Why Politicians May not Want You to Use this Database

For $300, the invitation promised, guests would enjoy dinner aboard a chartered yacht, as well as “exclusive” access to Premier Darrell Pasloski and two of his ministers. A “Yukon Party ‘Party’”— except that the cruise wound its way around Burrard Inlet, near Vancouver.

That was back in 2014. But there have been fundraisers at similar gatherings in Vancouver every year since. In fact, between 2006 and 2016 nearly half of the party’s named donations (contributions above $250) came from supporters outside Yukon.

The Yukon Liberals, now in power, also bring in about one-third of their named donations from outside the territory. In 2016, Copper North Mining donated $50,000 — the largest donation in the past decade, from a company based in B.C.

Most Canadians live hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres from the territory, which itself has a population under 38,000. But Yukon makes up almost five per cent of the country's land mass, and climate change there has been so explicit scientists recently reported a glacial river had reversed its course to flow south instead of north.

At the same time, the region is ripe for mineral exploration. Copper mining alone was worth just over $200 million in 2016, according to preliminary data released by the territory. To spur further corporate investment, more than $360 million in joint federal and territorial funding was announced last fall, mainly to improve roads.

All of this makes the remote territory a bellweather for accountable government: where politicians raise money beyond their ridings, whose interests will they serve? Outrage over donations with even a “reasonable perception” of conflict of interest have sparked a nationwide crackdown on political financing in the last few years. But the revelations that drove this reform are only part of the story, because they cover only part of our vast and rapidly changing country.

We Need You Data is critical for democracy. So are readers who can make sense of the details. If you see material you think warrants investigation, send us an email here.

There is no tracking of donations made on a national scale. There are no consistent rules — or penalties — for political financing across Canada. Spending limits, out-of-province and foreign gifts, money from unions and corporations, donations from numbered companies: in some places anything goes, in others regulations are rarely enforced.

The Follow the Money project is an effort to address these gaps, and hold politicians to account for gifts large and small. Compiled from more than six million records that add up to more than $2 billion, it is Canada’s first centralized, searchable database of donations made at both the federal level and in all 13 provinces and territories. We hope engaged citizens, as well as other media outlets, will use this information to demand transparency across the country.

That transparency is not only important for the kinds of cheques that make headlines. More than 1.5 million donations in the Follow the Money database are for gifts between $250 and $1,000. More than 350,000 are for contributions between $1,000 and $3,000. All of these are well below donation caps in much of the country, but even small gifts can add up to significant political influence.

The most egregious — illegal — example is funnelling, or conduit contributions, where companies have employees make donations under their own names and then reimburse them. In 2016, SNC-Lavalin forfeited almost $118,000 in donations following an investigation by Elections Canada. In 2013, Conservative cabinet minister Peter Penashue resigned when receipts he had issued for individual donations ranging from $550 to $1,100 were tied to a St. John’s construction company. Donations from businesses have been banned at the federal level since 2004.

Special interests may also fly under the radar at fundraisers — particularly those hosted by lobbyists known as “bundlers,” who bring together dozens, sometimes hundreds, of guests each paying the accepted donation limit for tickets. The lobbying commissioner has launched a number of investigations into Liberal fundraisers, including two held for Justin Trudeau: a 2014 fundraiser by Clearwater Seafoods co-founder Mickey MacDonald where approximately 75 people paid about $1,000 each to attend, and an event hosted by the late chairman of Apotex Barry Sherman in 2015. That inquiry was dropped when he died, although Democracy Watch has filed a lawsuit challenging that decision.

Trudeau insists his policy decisions are "based on what is right for Canadians and not on what an individual at a fundraiser might say.” Politics may not be discussed at all. But those who pay to rub shoulders with politicians can subtly shape the way they see critical issues. As former U.S. president Barack Obama admits in his book The Audacity of Hope, "I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways.”

Although the guests at his fundraisers demanded only the chance to share their opinions, Obama writes, they reflected the perspectives of their class, of those who can write $2,000 cheques to candidates: “They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital."

Not all political influence is subtle, of course. In British Columbia, research by Dermod Travis of Integrity B.C. showed that 60 per cent of the nearly $120 million raised by the B.C. Liberal Party between 2005 and 2016 came from less than 200 donors — and that 177 of those donors were awarded $74.4 million in government transfers and $3.5 billion in government supplier payments.

Before Ontario’s recent ban on union funding, the Follow the Money database shows that the top three donors in the province — to the tune of more than $3 million between 2007 and 2016 — were the United Steelworkers, the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing, Pipefitting and Sprinkler Fitting Industry and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

All of these donations are public. At both the federal and provincial level, political parties are required to disclose who gives them money and how much. What varies is how these records are shared. In nine out of 13 provinces and territories, donation records are maintained in PDFs separated by party or by year. This makes even simple queries — for example how much MLAs have donated to their own party over a number of years — remarkably difficult.

“Putting data for every province and territory in one place provides a lot of potential for uncovering wrongdoing,” says Louis Massicotte, a political science professor at Université Laval. “You can see who is donating in a province they don’t live (in), who the biggest donors are across Canada, and who is making big donations and then getting favourable government policy. When records were digitized in Quebec, it certainly helped uncover a lot of embarrassing facts.”

Although foreign donations are illegal at the federal level and in most provinces and territories, for example, the Follow the Money database lists 5,000 donations associated with out-of-country addresses.

Gifts may be modest: Between 2013 and 2015, the Bank of China, the fourth largest bank in the world, donated $2,435 to the Alberta PCs; Malaysia’s Progress Energy donated $16,750 to the B.C. Liberals. But the flow of even small sums from state-backed enterprises to Canadian politics is troubling to many observers.

“Canada’s democracy is built on the principle of one person, one vote,” says Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who led Elections Canada from 1990 to 2007. “If you don’t live in Canada, you have no business trying to influence our elections.”

Alberta has banned foreign donations since the Bank of China made its contribution. B.C. included a ban on money outside Canada in its recent campaign financing reforms.

Saskatchewan, however, still allows foreign donations. Although it does not record addresses for donors, a few contributions stand out: Between 2012 and 2015, Texas-based Spectra Energy donated approximately $5,000 to the Saskatchewan Party; Evraz, a U.K. steel company with most of its operations in Russia, donated close to $4,000 to the Saskatchewan NDP between 2010 and 2014.

Four other jurisdictions in Canada also continue to accept foreign donations: the Yukon, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick. And it’s small regions that are of particular concern, says Jean-Marc Hamel, another former chief of Elections Canada, from 1966 to 1990.

An out-of-country gift could “almost buy the election” in a place like Yukon, says Hamel. “One $50,000 or $100,000 donation represents a huge portion of money spent in smaller jurisdictions.”

The $50,000 single donation that Copper North Mining gave the Yukon Liberal Party in 2016 represented more than a fifth of all the money they raised that year — $233,243. Yukon Premier Sandy Silver says such donations won't affect how his government allocates funds, but the infrastructure money jointly announced by the territory and the federal government will directly impact the Dawson range, where Copper North Mining, as well as a number of other mining companies who have given large sums to the Yukon Liberals, hope to grow operations.

The Follow the Money database also shows the outsize influence individuals may have — both in their own regions and well beyond them. Between donations made under his own name, via the numbered companies 328727 Alberta Ltd. and 631385 Alberta Ltd., and from Canadian Natural Resources while he served as its chairman, Allan Markin was behind almost $500,000 in donations to the B.C. Liberal party between 2005 and 2011 and more than $100,000 in support for the Saskatchewan Party between 2011 and 2014.

All of these donations are perfectly legal. But as Duff Conacher, co-founder of the non-partisan group Democracy Watch says, “Big donations from multiple corporations all controlled by the same person, especially donations from numbered companies which are basically anonymous donations, breeds a culture of corruption and dependency. Politicians know whose favour they need to curry, but the public can’t tell who is providing the funding.”

Rawlco Radio does not hide its ties to the Saskatchewan Party. Over a decade, the family-owned media company made 17 donations adding up to more than $120,000. The president of the company, Gord Rawlinson, has also donated small amounts, about $5,000, on two occasions. But the company’s full support is not clear unless you count $67,000 in contributions from a numbered company called 565509 Saskatchewan Ltd. — it lists the same address as Rawlco Radio, and is owned by Doug Rawlinson, Gord's brother and a senior executive at Rawlco. Taken together, these donations make Rawlco one of the biggest contributors to the Saskatchewan Party. Rawlco runs a number of stations in the province, including two news-talk channels that cover provincial politics.

Enforcement of the rules that do exist for campaign financing is also inconsistent across the country. This may be because elections agencies are under-resourced. As Kingsley argues, “Politicians are the ones controlling how big elections agencies are and politicians are the ones who get investigated if someone donates too much money, so they have lots of incentives to keep staff levels low.”

In New Brunswick, for example, elections officials left the Progressive Conservative party itself to look into a CBC report alleging over-donations by J.D. Irving Ltd.. The company ultimately returned a small over-payment. But while other elections agencies regularly level fines (and on occasion have barred candidates who have accepted donations above the legal limit from future campaigns) there were no further consequences for the PCs.

Yet the Follow the Money database indicates that 2014 was just one of 12 occasions Irving companies have exceeded the province's donation cap between 2003 and 2016. In 2011, donations from J.D. Irving Ltd. and two subsidiaries, Irving Group Moncton and Irving Personal Care Ltd, added up to $6,471.30 for the PCs. In 2016, J.D. Irving Ltd. and Irving Oil Ltd. donated a combined total of more than $10,000 to the ruling Liberals.

Mary Keith, vice-president of communications at J.D. Irving Ltd., says none of these companies are "in any way affiliated." But the companies shared owners until at least 2007, when it was first reported that the principals, J.K., Arthur and Jack, were splitting up the business — and Irving companies donated more than the $6,000 cap to the PCs every year between 2003 and 2005.

Keith said some of these records are also incorrect (in 2003, for example, she said the company did not give the PCs $6,915.97) but the company is launching an internal review of all their donations, and has requested records of contributions from the PC Party of New Brunswick. Elections New Brunswick, meanwhile, still maintains the agency has never received complaints about the Irving companies (despite the fact that the communications director for Elections New Brunswick is quoted in the 2014 CBC article) and that investigating any improper contributions would not be "a priority issue" as the agency prepares for a September election.

Better records can help catch over-donations, the flow of money between jurisdictions and many other practices that, whatever their intentions, might be perceived as conflicts of interest. But the best database is no substitute for the political will to keep watch and fix the system when it breaks.

Elections Quebec identified $12.8 million in illegal donations between 2006 and 2011. But this was only possible, the chief electoral officer noted in his report on the findings, because of reforms adopted by the National Assembly and partnership with the province’s revenue agency, following the recommendations of the Charbonneau Commission.

Donation Laws in Canada

The rules for political financing vary — sometimes wildly — between regions and levels of government. Below is a broad overview of regulations at the federal, provincial and territorial levels for the purpose of comparison. The "Maximum Annual Donation" amounts are the limits on donations to each political party and its riding associations in a non-election year.