With less than a year to go before the municipal election, the new NDP government has brought in legislation that will ban corporate and union donations, limit personal political contributions to $1,200 per year (including self-funded campaigns) and bar donations from outside the province.
The annual donation limits are still a little high for our liking, but we’ve published editorials over the years calling for electoral finance reform, and this goes a long way to removing one of the most embarrassing stains on our political landscape.
People don’t like the thought of vested interests having so much opportunity to influence local elections.
This issue was particularly noteworthy in the City of Burnaby, where the mayor and his team on council received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from developers and unions, many of whom had projects or labour contracts coming before council for a decision.
Were these decisions tainted by the campaign donations? Likely not.
And, since the Burnaby Citizens Association, an NDP-affiliated civic party, has a lock on all civic government seats in the city, and the party has seldom felt threatened politically by opponents, chances are they seldom feel beholden to anyone for anything.
But the presence of the donated money sullies the discourse and distracts us from the real debate about the merits of these proposals in their own right.
It also set up an unhealthy relationship between the “employer” – the city run by BCA, and the “employees” – union members whose unions have, for the most part, pledged allegiance to the NDP.
We’d like to see these new rules enforced by the province with zeal.
We’re just now emerging from a long period being seen as the “Wild West” for our almost total lack of campaign finance rules and lackadaisical enforcement of the few we had.
We look forward to the 2018 municipal election with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. Will the new rules draw “fresh blood” into the local civic scene? Will it give candidates who don’t have a political party behind them some hope of breaking into local politics?
That’s hard to say.
There’s no question that with Mayor Derek Corrigan running again, he still has an iron grip on the the levers of local government.
But money still often equals power in politics.
And if the big donors dry up, it may just open up a path for some new voices.
