Ontario Liberals restrict spending on leadership race

And: WTO undermines Ontario-first buying in Green Energy plan.

from Inside Queen's Park, Vol 25, No 25  

Money: the mother's milk of politics

The Ontario Liberal Party (OLP) has set a ceiling of $500K for leadership contributions and further requires each candidate to remit to the party 25 percent of the total donated to their campaigns.  So if campaign donations reach the allowable ceiling of $3.0M, $750K would be clawed back by the party, leaving $2.25M for the campaigns.  And in addition, the OLP will collect an entry fee of $50K from each candidate.  Whatever their detractors say about the party’s "tax-and-spend" orientation when it comes to the provincial budget, the OLP does not shrink from taxing its own party leadership candidates.

IQP thought it worth comparing the current half-million dollar donation limit to that applied in the previous Ontario LIB leadership contest, in 1996. Sadly, our inquiries of the party and calls to sundry Liberal officers and activists yielded a welter of incompatible responses — $250K; $350K; no limit.  (As one source noted, it is especially difficult to extract information from records sloshing around on the beginning edge of the Internet.)

Having to take our pick, we note that the income and expense filings with Elections Ontario for the 1996 Liberal leadership show donations for four of the six listed were clustered around $250K, only one of which exceeded that sum.

Leadership contests held when a party is in opposition attract smaller crowds at lower prices.  The Liberals cashed in very profitably after the 2003 formation of the McGuinty government but they have fretted unhappily of late at the disinclination of stakeholders and consultants to cut cheques as generously as they had done before the October 2011 slump into minority territory.

(There was certainly not much sign of donor fatigue at the recent Celebration Dinner 2012: A Tribute to Greg Sorbara. The consultant crowd and stakeholders were a bit less present than in major fundraising events, but several hundred Liberal stalwarts plus some of the rest of us forked over $750 a seat.)

We don’t yet know how much will be donated in the 2012-13 contest or whether it will cover campaign spending.  Elections Ontario postings of contributions to and expenditures by the six candidates who contested the 1996 race were uniformly though not hugely in the red.  Donations totalled $1.1M and aggregate expenses were $1.3M.  (There were actually seven candidates but party activist Greg Kells did not file the required financial return.)

Dwight Duncan, or perhaps his CFO, deserves special mention for keeping his 1996 expenses of $249K
within $700 of his campaign contributions of $248K.  Splendid credentials for a Finance minister.

WTO strikes down Ontario-first renewable energy buying program.

The World Trade Organization decision striking down the preferences for Ontario producers of solar panels and wind turbines that are central to Ontario’s Green Economy industrial strategy comes at an awkward time for the McGuinty government for two reasons.  (And it‘s a pain to try to get information from the WTO, which doesn’t use sensible disclosure protocols.)

First, the decision further undercuts the financial basis for the production of renewable energy, in pursuit of which wind farms sprouted all over south western Ontario, reminding voters that they had been imposed over local objections.  And what’s left of the government’s connected programs to create industrial employment, produce affordable electricity and clean the air?  And second, it appears that in both crucial arenas the McGuinty strategy of abandoning negotiated compensation in favour of legislative imposition is going down to judicial  or — if you prefer — quasi-judicial defeat.