Managing the cost of seeking higher office
Double standard: MLAs can’t run for federal seat; why can local politicians vie for B. C. positions?
There were smiles all around inside Penticton council chambers last November as newly elected mayor Garry Litke accepted a cheque to the city for $ 32,000 from his predecessor, newly elected B. C. Liberal MLA Dan Ashton.
Ashton, a veteran of 15 years on council including four years in the mayor’s office, had sought a seat in the legislature on a promise, if elected, to cover the city’s cost of holding a byelection to replace him.
True to his word after being elected to represent Penticton on May 14, Ashton resigned as mayor, waited until the city clerk had totted up the full cost of the byelection to replace him, then wrote out a personal cheque for the full amount.
“The City of Penticton was facing some tough decisions when I was elected as the mayor. We made those decisions and they affected the community and many of the people that worked at the City of Penticton,” he explained, referring to the major budget- cutting exercise he’d presided over as mayor. “I just couldn’t leave with a clear conscience without acknowledging the fact that it would not be right to impose an additional expenditure of more than $ 30,000 on the taxpayers.” Special circumstances, to be sure. Still, I can’t find any precedent for Ashton’s decision to cover the cost of the vacancy he’d created. And he made the gesture after an election in which an unusually large number of local government members — three other mayors besides himself and 10 councillors — were elected as MLAs. Aside from Ashton, seven other newly elected MLAs chose to resign their local government posts in relatively short order, necessitating byelections to fill the vacancies, as required by the Local Government Act.
The departees included Dawson Creek Mayor Mike Bernier and councillors Greg Kyllo from Sicamous, Jackie Tegart from Ashcroft, Linda Larson from Oliver, Jennifer Rice from Prince Rupert and two members of Coquitlam council, Linda Reimer and Selina Robinson. All were elected as Liberals except for Rice and Robinson, who are New Democrats.
Five other newly elected MLAs, all B. C. Liberals, found a way to spare their council the cost of a byelection.
Peter Fassbender offered to resign as mayor of Langley City after he was elected as MLA for one of the Surrey ridings and then got himself promoted to the cabinet table as education minister. Instead, with the support of his council, he took an unpaid leave, clearing the way for councillor Ted Schaffer to take over as acting mayor.
Hanging on were councillors Marvin Hunt of Surrey, Scott Hamilton of Delta, Simon Gibson of Abbotsford and Doug Bing of Pitt Meadows. Each has taken part in some council activities, albeit on an unpaid basis.
Then there’s Jordan Sturdy, who continued to serve as the mayor of Pemberton after being elected Liberal MLA for West Vancou-ver-Sea to Sky. Sturdy also began collecting the $ 100,000 MLA salary while continuing to collect the $ 24,000 that the village pays its mayor. “If you do the job, there’s no reason not to be compensated for it.”
The MLA held off resigning as mayor until last week, by which time the Jan. 1 legislative requirement to fill the vacancy had passed, so no byelection needed to be called. And for all the controversy over Sturdy’s double- dipping, byelections are a burden on local ratepayers as well, given the dearth of politicians willing to follow the example set by Ashton in Penticton.
For the eight instances cited above, costs ranged from $ 10,000 to fill the vacancy on Oliver council to an estimated $ 150,000 for last fall’s doubleheader in Coquitlam. In defending his decision to stick around in Surrey, Hunt estimated a byelection in the province’s second largest city would have cost in excess of half a million dollars.
The latter figure is on par with what it costs the provincial government every time an MLA resigns his or her seat in midterm. The two byelections staged in April 2012 to fill vacancies for two B. C. Liberals who resigned after Christy Clark taking over the party leadership came in at just under $ 1 million.
But at least senior levels of governments have a ban on politicians running for a seat in one parliament while they hold down a spot in another.
The provincial Constitution Act says that a member of the House of Commons “is disqualified from being nominated as a candidate or being elected or holding office as a member of the legislative assembly.”
The list of persons “not eligible to be a candidate” for the House of Commons under the federal Elections Act includes “a member of the legislature of a province.”
No hedging, in other words. If you want to run for one office, you have to resign the other. Strikes me that there’s a case to be made for extending that rule to the municipal realm as well, after a year in which almost half of the newly elected MLAs ( 14 of 33) were already holding down elective office as mayors or councillors.
A rule that would force such MLA wannabes to resign their local government posts before aspiring to higher office might well diminish the number choosing to do so. But that could save local ratepayers the cost of some byelections and/ or the spectacle of politicians trying to hold down two elected offices at once.