It’s time to talk about changing city’s campaign financing rules
When Tobi Nussbaum ran in last fall’s campaign, the Rideau-Rockcliffe councillor promised to introduce a motion to ban corporate and union donations in municipal elections during his first 100 days in office.
A tall order. Moving the motion is easy, but getting 13 of his council colleagues to agree to the election financing changes was going to be a serious challenge. Mayor Jim Watson has said he doesn’t see any issues with companies and unions contributing to campaigns.
And anyway, council can’t change the election contribution rules, as Watson has been quick to point out in the past. The provincial government, under the Ontario Municipal Elections Act, allows companies and trade unions operating in Ontario to make municipal donations.
So there are a lot of procedural hurdles that would have to be cleared for Nussbaum — and others in favour of the ban — to successfully change the contribution rules.
But what makes Nussbaum’s current strategy so deft is that he’s breaking up what’s sure to be an onerous process into more doable pieces.
At Wednesday’s council meeting, Nussbaum gave notice that he’ll be moving a motion next month to ask his colleagues to consider one specific thing: that council request the province allow the City of Ottawa to pass a bylaw banning corporate and union donations.
It’s a wise political move, and not just because the councillor raised the issue the same week that the financial records of last fall’s candidates will be made public.
Nussbaum proposes something very sensible, very uncontroversial: that council demand it has more say over its own election rules or, as the councillor put it in an interview, “that we’re masters of our own destinies.”
The province is virtually sure to agree, as it has already given the City of Toronto special dispensation to pass a bylaw prohibiting corporate and union donations. (Toronto did just than in 2009, managing to hold two busy elections since then without these sorts of contributions.)
So there is no way that this Liberal government would refuse a request from Ottawa to do something that Toronto already does.
And as Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Ted McMeekin is currently reviewing the Elections Act, now seems like the perfect time for Ottawa council to make this request.
There’s also no downside to councillors voting in favour of Nussbaum’s proposal. By supporting his motion, elected officials are not committing themselves to banning corporate and union donations down the road. They are simply telling the province that the municipality should have the right to do so.
What councillor is going to vote against having the same powers Toronto does when it comes to campaign finances? It’s hard to imagine a councillor defending a decision not to support this motion.
Of course, the next phase — actually banning the corporate and union donations — will be much trickier. Nussbaum realizes this.
Even if this council doesn’t ban corporate and union donations, he says, “the benefit is that we will have the jurisdiction to do it sometime down the road if we so choose.”
That’s fairly forward-thinking. And the fact is that without the force of a major scandal, political culture changes slowly.
But there is an appetite for change. This week, Toronto Mayor John Tory indicated he’d support ranked-ballot voting in the next election.
That’s a system where voters literally rank the list of candidates from first to last choice, with the candidate who gets the least votes eliminated. If your candidate is dropped off the list, then your vote goes to your second choice. This process continues until someone has more than 50 per cent of the vote.
Proponents of ranked ballot voting say it will encourage more candidates to run, more people to vote and less negative campaigning.
Like banning corporate and union donations, moving to ranked ballots also requires permission from the provincial government, but the Liberals have said they are open to making the ranked system an option available to cities.
“I will be trying to be a leader in the entire process of governance review … I think change and reform are needed,” Tory told the Toronto Star.
Many voters in Ottawa would agree with him. But Tory is not our mayor.
Watson has been more cautious about electoral reform. But the status quo resulted in fewer than 40 per cent of eligible voters marking a ballot in last October’s election.
That’s not good enough. And if our own elected officials aren’t open to championing increased democratic participation, who will?