TEAM URGES TOUGHER ENFORCEMENT OF LOCAL ELECTION FINANCING LAW AFTER FINDING ABC HAD A $200,000 ADVANTAGE

salrobinson6
2 days ago
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Elections BC Fails To Explain Long Delays, Light Penalties, and Inconsistencies Following 2022 Vancouver Civic Election

VANCOUVER (Nov. 3) – TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is urging consistent, timely enforcement of local-election financing laws after its research showed ABC Vancouver collected more than $200,000 in prohibited or excess contributions before and during the 2022 campaign.

ABC hung onto some of this money for years before finally refunding it – mostly without penalty. The transactions were deleted from the Elections BC’s Financial Reports and Political Contributions System (FRPC), leaving the public with no easy way to find the source of later-returned cash that ABC was able to use during the election.

As Elections BC Director of Investigations Adam Barnes writes in his enforcement notices, “Failing to return prohibited contributions gives an elector organization an advantage in that they had access to money during the campaign period that they were not entitled to.”

“Local-election financing laws are supposed to provide a level playing field for how civic parties are funded,” says TEAM President Chris Johnson. “Instead, the field is badly tilted. Why delete the data?”

TEAM is calling on the province to strengthen the campaign-finance legislation it passed in 2017 to limit the influence of big money on local elections. The law banned corporate and union donations, limited individual contributions, and aimed to ensure “democracy at the local level works for everyone, not just a few,” according to a press release at the time.

But it hasn’t worked out that way.

TEAM’s research found plenty of other problems besides ABC taking advantage of mishandled over-contributions from donors, including:

Lengthy delays in investigations
Unexplained contradictions and a scattershot enforcement process that penalized some violations and ignored identical ones
Penalties too light and late to be a deterrent

After more than two years of research and back-and-forth correspondence with Elections BC, we are left with many questions, some of which are:

Why was Elections BC’s enforcement so inconsistent?
What kind of conduct would earn the maximum penalty?
Why would Ken Sim appoint Corey Sue as his financial agent more than once?
Why did the Elections BC investigation into ABC take so long?
Why is ABC still accepting contributions over the annual limit?

TEAM says it’s past time to clean up campaign funding in Vancouver. Elections BC should:

Enhance transparency of donor records in its Financial Reports and Political Contributions System by adding refund information instead of deleting the records entirely
Explain its investigation criteria
Make penalties significant, such as barring a party from running in the next election if it has a pattern of flouting the law

And the media needs to do its bit by digging deeper into this issue, which threatens the health of our local democracy - in all B.C. municipalities. For TEAM’s deep digging, click here.

Johnson says it’s obvious the current system isn’t working and harsher penalties are required: “To well-financed parties, a monetary penalty is the cost of doing business. Why not put them out of business and ban them from running in the following election?”