschel: I think uninformed voters are a little bit reckless. What you want is engaged people who are paying attention to vote with having thought about the issues.

If you have a few donors, a few large donors — and they’re easy to get for political parties, to grab a few large donors — they don’t have to go to thousands of people in their district, or hundreds of people in their district, to grab $50 or $100 or $200. If you want people engaged, then you’ve got to say, well, how are you engaging them?

If you’re just having to engage a few large donors, then you don’t have to engage everyone else, because your campaign is set. If you have to go out and talk to the people on the ground, in the neighbourhoods, and get them to give you cash, then you’ve got to convince them to do that. That’s going to engage a lot more people. You’ll get one in 20 to give you cash that you ask for — I don’t know what the numbers are — but you’ll have to approach a lot of people to get enough money to run a campaign, and that will engage voters.

The whole idea of trying to get the voting numbers up is that it’s a symptom of the problem of people that just don’t think it’s worthwhile or it’s going to make any kind of a difference. Because of our electoral system, that’s often true. If you want to engage voters, make it so that people who are running have to go to them to get the cash to run their campaigns, rather than just to a few people.

G. Holman: Craig, thanks for your presentation. I really like the…. Well, I think that principle of equality is a really interesting one. It clarified some things, in my mind, anyway.

I’m not sure why, but your presentation just reminds me of the fact that a lot of what this committee is deliberating on at the local level has already been thought through pretty carefully at the provincial and the federal level. It’s at the local level where, to a certain extent, as we’ve said, for many small municipalities, it’s not a huge big deal, but it’s starting to emerge as an issue in the larger.

I’m not prejudicing what I would recommend or what the committee would recommend, but it just seems that at the local level it’s kind of a largely undeveloped system to deal with issues like this, whereas provincially and federally we’ve thought through a lot of this stuff. For whatever reason, your presentation kind of reminded me of that.

The principle of equality. Would it be fair to say that you’re saying it’s not so much equality, but the idea is to try and provide equal opportunity — that kind of notion?

G. Holman: Clearly, we’re not all going to be equal, even if we all earned exactly the same amount of money, because there are going to be some people that are more influential. Some people are smarter than others, for example. I think that’s right. Am I being politically incorrect in suggesting that? I mean, there will be no perfect equality, but it’s equal opportunity that you’re trying to get at.

You spoke almost entirely, though, of the donation side of things. We are being very explicitly asked to think about spending limits. Does that principle still apply in the sense that…? Do you think that equal opportunity for candidates…? Would you translate that principle to the spending side in terms of trying to give all candidates — not an equal…?

Well, do you know what I mean? You’re trying to do a similar thing for candidates, to give every candidate a reasonable opportunity to get elected. Would you translate that principle over to the spending? If you have thoughts about spending caps in electoral organizations…. If you don’t have thoughts today, remember that you still can make a submission. You talked almost entirely on the contribution side of things.

C. Henschel: Spending caps. There may not be a huge issue with spending caps. I think that, obviously, you can’t have one candidate blowing out all the others because of cash. If spending contributions are limited to a certain amount which is affordable by all voters, then I think it
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would be pretty hard for someone to use an enormous amount of cash to buy an election. I think one follows the other.

If you’re going to put spending caps, then they should be low enough that there’s a competitive race. Just having a high cap doesn’t do anything all. You have to look at the numbers — maybe Patrick’s got them — for how much candidates spend on their election campaigns, or you could just say how much it’s going to cost for someone to throw a flyer at every door and some ads in the paper or whatever — some kind of a modest campaign. What will that cost?

Find some costing people — you probably all have them — to figure out how much it will cost to do a modest campaign where the decisions made by the public are based on the ideas in the campaign and not on how many flyers they got in the mail and how many negative ads they saw on television.

If you want a knockout brawl during the elections, if that’s the kind of election we want — like American style — we could do that, a Citizens United kind of approach, or we could have elections which are thoughtful about the issues, about the things that I think candidates care about. I could be wrong, but I think people run for office because they care about their communities. They care about the issues.

I don’t think people are necessarily excited about doing the all-out, knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out battle on television, yelling at the other candidates. The public doesn’t want that. I don’t think the candidates want that. Good public policy certainly does not want that. We need a discussion during the elections. There isn’t really a big discussion happening with just straight advertising. There needs to be a conversation.

One thing. I kind of looked at this a couple of years ago when the local elections act review process was happening more full-on, I think. Local elections should be run through Elections B.C. Leaving it up to every municipality with inexpert staff and varying policies of their different councils is crazy at this time in our civilized world. We all know better than to do that.

Elections B.C. is great. They’re non-partisan. I was just over in Nanaimo a couple of days ago presenting about the electoral boundaries to the Electoral Boundaries Commission with Keith Archer and those guys. They’re all very professional, unbiased. They do a really good job, and they help keep people out of trouble. I think involving them would be a very good step in that.

Everyone here in this room…. The idea isn’t to worry about a $400,000 campaign contribution not seeking any kind of extra favours this year. It’s about a $1 million contribution or a $200,000 contribution somewhere in the province seeking a quid pro quo favour in the years coming up.

What you guys deliberate now, what you decide now, is to avoid those problems later on from the person who is actually corrupt or the person who just steps in it and really screws things up. I think this is maybe why this committee is going. It’s because there was a problem in Surrey or something. I can’t remember exactly where.

There were financial irregularities. The press was full of that problem. You’ve got to set the regulations here so people don’t get in trouble, so people who are not experts, who are not perfect people — so Rob Ford–type people — can’t get themselves in trouble. If you do that, then you’ve done your job. But if there’s a scandal about financials or corruption or if we do a Montreal kind of thing, I mean, it’s on you because you guys have set the rules. You set the rules to keep everyone out of trouble, so set some good rules.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I want to thank you very much for your very thoughtful presentation. I just wanted to let you know it’s actually triggered for me this idea of principles. How do we make decisions? Going back to principles sort of helps inform.

This idea of voter equality that you mentioned and then Gary here sort of clarified about…. It’s opportunity for equality. Fundamentally, that’s, I think, what we would all argue for. I mean, that’s what democracy is built on. If I understand correctly, that’s the most important principle. We can have a whole bunch of principles around transparency, about relevance, as long as we keep that one in the forefront as we go through this process.

I’m just sort of wrapping my head around it and looking for clarification. Part of what we’ve been tasked to do is to look at expense limits. What you’re suggesting — that this principle actually suggests donation limits…. Sort of the flip side. We’ll have, I guess, to deliberate if that’s part of the mandate. Listening to you talk about it that way is sort of very, very informative. It sounds like what you’re suggesting is that if we focus on the donation side, we might not have to worry so much about the expense side. It will just sort of take the heat out of the problem. What’s been identified as the problem is actually perhaps not even the problem. The problem is on the donation side, not on the expense side.

C. Henschel: Yes, absolutely. If someone’s thinking about running for any position, if they are up against a team of people who have been running before and have consistently garnered $200,000 or something in their campaign war chest, election after election — and you’re an upstart party in Burnaby — you look at that and go: “We’re not going to be able to compete.” And they don’t. People just stay at home. They don’t run for the office. There’s no discussion about the issues.

In Burnaby it’s just pathetic. There isn’t an election campaign. There actually is not an election campaign. We’re all just going to go and vote for the guys who are there because we don’t know anything about the other guys. They’re not trying. The people who fund campaigns
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are not bothering with them, because they know they’ll lose. It’s pathetic. It comes down to the donors are already…. They’ve picked their party, and they’ll win.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): The other thing that you haven’t talked about…. If we think about small community, and we’re thinking about, let’s say, a donation. Let’s say we were to go that direction, and the maximum donation you can give is $500. In some communities you only need $500. So you can just self-fund. The argument would be made that most people can self-fund, and if you didn’t have $500, you could potentially raise $500. So that would balance it up. You can still self-fund and be one voice representing one voice and paying with one voice with one chequebook.

C. Henschel: Self-funding I don’t agree with — the notion that you can…. The American election that just happened. The former, now current again governor of Florida self-funded his first campaign. I think he gave himself $14.7 million to become governor. This last time he topped up his campaign with another $4 million or something. Self-funding just means that wealthy people can get elected if they want to, and poorer people won’t be able to. So having unlimited self-funding is ridiculous.

You need campaign spending limits, and they should be based on how much money a candidate really needs, in a kind of modest sense, to communicate with the voters to get their ideas across.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): But in my example I’m talking about a small community, and really, if you take a look at what people spend, there are small communities where you spend $500. That is all you spend, because it’s small. You don’t have a lot.

C. Henschel: Sure, unless there’s an issue which is really important to you or your friends, and you’re willing to spend $20,000 to the other person’s $5, because there’s some reason to do that. You can, and you’re allowed to. That’s a problem. There are communities all around B.C. where there are issues which some people have an interest in more than the regular voter — every single community. If you want to become the mayor and have the council on your side for an issue, you can buy it if there are no spending limits.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I just want to make sure that I understand. It’s about the voter equality principle on the one hand — everyone has equal opportunity to get behind their candidate of choice — and expense limits on the other side to balance it out.

C. Henschel: Yes. I think candidates should be able to spend more than the usual limit for the voters because they’ve got start-up costs and expenses going on. Obviously, you shouldn’t be able to buy all the stuff two years in advance and not report it until later — all those usual things that Elections B.C. takes care of.

J. Tegart (Chair): That ends the questions. Thank you very much for your presentation, Craig.

That ends the agenda for today. I thank those of you in the room. Thank you very much for your input today. The more we hear, the more complex it becomes. We will certainly take your comments into consideration in our deliberations.

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1) RITE Richmond	Norm Goldstein
2) Dr. Patrick Smith
3) Burnaby–New Westminster Citizens for Voting Equality	Craig Henschel

Chair:	Jackie Tegart (Fraser-Nicola BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Selina Robinson (Coquitlam-Maillardville NDP)
Members:	Mike Bernier (Peace River South BC Liberal)
	Gary Holman (Saanich North and the Islands NDP)
	Marvin Hunt (Surrey-Panorama BC Liberal)
	Jenny Wai Ching Kwan (Vancouver–Mount Pleasant NDP)
	Linda Reimer (Port Moody–Coquitlam BC Liberal)
	Sam Sullivan (Vancouver–False Creek BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Susan Sourial

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON LOCAL ELECTIONS EXPENSE LIMITS

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
LOCAL ELECTIONS EXPENSE LIMITS