Clark, who has tried to ignore growing public anger over the Liberal party’s fundraising practices, may have finally blinked at news of an RCMP investigation
Last week, Premier Christy Clark heard the four letters of the alphabet that every politician dreads to hear the most, particularly when it’s hitting close to home: RCMP.
Early Friday morning, Elections BC announced that it was handing its barely conceived investigation into the possible “cleansing” of donations to B.C.’s political parties over to the RCMP.
This, following a Globe and Mail investigation that revealed some lobbyists have been donating to the BC LiberalParty and were later reimbursed for those donations by unknown third parties.
B.C. doesn’t have many rules when it comes to political donations, and this one may be the toughest: donors cannot use others to mask their donations.
One gets a sense from the party’s reaction to the Globe’s story that it may have been forced into damage control.
You can almost imagine the meetings last week with party strategists, maybe a few lobbyists, trying to come up with something they could announce that sounds good, but doesn’t mean much.
Clark, who has tried to ignore growing public anger over the Liberal party’s fundraising practices – think $10,000-a-plate cash-for-access dinners – may have finally blinked at news of an RCMP investigation.
Word began to leak over the weekend that the premier was preparing to go further than she had ever gone before on electoral finance reform, further even than her proposed real-time disclosure of political donations.
Using the government’s proposed legislation as a prop, the premier announced on Monday that if re-elected her government would establish an independent panel to review B.C.’s Election Act and come up with recommendations for the legislature’s consideration.
Clark was clear, however, that members of her proposed panel would have to be accepted by a unanimous vote of the legislature, which everyone knows is a regular occurrence (mild sarcasm).
And if that wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle in and of itself, Clark added that any recommendations the panel might make four years later – or, as the Liberal party likes to say, $60 million later – would have to be adopted unanimously as well.
When pigs fly.
Meanwhile, in an incredible display of decisiveness, BCNDP Leader John Horgan can be marked down as squarely undecided on real-time disclosure, after he told CKNW, “Take it as a yes or no, however you like it. We disclose annually, as does the Conservative party, the Marijuana party, Libertarian party and the Liberal party.”
This, to CKNW’s simple question as to whether the public can expect the NDP to report fundraising in real time before voting day?
Horgan has had nearly a year to contemplate the idea.
Since he brought up the Libertarian party, B.C.’s 35 fringe political parties have accepted a grand total of 801 donations since 2005.
Putting the merits of real-time disclosure aside, it’s not a hill that any political party should die on.
Clark’s legislation came with a couple of unexpected and positive add-ons: the threshold for reporting political contributions will be lowered to $100 annually from $250.
And we might get to find out who attends those elite cash-for-access dinners with the premier, albeit not retroactively.
Clark’s office was quick to point out that she had misspoken on that point.
Call it the premier’s foxtrot week: one step forward, two steps back, then sidestep the real issue.
Dermod Travis is executive director of IntegrityBC.
