Money demands more openness
Saskatoon is joining the big leagues in municipal politics, with Mayor Don Atchison’s tab to get re-elected in October coming in at a considerable $161,347, nearly five times what he spent on his campaign in 2009.
Mr. Atchison also spent nearly twice as much as his rival Tom Wolf, whom he beat by a narrow margin of 3,400 votes. Garnering the top political job in Saskatoon also came in at a cost twice that of what Michael Fougere spent in Regina to become mayor there.
About half of Mr. Atchison’s donations — $83,700 — came from corporate donors, many of them local development and home building companies. That total is roughly equivalent to the campaign spending by Mr. Wolf, who collected $21,000 mostly from private donations and forked out the rest of the money himself.
While it may well be the case, as Mr. Atchison points out, that the developers don’t do business with the mayor but with the city, its land branch and land committee, what can’t be ignored is the fact that the mayor’s influence goes beyond being just another vote on council. Given his position as the nominal head of the civic corporation, the mayor has a role in setting the civic agenda.
And in a city whose rapid growth meant $1.1 billion in building permits issued last year, driven primarily by residential construction, it’s naive to ignore the fact that developers, construction companies and others have a strong incentive to look after their interests. Thus it’s certainly in the public interest to require close scrutiny over businesses’ dealings with city hall.
Mr. Atchison is an honourable man who has served Saskatoon well over his four terms in office and insists that campaign donations are not a way to buy influence. Perhaps, but Saskatoon needs better disclosure requirements and more transparency measures than what are currently in place.
Dismaying reports that have recently greeted Canadians from big cities such as Montreal and Toronto, whose civic governments and politicians are stumbling over allegations of undue outsider influence on municipal operations, are ample reason for Saskatoon residents to seek transparent rules to ensure independence and accountability at city hall.
It would serve the interests of the mayor, councillors and civic staff, as well as that of citizens, to move ahead with a disclosure policy on city hall’s interactions with individual lobbyists or lobby groups. It should not require freedom of information requests for citizens to learn about meetings municipal officials may have had with those who have a financial stake in civic government decisions.
Whether that takes a page from the City of Ottawa’s policy to create a publicly accessible registry that requires lobbyists to record formal contacts such as emails, phone calls and scheduled meetings with politicians or civic staff, or it’s a policy that places the onus for disclosure on the latter group, it’s time to let the sunshine act as a disinfectant in this process.
As Saskatoon grows to join big city ranks, it’s better to learn from others’ mistakes and head off problems before they occur. The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The StarPhoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper’s editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.