The Main — July 27: Does Cash Rule Everything Around Me?
A money-chasing tone for the 2021 municipal campaign has been set, but candidates could pay a big price
Political campaign donations are a big talking point in the 2021 municipal election in Alberta, and this ramped up last week with two stories out of Calgary and Edmonton.
To recap: In Calgary, current councillor and mayoral candidate Jeff Davison now faces complaints filed with Elections Alberta from fellow mayoral candidates after a Davison campaign official sent emails to his supporters about a golf tournament fundraiser being held by a third-party advertiser called Calgary Tomorrow. News reports suggest entry fees for this tournament start at $400 for, one has to suppose, regular people, and scale up to $10,000 for, well, who knows (more on that later). Davison, for the record, refused to comment for the excellent CBC story that broke these details. You can read more here.
In Edmonton, the first mayoral candidate debate in one of Canada’s youngest, most progressive and fastest growing cities in 2021 was an invite-only event held by — checks notes — a capital investment firm. Four mayoral candidates decided this closed event, where even news media weren’t made aware, was an appropriate way for them to come together and discuss city issues in the company of what one can only interpret to be well-connected people with healthy amounts of money to potentially inject into mayoral campaigns.
Cool. Cool.
And don’t forget: The province’s role is to act as a non-impartial regulator of the rules for municipal governments in Alberta. In 2021, they have non-impartially (in my view) altered regulations around election fundraising to allow those with big money to more freely influence this election’s outcome in cities, towns and villages. To add to this, the provincial government is also holding a referendum about federal policy on the same ballot, too.
Now for the intrigue.
Who are candidates wooing with their apparent money-driven actions detailed above? It certainly isn’t the average municipal voter, who cares about their own local issues like garbage collection or programs to address homelessness. And some suggest it may actually backfire, too.
To check-in with my own read of the recent events in Calgary and Edmonton I caught up with Melanee Thomas, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
Thomas says she sees what’s happening as a part of a continued reaction to the 2015 provincial win by the New Democratic Party. This rocked the conservative boat harder than many in Alberta’s political status-quo were ready to be rocked. This year’s election, Thomas says, appears to have been set up by those with control to allow an “atypical” person with deep pockets to influence the results at the municipal level, to allow such forces for purported normalcy to have a larger amount of sway.
“The whole point is to enable people with money to unduly influence the democratic process,” Thomas says of the changes. “It has to do with expectation of who should be in power. It has to do with reactions to that 2015 election.”
(For those needing a background story on political-action committees at this point, we’ve got you covered here.)
Another wrinkle in all of this is that the rules are also set up to allow candidates to reveal who donated what to their own campaign long after the election is held and votes are cast. What of the transparency of third-party advertisers and political-action committees, then? We seem to be beta testing that one and no one knows the firm answer, but the tone was most certainly set by Calgary Tomorrow, when it opted out of transparency because it apparently can do this without fear of actual repercussion. Our friends at LiveWire wrote about it all here.
From this story:
“Their choice to make it a private, hidden, third party advertiser is unique. No one else has done that, and they did it because they don’t want public scrutiny,” [Stephen ] Carter [strategist for the Jyoti Gondek campaign] said.“They want to exist in the background, and they want to gain as much money and power from old Calgary as they possibly can.”
But what Thomas sees in all of this is a growing mismatch between strength in money and strength in voter endorsement. There’s a looming bit of poetic justice here. And she’s likely right.
Municipal candidates have to chase after money to fund campaigns. That’s nothing new. They have to pay for advertising, campaign offices and other expenses. In the past, this big-cash has largely been offered up by suburban housing developers who have donated a lion’s share of the money candidates have on offer (the Edmonton Journal offered a great investigation here).
In 2021, though, the spectre of third-party advertisers and political-action committees having far freer reign to collect much larger sums has made the potential for most of the real big money to consolidate in these organizations. This has potentially made candidates see efficiency in playing footsie with these groups to get big bucks and get them quick.
But the disconnect, Thomas says, is that we’re still talking about a democratic fight for people to vote.
“The peril of the PACs is you could throw all this money in but the average person isn’t paying attention to the campaign yet,” she says. “If that’s all a campaign is doing, I don’t think that’s a very good campaign.”
Indeed, Thomas says it’s probably “strategically foolish” to chase the big money rather than do the hard work and collect thousands of small donations from regular people — which is how municipal campaigns have worked for generations.
“I would imagine that people who have experience with campaigning under old set of rules [are still chasing smaller donations], but there will be some candidates comfortable chasing really big-ticket donors versus getting a lot of donations from a lot of people,” Thomas says. “The best way to win an election is build a broad base of support.”
Do big-dollar golf tournaments or invite-only mayoral debates build that sort of broad support? I’ll let you answer that yourself.
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Author’s note for transparency: I steer clear of writing about specific or individual candidates in Edmonton’s municipal election because I now work in a job where being non-partisan in municipal campaigns is a base expectation and I take that seriously.