Why does the public have to police campaign fundraising?

The $5,000 donation jumped off the page.

That handsome sum is what Marylou Annable contributed to College ward candidate Guy Annable’s campaign for city council last year.

The maximum any one person (or company or union) can donate to a single municipal candidate is $750. A candidate and his or her spouse aren’t subject to the spending limit and can contribute any amount they like. But Marylou Annable isn’t Guy’s wife — she’s his mother.

Annable, who ran on the catchy slogan “Give Guy a College Try,” knows the campaign finance rules. He borrowed the money from his mother to finance his campaign, figuring he could pay her back as he raised more funds, which is a common practice for municipal candidates. But when additional contributions didn’t materialize, he explained in an email, “I disclosed the honest amounts that I received . . . I do not fudge the numbers nor do I take contributions from companies that do business with the city.”

The former candidate’s actions may be laudable, but taking such a contribution disqualifies Annable from running in the next municipal election, at least in theory. In reality, it would take an official complaint from a member of the voting public, a committee hearing and a subsequent audit for these campaign-finance rules to kick in. Because, under Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act, campaign-contribution laws are enforced by a system that has much in common with tattletaling in Grade 5, except with a lot more paperwork.

Officials do not review financial contributions made by any candidates, successful or otherwise. And while campaigns that raised more than $10,000 must be audited to make sure there are receipts for claimed expenses, auditors are not enforcers of municipal election rules. Annable’s financial report, for example, includes an auditor’s stamp of approval.

If there are issues with donations, the only way to look into it is if you — yes you, or someone like you — files a complaint to the city’s election-compliance audit committee.

Here’s how it works: Anyone who is entitled to vote in the election and has reasonable grounds to suspect that a candidate broke campaign-finance rules can apply in writing using a prescribed form available at city service centres and online. You need to declare an oath — this is to discourage nuisance complaints — and you need to do it by June 25 at 4 p.m. (Complaining about fundraising practices during the next campaign will be about three years too late.)

Then the city’s five-member compliance committee, which is comprised of former senior public servants, a lawyer, an accountant and the former chief electoral officer for Canada, meets to decide whether the grounds for the complaint are indeed reasonable. If they are, the committee then grants an audit. And if an independent auditor’s report finds that a candidate appears to have contravened the rules, the committee has to decide whether to launch legal proceedings.

The consequences of breaking the rules can be severe and can include losing a council seat or being banned from running in the next election, so the process does need to be rigorous. But it’s not exactly simple, which may be why only a few complaints are made per election.

And then there’s the question of whether the rules will even be upheld. Former Gloucester-Southgate candidate Lilly Obina should have been disqualified from running in the 2014 election because she didn’t comply with the financial reporting rules in the previous campaign. Obina filed her 2010 campaign expenses a few moments after the deadline, and her statement was not audited. But she appealed her case and last September, a judge granted her an exemption, allowing Obina to run again in the Oct. 27 election.

Did Obina learn any lessons from this? One of her five donors from the 2014 campaign is listed simply as “Carol C” of “Preston Street” — no last name, no street number and the only person to donate the $750 max. Obina says she’s waiting for her bank to return a copy of the cheque to her so she can fill in the blanks.

Who knows if anyone will bother to challenge her recordkeeping. While the system places the burden of policing campaign finance compliance on all of us, those most likely to launch official complaints are the candidate-in-question’s opponents. And that can be a politically fraught move. Does a councillor want to be seen as hounding another candidate who came in a distant second, even if he or she may have broken the rules?

After all, no one likes a tattletale.