Shell games

The Ottawa Citizen reports that the Cons look to have broken the Canada Elections Act yet again, this time by wrongfully funneling federal expenses through individual campaigns in order to avoid exceeding the national party's spending limit:

The Conservative party shuffled more than $1 million in advertising money between itself and Tory candidates in the 2005-06 campaign, boosting candidate expenses and qualifying them for larger Elections Canada rebates for their riding war chests.

A Citizen investigation of election financing records shows the Tories would exceed their $18.3-million overall limit on election spending if the advertising expenditures are considered part of the national Conservative campaign -- a point the party disputes.

Elections Canada recently rejected some expense claims filed by Conservative candidates who reported payments of up to $50,000 to the federal party for radio and TV advertising, according to the Citizen probe...

Elections Canada records show that 50 Tory candidates claimed $1.05 million in radio or TV advertising expenses they paid to the party. Of these, all but four received transfers of funds from the party, totalling $1.26 million, a Citizen review of the candidate returns found.

Many received the money from the party just a few days before they bought ads, and some in nearly the exact amount they later returned to the party in advertising. Most of the payments took place in the final two weeks of the campaign for the Jan. 23, 2006, election.

If this money were spent on advertising for the federal party and not candidates, it would have put the Conservatives well over the spending limit that Elections Canada set for the 2006 election. The party came in just $259,000 under the limit...

Cash transfers between parties and candidates are acceptable under the Canada Elections Act, but candidates can only claim advertising expenses that benefit them directly.

"The party can buy services for the candidates and bill the candidates for it, providing the service is really for the benefit of the candidate," an Elections Canada official said. "The benefit has to be for the candidate if the candidate lists that as expenses."

Conservative candidates interviewed by the Citizen said they understood the money they received and then paid to the party for broadcast advertising was intended to promote the national campaign, not their own.

Gary Caldwell, a Sherbrooke-area businessman who ran a distant second in the Quebec riding of Compton-Stanstead, said the party channelled money through ridings with smaller budgets.

"The federal party wanted to put through some of their expenses through the accounts of candidates who weren't spending up to their maximum," he said...

York-South Weston Conservative candidate Steve Halicki said the national party wanted to use spending room in his campaign because, like most of the Tories involved, he had low voter support in his riding and few contributions or money to spend.

"It was a transaction to allow the party to be able to use some of the unused capacity in my financing," he said. "I paid for this thing, but they actually gave me the money to pay for it."

Lawyer Sam Goldstein, who ran a token campaign for the Tories against New Democrat Olivia Chow and Liberal Tony Ianno in the Toronto riding of Trinity Spadina, said the advertising money he paid was not for his campaign.

"It's national advertising is what it is," he told the Citizen.

Now, I'll note that as one of the few Canadians seemingly interested in closely tracing the links between money and politics, I probably find the violation more dangerous than most would. But even voters not particularly concerned with election financing specifically should be able to recognize the danger in a government which honestly believes that it's above the law in how it classifies and spends money.

And in that respect, it's particularly noteworthy that three separate Con candidates have already gone public saying what the party is still trying to deny. As noted within the article, there's nothing wrong in principle with transfers of money from federal parties to candidate campaigns, or vice versa. But when even the candidates involved are admitting that the sole purpose of the transfers was to shuffle money around the federal spending limit, it seems virtually impossible to believe that there's some innocent explanation - and the Cons' brain trust looks all the more ridiculous for trying to pretend otherwise.

I'll take a more detailed look later at the provisions of the Canada Elections Act which the Cons seem to have violated. But suffice it to say for now that both the official agents who filed misleading reports and anybody within the party who assisted in carrying out a plan to deliberately circumvent the federal limit could face a serious risk of prosecution. And now that we know just how many rules the Cons seem to have wilfully broken in order to try to win power, there's all the more reason to keep them under the microscope now that they have the country's finances at their disposal.