Martin Regg Cohn NDP’s
righteous rhetoric rings hollow,
At first, it didn’t add up. Today, the NDP’s political calculation suddenly makes self-serving sense. Why were Ontario’s New Democrats whipping themselves into such a frenzy over long overdue reforms to the province’s outdated fundraising laws? Why would NDP Leader Andrea Horwath be holding out for a more drawn out process of extraparliamentary consultations?
And why would the NDP, of all parties, be demanding that seats at the consultation table be reserved for big business and big labour — the very entities that the rest of us are trying to drive out of our money-tainted politics?
Now, after reading the revelations in today’s Star about the NDP’s secretive shareholder structure — by which unions bankroll its party headquarters — it’s easier to understand Horwath’s calculus: When you’re deep in debt, and can’t dig yourself out of the hole, claim the moral high ground.
It turns out that, contrary to Horwath’s previous public denials, her expensive party headquarters in downtown Toronto has been underwritten for years by major unions acting in concert with the NDP. And then providing loan guarantees for the party at election time, as the party struggled with a $5-million campaign debt.
The secretive arrangement for Cornerstone, as the headquarters is known, is worthy of the best Bay Street financial engineering. It’s not illegal, but it has been hidden from public view in a way reminiscent of the opacity of the Panama Papers.
It turns out the NDP’s fondness for transparency loses out to opacity and hypocrisy where its own interests are concerned.
Not only did Horwath publicly deny the cozy arrangement in 2011, she bizarrely refused to explain it this week when confronted with the contradiction by my colleagues in the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau, Robert Benzie and Rob Ferguson. Instead, the NDP ducked — and delegated the speaking role to the party’s little-known MPP Gilles Bisson, who revels in being too clever by half when he tries to play dumb.
Here is the NDP’s official response, in lieu of the leader owning up:
“I don’t really understand how Cornerstone is set up,” replied Bisson, blithely — despite having cochaired the NDP’s 2014 Ontario election campaign. “I thought it was to buy a building.”
That building is itself a cornerstone of the NDP’s financial engineering, thanks to a $6-million loan secured against the collateral that is Cornerstone. The complex share structure detailed in the Star article — A shares, B shares, NDP shares — confers special voting rights on Horwath’s party that allows it to stay financially afloat while pursuing voters at election time.
For weeks, Horwath’s NDP has been on a righteous rampage over fundraising reforms, demanding an end to the cozy collusion by which big donors buy preferential access to politicians. Listening to their rarefied rhetoric, you’d think they had singlehandedly uncovered a government fundraising scandal and fearlessly rooted out the rot — not merely read about it in the Star — and that Horwath was boldly forcing the bandits in the other parties to do the right thing. You would be wrong on all counts. Horwath never led the way against Ontario’s lax fundraising rules, and never uncovered any abuses. More to the point, she has pointedly avoided making concrete proposals to clean up the morass all along.
Instead, the NDP has quietly availed itself of the loopholes for years, hitting up both big business and big labour under Ontario’s seemingly limitless contribution limits. Now, after years of conspicuous silence, shamed into action by the newspaper headlines, Horwath has pivoted onto the attack.
But she has chosen a strange target.
Rather than demand a quick cleanup of the existing mess, she has summoned every last microgram of moral outrage to howl against the Liberal government for daring to propose — finally — swift, straightforward reforms to the system. The very system New Democrats have shamelessly profited from alongside the other major parties.
Now that the Liberals have been embarrassed, belatedly, into giving up their egregiously greedy fundraising methods, we would be wise to take “yes” for an answer — on banning corporate and union donations, dramatically lowering individual contribution limits, limiting third-party spending, and closing byelection loopholes. Do it now, while the public is engaged and clamouring for action.
It’s not that complicated. Momentum is a terrible thing to waste.
Yet the NDP, having failed to ever raise a peep about fundraising excesses all these years, now demands a more perfect process — without saying how it would make the substance better. It’s an odd priority-setting process.
It must be intellectually comforting and morally reassuring to always know what’s good for society. All New Democrats have to do is ask themselves what’s best for their party. Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn