1.
Forms 40 and 41 are the campaign contribution reports legally required of all candidates running in municipal and school board elections; Form 40 is for money given to a candidate directly, while Form 41 is for money given to a candidate’s campaign association, a group working on the candidate’s behalf. Not all candidates have associations.
2.
This is the first of eight pages of Form 41 submitted for District 17 councillor Linda Mosher. Many candidates submitted computerized spreadsheets or typed forms, but there is no requirement that the form be legible; large sections of Mosher’s handwritten submission are essentially unreadable, and so while her Form 41 meets the letter of the law, it serves no useful purpose whatsoever.
3.
Forms 40 and 41, which are publicly available, track contributions to the candidate. The candidate is also required to report his or her expenditures, but unlike the cities of Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, which put that information online, Haligonians are not allowed to view candidate expenditure reports. The potential for self-serving expenditures or other abuse is enormous, but there is no way for the public to discover it.
4.
R.W. Eaton is evidently the official agent responsible for tracking contributions to Mosher’s campaign. He or she filled out the form and submitted it to the municipal clerk’s office. Along with the other candidates’ forms, the clerk placed it in a four-inch thick black binder. In Montreal, Toronto and Calgary, they put candidates’ campaign contribution information online, but Halifax does not. Haligonians can view the forms, but it involves a trip to City Hall and a charge of 25 cents per page levied for copying.
5.
Candidates are required to report only contributions of $50 or more. Smaller contributions are unknown, and therefore secret. A determined group could get around the reporting requirement by “bundling” contributions—a church, a union or the Chamber of Commerce could hold a fundraising party, with each attendee ponying up $49, potentially raising thousands of dollars for a candidate (and buying great influence on the councillor’s votes) with no one the wiser. Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg prohibit anonymous contributions; Halifax does not.
6.
By far the largest contributors to council campaigns are developers, and the largest of those—$9,000 given to nine councillors across the political spectrum, including this $500 donation to Mosher—come from those firms associated with the Armoyan family, including Armco Capital Fund, APL Properties and public-private partnership school developer Scotia Learning Centres.
7.
Presumably, the forms are required so the electorate is informed as to who is financially supporting candidates. But candidates are not required to submit the form until 60 days after the election, and so the form will not help voters make informed decisions. A better system would have candidates enter contributions daily, as they’re received, onto a publicly viewable online database.
The Full List
Campaign contributions received by winning candidates to their 2008 HRM municipal elections campaign.
Source: Halifax Regional Municipality
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2009.
Tim, you’re getting lazy.
Is this “By far the largest contributors to council campaigns are developers…” true for every councillor?
I don’t think it is….
Well, I see how you could take it that way, but I meant collectively.
The database will be up shortly; you can look for yourself.
Thanks
Do I read right, Barry Dalrymple “contributed” to his own campaign? Does that mean he gets a tax credit? Hmmm…. methinks there’s some fraud afoot if that is the case.
Tim, I had no problem reading the names on the sheet reproduced in the print edition. Rudderham and that financial ‘genius’ Younker (the man with the bow ties), Hopgood, Dugger’s Menswear,etc.
Cllr. Watts got money from the usual NDP sources, as did Cllr. Barkhouse. Kelly even gets dough from the former CAO !!! but Libs & Tories back him. All in all, just the usual donors to political campaigns.
Tim B is a refugee from America but he needs reminding you cannot buy a councillor or a mayor because neither person has any power. You would be hard pressed to find kickbacks in municipal or school board decisions. It’s not like Obamatown.
Dr Fever – no tax credit for municipal politics.
Far more worrying is the fact that council took 12 months to approve the audited finacial statements for Macrh 31 2008.
The staff fiddled the books to show a surplus so that Kelly could go campaigning without having to explain a significant deficit. Check the books and see if you can figure out how they produced the small surplus.I think I explained it to Tim B some months ago.
Big claims Joe.
Prove it
Matthew Which claims are you referring to ? The accounts ?
Here is the answer.Did you notice that Dan English cooked the books by several million dollars to give kelly a $87,187 surplus at year end 2007/2008. It was in the staff report on Tuesday September 30 20008 and everybody picked up on the $9 million spent on snow clearing. The info was at Cttee of Whole item #6
But the item that got me was a ‘ one-time accrual of Summary Offence Ticket revenue’.
Here is the relevant paragraph :
” Details by Business Unit are included in Attachments 1 and 2 to this report; and include the Reserve
withdrawals as recommended in a separate council report. At the third quarter, a $1.89 million deficit was projected. In January the CAO issued a directive for all Business Units to exercise
spending reductions wherever possible. As a result of this fiscal restraint, mainly in the areas of spending for computer replacements and delays in filling vacant positions, as well as a one-time accrual for Summary Offence Ticket revenue, and the recommended reserve withdrawals have supported a small surplus year end result. As well, a separate report will ask Council to approve a deferral of a contribution to the Ferry Replacement Reserve in 2007/08.”
Tickets issued before March 31 but not paid were obviously counted as revenue even though many of them never got to court for many months later.
Take note of this :
” Due to the time required to
produce consolidated financial statements, the audited PSAB compliant financial statement will be
presented in November of 2008.”
Or in other words after the election; provincial legislation requires audited statements to be filed within 6 months after year end. The statements will not be available to the public until 7 months after year end and after the election. The issue of a one time accrual should have been decide by the Audit Committe before ever reaching the Council. The deferral is a choice and obviously choosing to book revenue which was in doubt had not been done in prior years and was being done to show a surplus instead of a deficit. The deficit should have been several million dollars.
Fiddling the books :
This is the link
http://www.halifax.ca/council/documents/cw080930.…
The’reserve’ withdrawal and ‘accrual’issue were items #5 and #6. The relevant supporting documents were also available. At the meeting of Committee of the Whole they decided to delete the items from the agenda. On October 3 the documents were vailable on line.
I have just checked the HRM site and the documents are no longer available, disappeared, gone, ZAPPED. But I have aan email I sent detailing the issue part of which is shown above.
On March 24 2009 just 7 days shy of a year after the financial year ended the Council finally approved the financial statements for 2007/2008, here is the link http://www.halifax.ca/council/agendasc/doc…
Page 36 details why the Audit is late (Senior HRM finance staff left etc).
The Pension Plan had an estimated surplus at Dec 31 2007 of $24 million. The next actuarial review is Dec 31 2009 which means that in 12 months time taxpayers may be faced with higher contributions unless the markets improve. We already pay over 10% of regular earning into the plan.
Interesting that Betty Pacey gave money to Mayor Doofus and anti-development council member Dawn Sloane… but I guess Tim thinks that is OK.
Donations from businesses are written off as business expenses– essentially a tax write-off. Not so with donations from individuals.
Christ, that means you could have a numbered company, doing whatever the hell you wanted (it could be a “consulting firm for re-election”) to do as a tax haven, make all of your contributions run through this “company” and blammo, thousands of dollars in tax write offs for the councilor/business owner.
There are no Tax benefits to corporations from donating to municipal campaigns.
(Check page 12 of the Candidate Guide at http://www.gov.ns.ca/snsmr/muns/manuals/pd….)
Current law does not count donations to municipal candidates as a ‘political contribution’ for tax purposes. Only donations to provincial and federal campaigns are given that status.
Therefore, companies can not write off donations as ‘business expenses’ and count them towards their income-before-tax in order to realize any tax benefit from the donation.
That means that donations from individuals AND from corporations come out of their after-tax income, which puts them both on the same level in terms of ‘benefiting’ from a contribution made to a municipal candidate: i.e. no tax benefit.
.. Sorry, I meant page 20 of the Candidate Guide, not page 12.
issamat– it wouldn’t have to be done directly as a donation. “expenses” can be anything. Take for instance, grocery store gift cards used to purchase food for the re-election party. Untraceable and can be considered as gifts (thus the write off). It’s dubious at best.
I’d be interested to see how the losing candidates did compared to the winners. I seem to recall in 2004, Peter Kelly took in about double what his closest competitor (Victor Syperek) took in. This really surprised me. I guess an incumbent has a lot of $$ draw.
Tim, can you post the totals raised by Peter Kelly and Sheila Fougere for 2008?
Dr. Fever,
The intention of the law is to not allow a tax benefit for a political donation to municipal candidates, whether the donation was made in cash or in kind (gifts).
Ofcourse, if we’re going to entertain scenarios where an individual or corporation is willing to defraud the system… then the possibilities are many.
I just want to make sure that readers understand that ‘the rules’ don’t allow this, as opposed to what was implied earlier in that donations from businesses somehow get an unfair tax-advantage compared to donations from individuals.
As for fraudulent scenarios, these too can be undertaken equally by businesses or individuals. If a person or entity decides to go that route for some reason, they do so at their own legal risk.