Documents suggest ‘lots of rules broken’
PC party head consults chief electoral officer regarding U of C political donations
The president of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative party has turned to the province’s chief electoral officer for guidance about “possible inappropriate action” in regards to political fundraising, divulged through University of Calgary documents.
The salient records were released to media outlets on Friday, and provincial opposition parties immediately raised questions about why the documents were only released after a hard-fought election and the end of the spring legislature sitting.
However, other high-ranking members of the long-governing Tory party say they only learned in recent days that just under $10,000 in “indirect contributions” possibly flowed from the university to the PC party between 2004 and 2008.
The university records also contain emails that put prominent Tory Joe Lougheed, son of former premier Peter Lougheed, in the middle of questions over whether public funds from the U of C went to buy tickets at PC party fundraising dinners. The entire matter is now before chief electoral officer Brian Fjeldheim.
Through a statement posted online on Friday, PC party president Bill Smith said he had been made aware of the release of the university records.
“In that part of this release refers to a PC party event and possible inappropriate action, I will today ask the Chief Electoral Office to provide guidance on how the donation should be handled,” Smith said.
On Saturday, PC party interim executive director Kelley Charlebois said he only became aware of the details about the case through media reports on Friday. Former advanced education minister Greg Weadick also said he had no knowledge of the documents “before the election, or even since.”
The premier’s former chief of staff and PC campaign strategist Stephen Carter also said he had no prior knowledge of the issue. But Carter said many publicly funded organizations give money to the party when they know they shouldn’t and, in the end, it’s the PC party that’s unfairly “tainted.”
Carter said it’s difficult for the party to determine whether money is coming from a prohibited corporation, such as a university, if the cheque comes from someone else.
“It would appear that there’s been lots of rules broken,” Carter said Saturday. “It’s incumbent that we have a strong chief electoral officer who’s got a big enough budget and the ability to investigate — and we hit people over the head with a stick when they break the rules.”
But Liberal Leader Raj Sherman said Tory governments have a pattern of blurring the lines between independent provincial institutions and politics. Even though the university said the release of documents was delayed by third-party objections, Sherman said “this is typical behaviour of the government where they bring all the bad news up after the election, or when the legislature isn’t sitting, because they can escape responsibility.”
The emails released by the university show that in 2008, the former general counsel for the U of C, Charlene Anderson, was worried Alberta election finance laws were being circumvented by a practice of allowing Joe Lougheed to bill the university for legal fees that were actually charges for PC party political fundraisers. Anderson wrote she was concerned the “practice is illegal and is unacceptable.”
However, earlier this year Lougheed submitted a statement to the university saying a “poorly drafted email” from 2008 might have created confusion, but he never billed for government relations services not provided to the post-secondary institution. Lougheed said university officials were invited to premier’s dinners as guests of his law firm, Fraser Milner Casgrain, which also provided legal services to the university. “I have always sought to conduct myself with honour and integrity,” Lougheed wrote in February. “At no time did I or FMC act on behalf of the University of Calgary as an agent to facilitate political donations.”