Premier Kathleen Wynne, take note: this is what comes from ignoring repeated calls over several years to tighten Ontario’s loose election rules. It’s the smell of scandal.

The province’s ill-advised practice of giving secret payouts to teachers’ unions, supposedly to offset the cost of bargaining, is wrong on multiple counts. It gives labour an incentive to drag out contract talks and it squanders taxpayers’ money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Furthermore, the government’s response has been hopelessly bungled. Education Minister Liz Sandals had earlier indicated that funds were doled out — by the million — without any invoice or other evidence of actual costs incurred by the unions. It was ostensibly to cover bargaining expenses with no receipts required because, as Sandals explained, the government knew the cost of such things as hotel rooms and pizza. This smacked of shoddy accounting, at best.

Wynne stood up in the legislature and performed some much-needed damage control on Wednesday, saying the money hasn’t yet been paid to the unions and that they’ll need to provide proper records after all. Fair enough, but the premier needs to go further.

A nagging suspicion remains in some quarters that the Liberal government quietly made these payments to support the labour movement’s anti-Conservative third-party election ads and political donations by teachers’ unions. Both the Wynne administration and the unions have adamantly denied that there was any such intent.

The money involved is considerable. Unions representing Ontario’s high school teachers and Catholic school teachers were each awarded $1 million in their latest collective agreement. A smaller union representing the province’s French teachers got $500,000. Similar payments have gone on for years.

A look at campaign finance disclosures for 2014 indicates that unions representing high school teachers and teachers in the Catholic system spent well over $3 million on various election-related activities, including to fund a blatantly anti-Conservative coalition group called Working Families.

This pattern of government payouts and election spending by labour readily gives rise to a perception — however unfair — that public money may have been spent in an effort to tilt the outcome of a provincial election.

It’s a shocking thing to consider. And people wouldn’t be pondering it at all if Wynne had listened to Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa and other concerned voices calling for election reform.

Two years ago Essensa urged the province to set up an independent body to draft ways of limiting spending on election ads by third-party interest groups, including unions. He was worried that unfettered campaigning by such organizations had reached a point that it was unhealthy for democracy.

Essensa reiterated that concern in March in a report warning that third-party advertising had increased by more than 400 per cent since 2007, totalling almost $9 million for the 2014 provincial election. That wouldn’t be allowed at the federal level, where there are strict limits on what such groups can spend. Indeed, Ontario is the only jurisdiction in Canada that regulates third parties but doesn’t restrain their spending on political ads.

In the wake of Essensa’s report, Wynne promised to bring in new regulations limiting third-party ads during campaigns, but the same old rules remain in force. Now is the time to deliver on that pledge and ensure that no future government will be tainted by the suspicion of unfairly funding lavish third-party campaigns.

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Wynne would also do well to ban corporate and union election contributions, as both Toronto and the federal government have done. Had she already delivered on these reforms it would be harder to accuse her administration of issuing politically motivated payouts to the teachers’ unions.

In the interest of boosting public confidence in her government’s impartiality, and to serve democratic principle, Wynne should enact these reforms with all urgency.