GLOVES COME OFF
Political spat turns nasty
The Non-Partisan Association’s former golden boy and the current president of the municipal political party are exchanging pointed words over financial irregularities revealed in new campaign financing filings.
There’s a clear sense of drama — and no love lost — between the two sides, who are expected to be rivals in the civic election in two years.
Ken Sim, the businessman who led the NPA into the last election and finished a close second in the mayoral race, made two loans, of $12,000 and $25,000, from his personal bank account to his campaign account in the lead-up to the 2018 election. Both were more than the $1,200 legal limit.
Although the loans are offences under B.C. laws, Elections B.C. has deemed the violations a mistake, the money has been returned, and no monetary penalties will be imposed. Sim and the NPA both recently filed amended campaign finance disclosures with Elections B.C., which put the prohibited loans on the public record.
Sim blamed the NPA and its internal accounting practices. But the NPA’s president says that’s ridiculous.
Earlier this week, Sim had told Postmedia he wants to run for mayor again in the next election and has decided to form his own team to run against the NPA. Sim said his decision to run against the NPA in 2022 is because he has concerns over the party’s direction since a new board of directors was elected in November.
NPA president David Mawhinney, a board member since 2017, says that’s bogus. He said Sim had already had a falling out with the previous board in early 2019, long before current directors were elected. And, he said, the falling out was over the financial irregularities that have now become public.
The amended campaign finance disclosures show the $12,000 loan was made to Sim’s campaign in May 2018 and returned the following month. The $25,000 loan was made in June 2018 and returned in October 2019, a year after the election.
In February of this year, Elections B.C. said they were doing a “compliance review” on the campaign finance statements filed by Sim and the NPA in early 2019, following the election. In May, Sim filed an amended disclosure, which showed a discrepancy of about $30,000 in his total expenses compared with his original disclosure, and also showed the prohibited loans.
“He personally deposited money into his own campaign account in order to cover a shortage,” said Jodi Cooke, Elections B.C.’s executive director of electoral finance.
“I guess the intent was, he thought: ‘OK, I’ll put the money in, and then I’ll be reimbursed, and it will all be OK.’ But that’s one thing that’s prohibited under the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act.”
Candidates are “prohibited from making a loan to their own campaign more than the contribution limit, so he had done that offside,” Cooke said. “In this case, Ken Sim would have only been able to donate $1,200 to his own campaign.”
Candidates running with a party are subject to the same limits on donations and loans as anyone else, said Cooke. Under the tighter electoral finance rules brought in by the NDP government in 2017, a person is allowed to donate or lend only up to $1,200 a year to any campaign — and that includes candidates running with a party.
Sim is an accountant and a co-founder of the international homecare business Nurse Next Door, and the 2018 election marked his first time running for political office. Asked for comment, he said the situation raises “a bigger question for the NPA and their accounting and their own internal issues.”
“When you’re new to this stuff and you’re planning to run for an organization, and the organization’s been around for 80 years, there’s an expectation,” said Sim. “I was a candidate following their system, and I think they were trying to figure out all this stuff, because all these rules were new. So do I hold any ill will towards the NPA and their accounting systems? No. But did I rely on them? Yes.”
But Mawhinney rejected the former candidate’s explanation, saying the prohibited loans went into Sim’s campaign account, which was separate from the party’s bank account.
“Ken Sim is the one who had a prohibited loan,” Mawhinney said. “There’s no record of us doing something prohibited.”
Mawhinney, who was the NPA treasurer in 2018, said he didn’t have access to Sim’s account until after the election.
“If you’re talking about running for mayor as the ‘business mayor,’ but you can’t keep track of a $25,000 cheque you’ve written?” Mawhinney said.
“If you can’t manage a campaign account, how are you going to manage the city’s accounts?”
Of the 3,556 disclosures filed by candidates, electoral organizations and third-party sponsors for B.C.’s 2018 municipal elections, only about 10 were found to have prohibited loans, Cooke said. That’s less than 0.5 per cent.
None of the other Vancouver disclosures had prohibited loans, but a handful had prohibited contributions.
A review of those shows none were for amounts near the size of Sim’s loans.
Most were for less than the $1,200 limit, but were prohibited for reasons such as a donor’s address couldn’t be confirmed or an online donation came from an outof-province source.
Most involved fringe candidates. The only successful Vancouver candidates found to have prohibited contributions were NPA park board commissioner John Coupar, who received a $1,200 donation from a company, which was returned before the election, and current Mayor Kennedy Stewart, who had one supporter accidentally make three $600 donations in 2018, putting him $600 over the limit for the year.
There were several questions, confusions and controversies about election expenses and contributions for the 2018 election, B.C.’s first under the new rules. The vast majority of candidates, though, appear to have run campaigns without the aid of prohibited loans.