The District of North Vancouver supports greater transparency but how they will achieve that remains a tad opaque.
On Monday evening council voted unanimously to have district staff report back on a to-be-determined policy regarding campaign donations. The vote followed a motion from Coun. Jim Hanson asking councillors to either refuse donations from developers, as well as the employees and family members of developers, or to recuse themselves from votes that could enrich those developers.
While there is a need to close loopholes around campaign contributions, Mayor Mike Little suggested the matter may need to be left to the provincial government.
“We’re going to find in this process we’re very limited in what we can make legally binding,” he said.
Coun. Jordan Back also expressed misgivings about Hanson’s motion.
“I do have an issue with the way it’s targeting the development industry specifically,” he said. “As we’ve learned most recently from the pigeon prohibition . . . there are varying levels of understanding around conflict of interest.”
It’s critical to do away with both conflict of interest and the appearance of conflict of interest, Hanson maintained.
“Public confidence is undermined if the public perceives there to be any kind of a conflict,” he said.
Hanson previously advanced the motion in June 2019 in which he singled out urbanist-oriented Building Bridges Electors Society for taking donations from several developers. Hanson struck a different tone on Monday, emphasizing that he wasn’t targeting any particular councillor.
“That applies to all of us,” he said, explaining he wanted rules to be clear prior to the 2022 municipal election.
Discussing the focus of his motion, Hanson noted that his spouse is part of the Blueridge Neighbourhood Association and that members of that group have donated to his campaign. However, the donation must result in financial gain for the applicant, he said.
Coun. Mathew Bond differed.
“You don’t necessarily have to be an applicant on a proposal to be a potential financial beneficiary,” he said.
Bond previously noted that Hanson gave small campaign donations to Mayor Little as well as three councillors. Donating to another candidate’s campaign is a loophole, Bond said, noting that he faced tighter rules while on the Building Bridges slate.
“The rules around electoral organization donations are actually a lot stricter than the rules of . . . informal slates.”
Donating to another candidate is often a “nice, humanly gesture,” Little said.
Little also differed with Coun. Megan Curren on the issue of campaign signs, with Curren suggesting a ban on all election signs on public property.
Hanson’s motion represents a “very small step” in the march to reform a very flawed system, Curren said.
“There’s a lot of corporate influence over public policy that needs to be addressed,” she said.
The staff report is expected to be part of a larger discussion about conflict of interest including recommendations from the independent review of the district’s pigeon ban.
