It’s time for Sask. to ban corporate political donations
Recent example in the U.S. reveals significance of issue
As most other Canadian jurisdictions have put in place meaningful donation limits and other checks on the undue influence of corporations and extremely wealthy individuals in politics, the problem has largely fallen off the radar in Saskatchewan.
Whenever the issue has been raised on the provincial scene, the Saskatchewan Party — as the primary recipient of corporate largesse — has been quick to claim it doesn’t see a problem with corporate and outside influence in our election campaigns.
But the recent experience of our neighbours shows us how important the problem of large and untraceable influence can be — and how much work there is to be done in building a democratic system that is less vulnerable to control by outside forces.
The primary example of outside meddling in an electoral process is of course the steady stream of news of Russian participation in the most recent presidential campaign in the United States, which appears to be mirrored in similar disruption of campaigns around the globe.
If anything, the fecklessness of Donald Trump’s entourage has provided us with far more insight into the nature of outside interference than we might otherwise have expected. Trump’s communications strategy of saying the quiet part of hush-hush messages out loud apparently extended into his campaign’s interactions with Russian operatives. And as a result, investigators have been able to connect campaign coordination to favours granted to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Of course, the prospect of a hostile foreign power co-ordinating directly with a partisan election campaign makes the example from the U.S. all the more jarring.
But we should be wary of any loophole that facilitates the systematic manipulation of voters during an election period. And news emerging about Ontario’s most recent provincial election shows how those dangers are manifesting themselves in Canada.
In the past week, the release of electoral filings as well as an investigation by a Parliamentary committee have shone a spotlight on the activities of the third-party advertiser Ontario Proud — which essentially spent the election campaign broadcasting smears of political opponents that were seen as too toxic for Doug Ford and his party to speak directly.
Sadly, that influence seems to have had a substantial impact on the campaign — particularly toward the end, when there was insufficient time to respond to anti-immigrant messaging used to suppress a wave of support for Andrea Horwath’s NDP. And it’s only months after Ford’s majority government took power that we’re getting a more clear picture as to who helped push it over the finish line.
On the funding side, it’s no surprise that contrary to its claims of being funded by small donors, Ontario Proud received the vast majority of its half-million-dollar budget from corporate actors who were promised a compliant government in exchange for six-figure contributions. And those corporations have been rewarded with multiple bills attacking employment and labour rights, regulations and environmental standards — even in cases where Ford made different promises to the public.
Meanwhile, we’re still awaiting answers about mass unsolicited texts from an unidentified sender that targeted voters late in the campaign.
The investigation now being conducted at the federal level is part of a multi-party review into threats to the integrity of our national elections. Unfortunately, we haven’t even begun to discuss the same problem due to the Saskatchewan Party’s see-no-corporate-influence denialism.
As a result, our next provincial election will all too likely feature forms of outside interference that have long been deemed unacceptable elsewhere. And so it will be up to Saskatchewan’s citizens to look behind manipulative messages and ask who stands to profit by distracting us. Fingas is a Regina lawyer, blogger and freelance political commentator who has written about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective since 2005.