Taxpayers will reimburse parties for expenses
Federal political parties will be reimbursed tens of millions of dollars by taxpayers for their election expenses without having to provide any receipts or supporting documents detailing their costs.
Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand has urged changes to laws that allow federal parties to claim election expenses, half of which are reimbursed by taxpayers, without providing “vouchers” such as itemized receipts and other supporting documentation of their expenses.
Individual candidates are required to provide receipts and invoices documenting, in detail, their election expenses, with up to 60 per cent reimbursed by taxpayers.
But federal parties, which can each spend up to $54.5 million each this election campaign, are not required to do so.
The issue is especially pressing in this election, because the 79-day campaign is more than double the normal length, meaning political parties will be reimbursed more than twice the amount they normally would be.
“It is striking when looking at provincial regimes that we remain the only jurisdiction in Canada where political parties are not required to produce supporting documentation for their reported expenses,” Mayrand told a Commons committee in March 2014.
“At every election, parties receive (tens of millions of dollars) in reimbursements without showing a single invoice to support their claims. This anomaly should be corrected,” added Mayrand at that time. He was unavailable for an interview this week.
Federal parties are required to submit their expense returns to Elections Canada with an auditor’s report on election spending within eight months of election day.
Those reports are only a few pages in length, summarizing the total amount spent on areas such as advertising, election surveys, professional services, leaders’ tours, and salaries and wages.
The chief electoral officer wants the federal government to amend the Canada Elections Act so parties are required to provide vouchers, as individual candidates must.
Former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley said the failure of governments to enact the changes requiring receipts and invoices prevents Canadians from seeing exactly how and why their tax dollars are being reimbursed to political parties. He called for the improved reporting requirements in 2005.
“Now that the party ceiling exceeds double the ordinary $25 million, the problem of ascertaining anything meaningful from the short party reports is significantly compounded, and the ability to verify anything in some detail remains practically impossible,” Kingsley said. “So much for accountability to Canadians for expenditures from public funds.”
The Conservative party, in an emailed response to a question on why the government hasn’t adopted the changes requested by the chief electoral officer, pointed to a tweak it made to elections laws.
The reforms now require the party’s external auditor to include a compliance audit to assess whether the party adhered with political financing rules.
However, since the rules don’t require parties to submit receipts and invoices, complying with those rules won’t produce any more detailed documentation of spending.
The government’s tinkering is nothing but a “smokescreen that’s being shot across a fog,” Kingsley said. “They don’t want people to know how they’re spending the money in detail.”
The three main parties unanimously supported an NDP motion in 2012 that called on the government, within six months, to introduce amendments that would give the chief electoral officer “the power to request all necessary documents from political parties to ensure compliance with the Elections Act.”
Nothing came of that motion.