Two former Coquitlam city councillors who are now Tri-City MLAs will make up part of a special committee examining regulations limiting how much municipal election candidates can spend on their campaigns.
But one of them is concerned the process is not going far enough.
Both Coquitlam-Maillardville NDP MLA Selina Robinson, who is deputy chair, and Port Moody-Coquitlam BC Liberal MLA Linda Reimer are veteran civic campaigners who said they will draw on their local election experience for their committee work.
Robinson, who is a member of the three-person NDP minority on the provincial committee, said the government should also be looking at implementing caps on donations, restricting the amount a donor can contribute to a campaign. This would force candidates to seek out multiple funding sources rather than just relying on one or two major donors, Robinson said.
"Just expense limits is not going to change a whole lot," she told The Tri-City News. "If your limit is $30,000 but you can get that completely funded from one source is that really going to help?"
But Reimer said the committee is simply following the recommendations of the Local Government Elections Task Force.
That group released a report in 2010 stating that limiting how much a candidate can spend would lead to a reduction in large contributions without limiting "the democratic discourse and the variety of voices that can be heard in an election."
"We are honouring the recommendations that came forward," Reimer told The Tri-City News. "They said expense limits."
SIZE OF CITY WILL AFFECT $$ LIMITS
Coming up with a way of determining how much a candidate can spend while taking into account the office they are seeking and the size of their municipality will not be easy, she said.
The task force outlined the difficulty of a one-size-fits-all approach in their report, noting some submissions to the task force had suggested a $1 per capita formula for each community.
"This would result in candidates in Vancouver being able to spend $628,621 but those in Zeballos [a village on Vancouver Island] only $161," the report stated. "Careful consideration of the design of the limits is needed to ensure the limits work in B.C.'s diverse communities."
Instead, the province is looking at a base amount for communities that range in size from 0 to 10,000 people. Reimer and Robinson said a formula would be determined to establish expense limits based on population.
Last week, The Tri-City News published statistics it had compiled from the recently released financial disclosure documents from the November 2014 civic elections. That data showed that of the more than $312,000 raised by the nine elected candidates in Coquitlam in November, close to $169,000 (54%) came from the development industry.
In Port Moody and Port Coquitlam, unions made up a larger piece of the political contributions pie.
PoCo, for example, saw 15.9% of the $115,458 raised by the seven council winners come from labour, a percentage that increases when Mayor Greg Moore's donations are removed from the total (mayoral candidates tend to have to spend more on their campaigns, which can skew the results).
In Port Moody, 33.2% of all contributions to the seven winning candidates came from unions, a percentage that increases to 41.5% when Mayor Mike Clay's totals are removed from the equation.
@GMcKennaTC
