Municipal Campaign Finance Reform
This week is the annual Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM) conference in Vancouver. This is where the elected officials and senior staffers from all over the province get together to discuss issues and lobby the provincial government. One of the topics was campaign finance reform for civic elections. You can read the story by Jeff Nagel of Black Press (the parent company of the Langley Times) here.
This is an interesting issue as there is no limit on how much money civic politicians can raise from individual donors as well as on how much they can spend. Apparently, between Vision, the NPA and COPE, over $5 million was spent in Vancouver alone.
I, for one, don't have a problem with a reasonable spending cap. Some things it takes to win elections, however, cost significant amounts of money. Websites, advertising, printing, signs and phoning (I'm talking about the phones, not the volunteers calling) can all be fairly expensive depending on the scale of deployment. If there are limits, they have to be reasonable and able to be revisited as the costs of goods and services fluctuate.
The challenge, to my mind, are the geographic differences that each city and municipality has. Not all are created equally. Thus, a blanket approach to finance limits is probably unwise. To compare the City of White Rock to the City of Surrey and apply the same limits would be ludicrous just based on the different sizes of the jurisdictions and their populations.
Toward the bottom of the article, Nagle points out that campaigns in Surrey were far more expensive than individual provincial campaigns. In a city the size of Surrey, it actually encompasses 6 or 7 rather different provincial ridings. If you added together what a provincial party spent in each Surrey riding, I would hazard a guess that it was far more than what a group like Surrey First spent to campaign in the entire city. Sure, Vancouver politicians spent a bunch of money. But, again, they all had to cover an entire city with a large geographic area with different demographics and issues. I'm not surprised that so much was spent in Vancouver. So I'm not sure that saying civic campaigns are more expensive than provincial campaigns because of a lack of campaign limits is a good argument.
With geographic issues in mind, one option might be to look at wards (where appropriate) along with finance caps for each ward. That's far more enforceable and reasonable. Toronto and Winnipeg each have caps and it seems to work well, but they use the ward system.
For cities and municipalities in places like Langley Township where wards are not necessary at this time, any finance limits need to be reasonable and well thought through. Should there be limits? Absolutely. But the legislation needs to be done well.
This is an interesting issue as there is no limit on how much money civic politicians can raise from individual donors as well as on how much they can spend. Apparently, between Vision, the NPA and COPE, over $5 million was spent in Vancouver alone.
I, for one, don't have a problem with a reasonable spending cap. Some things it takes to win elections, however, cost significant amounts of money. Websites, advertising, printing, signs and phoning (I'm talking about the phones, not the volunteers calling) can all be fairly expensive depending on the scale of deployment. If there are limits, they have to be reasonable and able to be revisited as the costs of goods and services fluctuate.
The challenge, to my mind, are the geographic differences that each city and municipality has. Not all are created equally. Thus, a blanket approach to finance limits is probably unwise. To compare the City of White Rock to the City of Surrey and apply the same limits would be ludicrous just based on the different sizes of the jurisdictions and their populations.
Toward the bottom of the article, Nagle points out that campaigns in Surrey were far more expensive than individual provincial campaigns. In a city the size of Surrey, it actually encompasses 6 or 7 rather different provincial ridings. If you added together what a provincial party spent in each Surrey riding, I would hazard a guess that it was far more than what a group like Surrey First spent to campaign in the entire city. Sure, Vancouver politicians spent a bunch of money. But, again, they all had to cover an entire city with a large geographic area with different demographics and issues. I'm not surprised that so much was spent in Vancouver. So I'm not sure that saying civic campaigns are more expensive than provincial campaigns because of a lack of campaign limits is a good argument.
With geographic issues in mind, one option might be to look at wards (where appropriate) along with finance caps for each ward. That's far more enforceable and reasonable. Toronto and Winnipeg each have caps and it seems to work well, but they use the ward system.
For cities and municipalities in places like Langley Township where wards are not necessary at this time, any finance limits need to be reasonable and well thought through. Should there be limits? Absolutely. But the legislation needs to be done well.
posted by Sam Kirk @ 2:22 PM
