MONEY can't buy you happiness, they say.
But it doesn't hurt.
Nor can money buy you a seat on council.
But again, it helps.
After a ridiculous four-month wait, we finally get to see who bankrolled whom during our municipal elections last November.
My first reaction while poring through the financial disclosure statements was "Gadzooks! Darrell Mussatto spent $52,000?"
That's a long ton of money for a city this size. Mussatto spent fully 61 times as much as his nearest rival, Ron Polly, who shovelled out, wait for it, $850 - mostly of his own money. In truth, the results reflected this. Financially, that was Mike Tyson versus Woody Allen.
At the North Shore News' mayoralty debate, our candidates were asked what portion of their donations came from developers, unions and private individuals. It doesn't work out quite that easily because lots of non-developer businesses donate as well. But Mussatto guessed at about a third each, and he was somewhat close. By my crude figuring, Mussatto got about 26 per cent of his donations from unions, about 43 per cent from the development community, and about 31 per cent from private citizens and other businesses.
The next biggest spender was Coun. Craig Keating, who dropped $15,438. Both Keating and Mussatto seem to have found a real fundraising sweet spot, attracting donations from organized labour and developers and a grab-bag of businesses large and small.
Rounding out Team Mussatto's winners was Coun. Linda Buchanan, who raised $14,692 from largely the same sources.
Close behind was rookie/ veteran Don Bell, who had a short list of donors and spent $13,179, mostly of his own money and that of family members.
Coun. Guy Heywood scraped into the winners circle with a muscular $9,067, almost entirely his own money - and, oddly enough, $375 worth of "in-kind donation" from Tim Hortons. That's a lot of donuts.
Councillor-since-the-dawn-of-time Rod Clark accept four small personal donations but the rest of the $5,056 he spent was his own coin.
So money talks, nobody walks, right?
Well, most of the time.
Coun. Pam Bookham received a total of six donations, adding up to a modest $1,320. She apparently did the rest on credit, because she spent $7,299. I guess there's three years to get that paid off, but you've really got to fancy your chances of winning to spend that kind of money you don't have. Fun fact: Bookham got the princely sum of $20 from Richard and Patricia Walton. Maybe they only had a 10-spot each on them at the time.
But bucks don't always buy ballots. Far from it.
Among the expensively disappointed were Mussatto ally Cheryl Leia, who spent $11,149 and fell just short; Juliana Buitenhius, who spent $10,765 and finished ninth; Bob Fearnley who spent $6,645 to lose his seat, and Amanda Nichol, who was almost entirely bankrolled by labour to the tune of $4,700 and landed about 160 votes behind Buitenhius. Nor could $4,898 get Elizabeth Fodor into four-digit country.
You know who writes a lot of campaign cheques? Sunshine Taxis. I'm still trying to work that one out.
There was a much bigger focus on individual donations in the district's contest.
Putting aside his $20 splurge backing Bookham, Mayor Walton spent just over six grand to get his job back. It must be said that rival Margie Goodman got a respectable return on her investment in a pack of Post-it notes.
Coun. Robin Hicks spent $17,000 to place first - most of it his. Coun. Mike Little raised about half of that to come second. Coun. Doug MacKayDunn clocks in with a little more than $5,000 for third. Coun. Lisa Muri ran a remarkably efficient campaign with about $1,400 bucks, Coun. Roger Bassam was re-elected at the reasonable price of $5,400 -including a decent slug of business donations - and it only cost Alan Nixon $24,767 to hang on to sixth by 500 votes.
Yes, that's right. Nixon spent four times what his mayor did and almost half of what Mussatto did. Those big billboards in the SeaBus terminal don't come cheap.
I won't rattle off many more numbers, but suffice to say the top spenders - more than $5,000 for the school district were Cyndi Gerlach, who was elected, and Chris Dorais, who wasn't. Most everyone else spent in the $2,000 to $4,000 range.
Except one person: I have to save a special salute to Michael McGraw, who earned a place on the board of education having spent only $508.45 of his own money.
So what's the moral of this story? Money sure helps get the word out, and time spent fundraising is time not spent telling your story. Business and union backing is an advantage, to be sure, but not a decisive one. You can run a winning municipal campaign in North Vancouver for a few thousand dollars.
Or less - ask Mr. McGraw.
