Questions, confusion over union donations in municipal campaign
New financing rules are forcing Vancouver’s top mayoral candidates to run leaner campaigns than previous elections, but Kennedy Stewart has the support of full-time paid organizers that don’t cost his campaign a cent.
Since last month, four members of affiliate unions of the Vancouver and District Labour Council have taken time off from their jobs to work at getting the labour council’s preferred candidates elected, including Stewart.
The organizers continue to be paid by their unions, which are reimbursed by the labour council, said its president Stephen Von Sychowski.
Elections B.C. said that technically they don’t count as campaign contributions.
The news about the paid organizers comes after some of Stewart’s opponents questioned the support he was receiving from organized labour.
This month’s municipal elections are B.C.’s first since the NDP government banned donations from corporations and unions, proclaiming it was ending the “era of big money” in local and provincial elections.
But the months leading up to the Oct. 20 election have already featured several arguments over what’s allowed under the new rules — and the confusion continues this week.
In April, the president of Vancouver’s Non-Partisan Association asked B.C.’s minister of municipal affairs to apologize for accusing the party of trying to skirt the rules banning corporate donations, saying the NPA was following the rules as written. The government quickly moved to close that particular, so-called loophole. In July, Surrey First hosted a golf tournament at which the party solicited corporate donations, including $25,000 “gold sponsors.” The party said the tournament followed the rules, but they still drew criticism from some who called it out of bounds with the spirit of the new rules.
Some Vancouver candidates are questioning why, if union donations are banned, a labour group is allowed to pay several weeks’ worth of wages for people to work for labour’s preferred candidates.
There is some confusion over whether the VDLC, a registered third-party advertiser, needs to track the hours of paid work by the organizers and report it to Elections B.C. after the vote.
Von Sychowski initially said he had been “very surprised” to learn that while his group must report money spent on advertising and materials like the “door hangers,” they won’t need to disclose the time union members spend supporting campaign efforts, whether it’s as volunteers or paid organizers.
“That was sort of our initial assumption (that they would have to disclose the paid workers’ time), but what we discovered in discussions with Elections B.C. is that that doesn’t actually have to be reported,” he said.
But in an emailed statement Wednesday, Elections B.C. spokesman Andrew Watson said: “If a third party advertiser is an organization with paid staff, their staff can conduct third party advertising activities in support of a candidate or group of candidates. These activities ... are expenses of the advertising sponsor. The expense limits for third parties apply to such activities, and they must be reported by the third party in its financial disclosure statement after the election.
“We will follow up with the VDLC to ensure they are clear on these rules.”
After hearing the response from Elections B.C., Von Sychowski said: “We have had a little bit of confusion around this, to be honest.” But he added that if the VDLC needs to disclose the employees’ time as expenses, then they’ll disclose it and they’re not worried about being close to the $150,000 thirdparty spending limit.
Stewart, a former two-term NDP member of Parliament, chose to run as an independent in this year’s Vancouver election. Over the summer, the labour council endorsed Stewart and a full list of candidates for council and park and school boards, including representatives of Vision, the Greens, COPE and OneCity.
Given labour’s organizers are out knocking on doors this month, Shauna Sylvester wonders if the B.C. NDP really succeeded in their stated goal of getting big money out of local politics.
“I thought municipal finance rules were trying to make a level playing field,” she said.
Sylvester, also an independent Vancouver mayoral candidate, had sought the labour endorsement that went to Stewart.
“I believe organized labour is contributing financially to Kennedy Stewart’s campaign. And my understanding is that new rules do not allow any corporate, business or labour to contribute to these campaigns,” she said. “How can unions provide fulltime staff and it’s not a campaign contribution?”
Disclosure forms from the 2014 election show the parties of the top two mayoral candidates, Vision and the NPA, raised and spent $3.4 million and $2.1 million respectively.
This year, the top mayoral campaigns are leaner operations, said NPA strategist Mike Witherly, adding, “The big difference (in spending) is going to be in television and polling.”
Wednesday, Stewart released his fifth voluntary list of donors with a statement saying he “renewed his challenge to the NPA’s Ken Sim and other mayoral candidates to disclose donors” before advance polling opens Oct. 10.
Witherly said the NPA plans to release its first voluntary list of donors before advance polling and added: “It’s nice that Kennedy Stewart is disclosing his donors, but we know that that’s hardly the full story of the money that’s supporting him.”