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Bill 205 The Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure (Third Party Advertising) Amendment Act

Ms Blakeman:

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in third reading to Bill 205, the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure (Third Party Advertising) Amendment Act, 2009.

You know, when I see situations that develop such as the one that led to the impetus for this bill, I’m always really curious about what started that. Why did this whole situation create itself? If I may hazard a little hypothesis here, I think there’s an immense amount of voter and active citizen frustration out there with the political system that we have. People feel that they cannot influence the political parties. They cannot influence or move the party that has been in power for so many years in Alberta. They can get involved with other parties, but it doesn’t help to sort of shift or move that monolith that’s in place, so we end up with these splinter groups developing which are not political parties, but they may have come out of a special interest or they may have set themselves up as an alternative to the process.

We end up with groups like Public Interest Alberta, Parkland, Pembina. That right there is a mix of sort of very specific focuses, Pembina, obviously, on environmental and natural resource issues. Then there’s a whole other group in there that are the sort of traditional think tanks that tend to come out with a particular political bias like Canada West and the Fraser Institute, the centre for public policy, and a few other ones like that. I’m talking about the homegrown ones. I am talking about ones like the Greater Edmonton Alliance, Public Interest Alberta because I do see them as flowing from that active citizen frustration that they could not either get entry to or kind of move the system that they were in.

Interestingly, I think it has actually served to in some ways entrench the system that we’re in because it certainly has siphoned money off of people who may have otherwise supported a political party, particularly political parties that were not the governing party. Those donations now tend to go to those groups, and of course they are active around election time. So these are the groups that now the attempt is being made to capture. Of course, we have the very famous one from the recent election, which was a coalition of various unions and trade associations and worker associations that were specifically trying to make a point about the last government.

Out of a particular set of circumstances we have citizens moving in a particular direction and creating a certain entity in order to explore something that suits them better than what we’re currently offering them. That I take as a statement and an encouragement to work harder on how we’re offering up our individual access points to political parties. Certainly, in a younger demographic it seems they’re not very interested in joining political parties, and they say they never will be. It just doesn’t work the way they want it to.

So who’s going to be captured under this legislation? That’s what we’re looking at in third reading. What’s the anticipated effect of this bill when it comes into place? Well, I wonder if the sponsor of the bill anticipated that it would likely capture groups, possibly, like Public Interest Alberta, where it would now be having to disclose its finances, but in fact it raises money for a number of other activities that it gets involved in.

So how do we divide up that transparency? Do they have a right to say: well, we spent this amount of money during the election campaign or during the prescribed period, and that’s what you may have access to and look at, but the rest of our activities have taken place over a number of years and have involved policy development and conventions and all kinds of other activities. They did a series of seniors’ workshops, for example. You don’t get access to that because it’s not specifically directed to third-party advertising around an election campaign. I don’t think that has been anticipated or explored by the sponsor of the bill, and I wonder if we have not created a rather large can of worms as a result of that.

The second thing for me that is a deciding factor in support or non-support of the bill is what I call the YISBYs, which is: yes, great idea, but not in my political party, or not in my backyard is another way of looking at it, so support for the general idea but not to apply to us, thank you very much. And here we have it. In fact, it was illustrated by a couple of the speakers supporting the bill. Great idea; love transparency; everybody should have to admit to this, well, except not for leadership campaigns and not for nominations. That is where you create the problem. As soon as you start to have exceptions to transparency, you create that problem.

There are some people that do not have to admit to this now – there’s a curtain they can stand behind; there’s a half-open door that they are looking through or that we can look through – and that’s where the problems are created. So it is that sort of YISBY. I have to, I think, give credit to someone else for coining that particular term. I won’t name them at this point, but it’s not me, so I can’t take the credit for it.

But that to me is the problem with what’s anticipated here. If we had said, “Yes, we’re going to throw this open, and we are going to deal with everybody that gets involved in third-party advertising in an election campaign,” and had a really clear and fairly wide-reaching definition around that but also around the rest of the political process – if we’re going to talk about it, then let’s do it.

It should be around nominations. It should be, in particular, around leadership. Where do we have a dividing line there? Well, I would argue that there shouldn’t be one. You know, here we had the Wildrose Alliance. Well, they refused to give us, to make public, who donated to their leadership campaign or supported any given leadership candidate. But we had exactly the same thing when we had a leadership campaign in the governing party, and indeed that was what people were being approached with: you, too, can buy a membership and vote for your choice of the next Premier.

That’s exactly what they were selling, and I was horrified at the time that people that I knew and loved in the community could be enticed to buy a membership in a political party that they told me they did not support – why? – because they were going to get to vote for their choice of the next Premier. That entire contest is not covered under what this legislation would cover, and that to me is the fatal flaw in the bill because as soon as you start to create those YISBY moments – yes but not in my political party – that’s where the problem starts.

People fail to be convinced that there’s credibility in the process when they can see immediately that well-publicized and well-known opportunities to hide behind that curtain or hide behind that door out in the hallway are within recent memory. So I appreciate what the member was trying to do in throwing open that transparency; I think he’s failed to do it.

I have been fortunate to attend twice the COGEL conferences, which are the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws, and they have been great opportunities for me, and I’ve learned a lot. I went to one a long time ago in Texas and more recently to one in Chicago, and both times I was really struck by what happens in the U.S., where there are no spending limits, but the trick is that everybody has to fess up.

Even in that system they have people that go to great lengths not to be seen donating the money. So they donate it through the names of their children, and companies donate it through the names of their executives who they give bonuses to – I’m moving my fingers in little air quotation marks there – with the expectation and the directive that those bonuses are funnelled through to a political party.

So even in a system where there are no limits – anybody can donate any amount of money, but you must fess up to it; you must put your name on it – there is a certain reluctance to have your name attached to a political donation, to be seen supporting a particular candidate. I think that even if we got this far, it still wouldn’t solve the problem.

Thank you very much.