Would an NDP government under John Horgan kill B.C.’s natural gas industry and other extractive industries along with it?
That’s what the Concerned Citizens for BC (CC4BC) suggested in an April 7 front-page ad in the Vancouver Sun.
The ad warned that “the NDP’s Leap Manifesto” would kill 89,800 jobs and cost the province $5 billion in salaries annually.
But anyone wanting to know how the CC4BC arrived at its calculations would find the CC4BC.ca website disabled and no way of contacting the group, which appears to be a single person: Jim Shepard, a former adviser to Premier Christy Clark.
Shepard did not respond to emails from Business in Vancouver.
CC4BC is not the only third-party advertiser to run anti-Horgan ads in the lead-up to the election and then go dark just days before the writ was dropped.
Future Prosperity for BC (not to be confused with British Columbians for Prosperity), headed by former BC Chamber of Commerce president John Winter, ran the “Say anything John” campaign, which included TV ads.
In January, Winter confirmed to Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer that his group had an advertising budget that was in the $2 million range.
The NDP has third-party advertisers working on its behalf, too. The BC Federation of Labour’s (BCFL) Better Can Happen Here campaign has included TV ads.
BCFL executive director Jim Chorostecki said the video and TV airtime cost less than $100,000.
The video is available on YouTube and on the organization’s website and can still be shared via social media.
The labour organization just can’t buy any more airtime, or pay for its promotion – through Facebook, for example – or it becomes a third-party advertisement that must be declared through Elections BC. And there is a cap on how much the BCFL can spend during the writ period.
But as long as the paid promotional activity ceases during the 28-day election period, there are no public disclosure requirements. The public therefore might have no idea who is behind some third-party campaigns, how much money they raised, who donated or how much money they spent.
“John Winter or Jim Shepard, for all we know, could be spending $100 million,” said Bill Tieleman, a political commentator and former NDP strategist who wrote about Shepard and his CC4BC during the last election campaign.
“What happened in 2013 is there was this long aerial bombardment of Adrian Dix by Jim Shepard. Whether it worked or not is impossible to tell. But pretty obviously, Dix went into it with an advantage and lost the election ahead of the polls by 15, 17 points. So I think certainly there’s some cumulative effect.”
Last week, Horgan addressed the issue of pre-election third-party political advertising at a campaign rally in Vancouver.
“I believe that these third parties … are doing a disservice to democracy,” he said. “Third parties are just like the big money – they distort our politics. They tend to focus on the issues that are important to them and not the rest of the public. I would love to get rid of it.”
But it’s unlikely any government could place limits on third-party advertising outside the writ period, said Richard Johnston, Canada Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation for the University of British Columbia’s Department of Political Science.
“Any attempt to regulate this raises a charter question,” he said. “It’s a limitation on freedom of speech.”
Johnston points out that, in the lead-up to the 2009 election, former Liberal premier Gordon Campbell, fearing a major BC Teachers’ Federation campaign against him, considered restricting third-party advertising for a month before the writ period but backed off when threatened with a court challenge.
“To the extent that it’s a worry for [its] impact on the election, it kind of goes down to what you think is the rate of decay of any impact,” Johnston said. “I think that probably a month before election day is long enough that that ad will be lost in the distant history.”
