Liberals seeking advice on fundraising
Tory leader urges premier had public consultations on reforming fundraising
The Liberals will seek input from rival political parties as reforms are crafted to clean up fundraising in the province, says Premier Kathleen Wynne.
“I’m very interested to hear what Andrea Horwath and Patrick Brown have to say,” Wynne said, referring to the NDP and Progressive Conservative leaders, respectively.
“I know that Patrick Brown was at the federal level, so I assume he will agree as we move to the federal model. I haven’t heard anything specific from Andrea Horwath,” the premier said Friday in Ottawa.
“So I’ll be interested to hear their commentary,” she said, noting the government is looking at banning corporate and union donations and outlawing third-party advertising.
In a letter to Wynne on Friday afternoon, Brown urged the premier to strike an all-party select committee “to carry out public consultations on reforming both political donations and third-party election advertising.”
The Tory leader pointed out the federal changes a decade ago “allowed for a levelling of the playing field during elections and assured Canadians that the democratic process remained fair, balanced and devoid of undue influence.”
Horwath also wrote Wynne Thursday urging her to “seek and obtain widespread consensus beyond the governing party and, indeed, beyond the parties themselves” before imposing reforms.
Green Leader Mike Schreiner said his party, which holds no seats in the legislature, also wants to prohibit corporate and union donations.
While the Liberals have long mused about revamping Ontario’s lax political fundraising rules, action was announced only after the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn revealed this week that cabinet ministers have secret targets of up to $500,000 a year they are expected to raise.
After ducking the question for most of the week, Wynne admitted Friday that Ontario cabinet ministers have fundraising quotas.
“We’re a team and . . . we don’t necessarily have a joint conversation about what everyone’s target is. We know that there’s an overall objective in terms of what we need to run the party and to do the work that we need to do, and we all do our bit,” Wynne said.
The Star discovered that Finance Minister Charles Sousa and Health Minister Eric Hoskins have an annual “allotment” of $500,000, while Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli takes in around $300,000 a year for the Liberals, with many other cabinet mem- bers collecting $250,000 or so.
Those targets are set by the Ontario Liberal Fund, the premier added.
“You’ll have to talk to the party, because it’s the party that raises the money, it’s the party that works with all of the members to support their fundraising efforts and, as I say, it’s the same across all of the parties at the provincial level,” she said.
This fall — around the time the Liberals mark their 13th anniversary in power — Wynne’s government will introduce the new rules and restrictions, although not all will necessarily be in place by the spring 2018 election.
“We will bring in a timeline . . . and you’ll be able to see the kind of transition that we’ll go through,” the premier said, noting changes to municipal election fundraising will come even sooner.
Wynne said the new rules will also address so-called third party advertising. In recent Ontario elections, unions joined together under the Working Families banner and spent more than any political party to buy attack ads against the PC.
Wynne strongly denied any suggestion that donors get greater access to power than those who do not contribute money to the Liberals.
“You have to look at our track record and look at the work we are doing in the community. Who pushed us to do the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan? There was no lobby group that came to us with money for that,” she said.
“We’re doing that because it is exactly the right thing to do for people in this province. The example that has been used about the Beer Store and the money that we got from big breweries, we did exactly the opposite of what the breweries were looking for.”
That referred to the Liberals’ expanding six-pack sales to supermarkets last Christmas, despite opposition from the parent companies of Labatt, Molson and Sleeman, who have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Liberals over the years.