What a difference a few dinners can make.

This week, after hosting her fourth annual Heritage Dinner, Premier Kathleen Wynne finally conceded that these sumptuous fundraiser suppers are leaving a bad taste.

Back in 2013, after her debut speech to the mostly business audience, I asked Wynne how she could defend donations from all those corporate and union supporters — illegal, by then, at the federal level.

The premier replied (with a straight face) that everyone should be encouraged to support democracy in their own way, whether licking envelopes or cutting cheques. And that she had no intention of reforming a system that worked perfectly well for Ontario.

Now, all these years (and newspaper stories) later, she is grudgingly promising to follow the federal lead.

“As social mores change and public expectations change and different models are used . . . I think that we need to look at what changes we need to make,” Wynne told me after wrapping up this year’s speech.

“But again I will, I will stand by what I said in 2013 — which is, political parties need money in order to be able to operate. And people do take part in different ways.”

But why, exactly, do different jurisdictions legislate campaign financing in such dramatically different ways? And how did Ottawa find the political will to act, while Ontario remained frozen in time, relying on cabinet ministers to meet annual targets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as detailed by the Star earlier this week?

Many readers remain incredulous every time I write that the ban on corporate and union donations was brought in by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. It’s true that his Liberal predecessor, Jean Chrétien paved the way by dramatically lowering the contribution limits in the wake of federal spending scandals in Quebec, but Harper finished the job by eliminating them entirely in 2006.

With his party’s fundraising apparatus finely tuned, and his membership base highly motivated, Harper calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that he could hobble his Liberal rivals by suddenly cutting their links to the corporate contributions they’d long relied on. Perhaps Harper did the right thing for the wrong reasons, but he ultimately did a good thing for Canadian democracy.

In his landmark study of campaign funding in Ontario from 2004 to 2011, York University political scientist Robert MacDermid found that Ontario’s three major parties raised more than $162 million, with nearly 40 per cent coming from corporations and another 5 per cent from unions. The Liberals raised a disproportionate 50 per cent of their $72 million from corporations — mostly developers and the wider development industry, followed by big banks and energy firms.

In 2007, Ontario responded to concerns about “third parties” — special interest groups that try to influence elections — by requiring full disclosure of their spending, but without imposing any spending caps, as Ottawa did. That gave free rein to the infamous Working Families coalition of unions to spend millions of dollars in subsequent elections attacking the Progressive Conservatives as anti-labour.

Cabinet sources who must deal with corporate donors says their gravest concern is the influence of property developers, notably those seeking changes to the boundaries of the Green Belt or making inappropriate demands at both the provincial and municipal levels. An earlier study by MacDermid showed that developers and related donors funded 43 per cent of 2006 election in the regions of Halton, Peel, York and Durham.

“The same sorts of patterns are always there,” he said in an interview, adding that reforms to date have been “pretty grudging and pretty minimalistic.”

Government sources say the Liberals are now looking at updating municipal campaign financing, but are hamstrung by the hypocrisy of ordering tighter rules at the urban level before the provincial free-for-all is dealt with.

Significantly, however, the City of Toronto acted on its own in 2009 to cut off corporate donations — and it did so cold turkey, undermining Wynne’s argument that Ontario needs to gently phase in any reforms to avoid any sudden disruptions to political parties. Moreover, the province has already had 10 years’ advance notice to prepare for change and wean itself from corporate money after getting the heads up from those federal reforms in 2006.

Nowadays, the lavish Heritage Dinner put on by the Ontario Liberals has no parallel in the more streamlined and modernized federal party. Many former provincial staff who have migrated to Ottawa now work in a more democratized federal fundraising machine that seeks a greater number of smaller donations, rather than relying on the same old corporate fat cats that pay the Ontario party’s way.

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Another way to level the playing field, beyond banning corporate and union donations, would be to reduce the overall spending limits for general elections. The notion that all parties require ever-increasing sums for market research and advertising is a false premise, perpetrated by high-priced consultants and high-powered campaign managers.

Our elections can still be a contest of ideas, and a competition between leaders, not just a fight to the finish among fundraisers who can then outspend one another. In democracy, as in life, sometimes less is more.

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