Unless fundraising laws are absolutely airtight and enforced by rules that have real teeth, politicians and party brass will always discover loopholes to exploit, especially if they are in power.Christinne Muschi/Reuters
Perhaps there are a few voters in Ontario who find it honourable that, when Premier Doug Ford plays fast and loose with the spirit of the province’s political fundraising laws, he is respecting an ancient tradition.
"It’s been going on for years. And by all means are we taking an opportunity to raise some funds, just like the NDP, just like the Liberals?” he said this week. “Until the rules change, we’re going to play by the rules.”
Just playing by the rules. Who can argue with that?
That’s the same lame excuse every politician trots out when their fundraising practices are revealed to be substandard yet, strictly speaking, not illegal. Mr. Ford is building on a long tradition of governing parties devoting more effort to exploiting fundraising loopholes than to closing them.
His contribution to the genre has been to continue accepting donations to his Ontario PC leadership campaign – a campaign he won more than a year ago and is, obviously, no longer waging.
Provincial rules allow party leadership candidates to continue to take in donations for a period after their campaign is over – in Mr. Ford’s case, until May 9 of this year – in order to pay off any debts they may have run up.
The Premier’s leadership campaign has no debt. But because the rules don’t specifically say otherwise, he has continued to ask for and accept donations, building up a massive surplus, which is funnelled, by law, to the party’s coffers instead of being returned to donors.
It’s a sour little cheat that has allowed the Ontario PCs to take in an additional $528,684 since last May, including $205,860 in the first three months of 2019. An analysis by The Globe and Mail showed that many leadership donors also gave directly to the party this year, a move that may allow them to effectively contribute more than the annual limit of $1,600 (which, it should be noted, the Ford government quietly raised from $1,200).
The whole affair reflects badly on the Premier, the PC Party and the government. But it also reveals a continuing problem with political fundraising laws in Canada: Unless they are absolutely airtight and enforced by rules that have real teeth, politicians and party brass will always discover loopholes to exploit, especially if they are in power.
Take Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The federal fundraising regime – created under the Jean Chrétien Liberals and improved by the Stephen Harper Conservatives – has been a model for the rest of the country. Corporations and unions are banned from giving. And there is a relatively low annual limit for individual donations, set at $1,600 a party for 2019. Its creation spelled the end of the era of the party bagmen.
But once they took power in 2015, Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals discovered they could make a bundle by holding exclusive events, often in private homes, at which small numbers of wealthy donors gave the annual maximum, or something near it, in exchange for intimate access to cabinet members.
In Ontario, the then-governing provincial Liberals had long done likewise.
In both cases, it was a clear perversion of the spirit of the rules, which were designed to keep money out of politics and to avoid the perception of access being traded for cash. But just as Mr. Ford is doing with his leadership-campaign boondoggle, Mr. Trudeau argued it was acceptable because it was not expressly forbidden under the law.
Under the harsh glare of embarrassing publicity, the federal Liberals ended the practice. And the Ontario Liberals had no choice but to bring in legislation that considerably improved the province’s fundraising laws.
Ottawa and the provinces have, in fact, made strides in the past few years to limit donations and the influence of money on politics. Much of that progress was shamed into existence, but it’s clear in Canada’s political culture that shame only goes so far.
The best response is to remove the possibility of cheating. Make the rules simple and tight, with low donation limits to make cash-for-access trades impossible. As we’ve argued before, Ottawa and all the provinces should adopt the Quebec model: $100 maximum individual donations, complemented by public subsidies for parties based on the number of votes they get, with no corporate or union money allowed.
With politicians of every stripe trying to poke holes in the rules, it’s clear those rules have to be bulletproof.