FOLLOW THE MONEY
Our politicians might not want you to see this
In politics, CASH COUNTS. Parties need it to thrive and SURVIVE. So why has there never been a DATABASE that tracks POLITICAL donations on a PROVINCIAL AND NATIONAL scale? THERE IS NOW and this is why it’s vital to have one.
Who gives money to politicians, and how much, is already public information. So why spend 12 painstaking months building a database of six million donation records? As Zane Schwartz, Postmedia’s Michelle Lang Fellow, explains, political transparency and accountability depend on it.
For $300, the invitation promised, guests would enjoy dinner aboard a chartered yacht, as well as “exclusive” access to Premier Darrell Pasloski and two of his ministers. A “Yukon Party ‘Party’” — except that the cruise wound its way around Burrard Inlet, near Vancouver.
That was back in 2014. But the Yukon Party has hosted similar fundraisers in Vancouver every year since. In fact, between 2006 and 2016, nearly half of the party’s named donations (contributions above $250) came from supporters outside Yukon.
The Yukon Liberals, now in power, also bring in about one-third of their named donations from outside the territory. In 2016, Copper North Mining gave the party $50,000 — the largest donation in the past decade, from a company based in B.C.
Most Canadians live hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres from the territory, which has a population under 38,000. But Yukon makes up almost five per cent of the country’s land mass, and climate change there has hit so hard that scientists recently reported a glacial river had reversed its course to flow south instead of north.
At the same time, the region is ripe for mineral exploration. Copper mining alone was worth just over $200 million in 2016. And last fall, more than $360 million in joint federal and territorial funding was announced to spur further corporate investment.
All of this makes the remote territory a bellwether for accountable government: where politicians raise money beyond their ridings, whose interests will they serve? Outrage over donations with even a “reasonable perception” of conflict of interest have sparked a nationwide crackdown on political financing in the last few years. But the impact of money on politics still flies under the radar in much of this country.
There is no tracking of donations made on a national scale. There are no consistent rules — or penalties — for political financing across Canada. Spending limits, out-of-province and foreign gifts, money from unions and corporations, donations from numbered companies: in some places, anything goes; in others, regulations are rarely enforced.
All political parties are required to disclose donations. But how those records are kept in many regions means even simple questions — for example how much MLAs have donated to their own party over a number of years — require a level of detective-work beyond most watchdogs and media, let alone the average voter.
The Follow the Money database is an attempt to change that, and hold politicians to account for the money they accept. It’s a simple tool to search donations made at both the federal level and in all 13 provinces and territories — the first searchable records, period, for nine regions.
“Putting data for every province and territory in one place provides a lot of potential for uncovering wrongdoing,” says Louis Massicotte, a political science professor at Université Laval. “You can see who is donating in a province they don’t live (in), who the biggest donors are across Canada, and who is making big donations and then getting favourable government policy. When records were digitized in Quebec, it certainly helped uncover a lot of embarrassing facts.”
Although foreign donations are illegal at the federal level and in most provinces and territories, for example, the Follow the Money database lists 5,000 donations associated with out-of-country addresses.
Gifts may be modest: Between 2013 and 2015, the Bank of China, the fourth largest bank in the world, donated $2,435 to the Alberta PCs; Malaysia’s Progress Energy donated $16,750 to the B.C. Liberals. But the flow of even small sums from state-backed enterprises to Canadian politics is troubling to many observers.
“Canada’s democracy is built on the principle of one person, one vote,” says JeanPierre Kingsley, who led Elections Canada from 1990 to 2007. “If you don’t live in Canada, you have no business trying to influence our elections.”
Alberta has banned foreign donations since the Bank of China made its contribution. B.C. included a similar ban in recent campaign financing reforms. But five jurisdictions continue to accept foreign donations: Yukon, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick.
Small regions are of particular concern, says JeanMarc Hamel, another former chief of Elections Canada, from 1966 to 1990. An outof-country gift could “almost buy the election” in a place like Yukon, says Hamel. “One $50,000 or $100,000 donation represents a huge portion of money spent in smaller jurisdictions.”
The $50,000 single donation that Copper North Mining gave the Yukon Liberal Party in 2016 represented more than a fifth of all the money they raised that year. Yukon Premier Sandy Silver says such donations won’t affect how his government allocates funds, but the infrastructure money jointly announced by the territory and the federal government will directly impact the Dawson range, where Copper North Mining, as well as a number of other mining companies who have given large sums to the Yukon Liberals, hope to grow operations.
The Follow the Money database also shows the outsize influence individuals may have — both in their own regions and well beyond them. Between donations made under his own name, via the numbered companies 328727 Alberta Ltd. and 631385 Alberta Ltd., and from Canadian Natural Resources while he served as its chairman, Allan Markin was behind almost $500,000 in donations to the B.C. Liberal party between 2005 and 2011 and more than $100,000 in support for the Saskatchewan Party between 2011 and 2014.
All of these donations are perfectly legal. But as Duff Conacher, co-founder of the non-partisan group Democracy Watch says, “Big donations from multiple corporations all controlled by the same person, especially donations from numbered companies which are basically anonymous donations, breeds a culture of corruption and dependency. Politicians know whose favour they need to curry, but the public can’t tell who is providing the funding.”
Rawlco Radio does not hide its ties to the Saskatchewan Party. Over a decade, the family-owned media company made 17 donations adding up to more than $120,000. The president of the company, Gord Rawlinson, has also donated small amounts, about $5,000, on two occasions. But the company’s full support is not clear unless you count $67,000 in contributions from a numbered company called 565509 Saskatchewan Ltd. — it lists the same address as Rawlco Radio, and is owned by Doug Rawlinson, Gord’s brother and a senior executive at Rawlco. Taken together, these donations make Rawlco one of the biggest contributors to the Saskatchewan Party. Rawlco runs a number of stations in the province, including two news-talk channels that cover provincial politics.
Enforcement of the rules that do exist for campaign financing is also inconsistent across the country. This may be because elections agencies are underresourced. As Kingsley argues, “Politicians are the ones controlling how big elections agencies are and politicians are the ones who get investigated if someone donates too much money, so they have lots of incentives to keep staff levels low.” In New Brunswick, for example, elections officials left the Progressive Conservative party itself to look into a CBC report alleging over-donations by J.D. Irving Ltd. The company was ultimately returned a small over-payment. But while other elections agencies regularly level fines (and on occasion have barred candidates who have accepted donations above the legal limit from future campaigns) there were no further consequences for the PCs.
Yet the Follow the Money database indicates that 2014 was just one of 12 occasions that Irving companies have exceeded the province’s donation cap between 2003 and 2016. In 2011, donations from J.D. Irving Ltd. and two subsidiaries, Irving Group Moncton and Irving Personal Care Ltd, added up to $6,471.30 for the PCs. In 2016, J.D. Irving Ltd. and Irving Oil Ltd. donated a combined total of more than $10,000 to the ruling Liberals.
Mary Keith, vice-president of communications at J.D. Irving Ltd., says her company and Irving Oil are not “in any way affiliated.” But the companies shared owners until at least 2007, when it was first reported that the principals, J.K., Arthur and Jack Irving, were splitting up the business — and Irving companies donated more than the $6,000 cap to the PCs every year between 2003 and 2005.
Keith said some of these records are incorrect (in 2003, for example, she said the company did not give the PCs $6,915.97), so the company is launching an internal review of all their donations. Elections New Brunswick, meanwhile, still maintains the agency has never received complaints about the Irving companies (despite the fact that the communications director for Elections New Brunswick is quoted in the 2014 CBC article) and that investigating any improper contributions would not be “a priority issue” as the agency prepares for a September election.
Better records can help catch over-donations, the flow of money between jurisdictions and many other practices that, whatever their intentions, might be perceived as conflicts of interest. But the best database is no substitute for the political will to keep watch and fix the system when it breaks.
Elections Quebec identified $12.8 million in illegal donations between 2006 and 2011. But this was only possible, the chief electoral officer noted in his report on the findings, because of reforms adopted by the National Assembly and partnership with the province’s revenue agency, following the recommendations of the Charbonneau Commission — a two-year corruption investigation. Monday: A look at some of the notable donations