The Alberta Tories certainly seem to believe that they've been vindicated in the matter of the rather large Daryl Katz donation.
And frankly, maybe they have been.
Last year, in the dying days of the election campaign, the Tories receiving a cheque from the billionaire Edmonton Oilers owner for a whopping $430-thousand. But because Alberta has an election year donation limit of $30-thousand, the donation was split up between Katz's business, family members, and business associates.
Elections Alberta investigated, and today released their findings. In a nutshell, both the donor and the recipient have been cleared of any wrongdoing, An Elections Alberta spokesman said that the other individuals paid the money back to Katz, and that splitting up of bulk donations is not uncommon in Alberta.
There was one donation found to be illegal - $25-thousand from Katz associate Paul Marcaccio has been returned because it turns out he didn't have legal residency status in Alberta. Curiosly, though, there was no problem with the donation from Paul Marcaccio Professional Corporation.
That just highlights some of the absurdity of this all. If it's so easy to circumvent Alberta's donation limits, why bother having limits? Therefore, it should really not surprise us that the donor and the recipients of the donation have been cleared. It really isn't too hard to make the rules fit your donation.
The real issue here is that it took so long for us to find out about this donation. The Tories did not disclose any of this before the election, and even after the election, they disclosed some donations, but not this one.
Transparency would go a lot further than these useless rules. If parties were forced to disclose all donations during a campaign on a weekly basis, that might have changed this situation dramatically. Would Katz have donated such a large sum of money under those conditions? Would the Tories have accepted? Maybe. But at least voters would know and be able to judge them accordingly.
The Tories may be proud to have been vindicated, but they were ashamed enough of this donation that they kept it hidden at the time.
That is far more telling than anything we learned today.
You can hear the Premier's comments on the matter here (at the 30:45 mark). She doesn't really address the matter of why they were silent about the donation for so long, nor does she seem to find anything wrong with the rules:
Elections Alberta investigated, and today released their findings. In a nutshell, both the donor and the recipient have been cleared of any wrongdoing, An Elections Alberta spokesman said that the other individuals paid the money back to Katz, and that splitting up of bulk donations is not uncommon in Alberta.
There was one donation found to be illegal - $25-thousand from Katz associate Paul Marcaccio has been returned because it turns out he didn't have legal residency status in Alberta. Curiosly, though, there was no problem with the donation from Paul Marcaccio Professional Corporation.
That just highlights some of the absurdity of this all. If it's so easy to circumvent Alberta's donation limits, why bother having limits? Therefore, it should really not surprise us that the donor and the recipients of the donation have been cleared. It really isn't too hard to make the rules fit your donation.
The real issue here is that it took so long for us to find out about this donation. The Tories did not disclose any of this before the election, and even after the election, they disclosed some donations, but not this one.
Transparency would go a lot further than these useless rules. If parties were forced to disclose all donations during a campaign on a weekly basis, that might have changed this situation dramatically. Would Katz have donated such a large sum of money under those conditions? Would the Tories have accepted? Maybe. But at least voters would know and be able to judge them accordingly.
The Tories may be proud to have been vindicated, but they were ashamed enough of this donation that they kept it hidden at the time.
That is far more telling than anything we learned today.
You can hear the Premier's comments on the matter here (at the 30:45 mark). She doesn't really address the matter of why they were silent about the donation for so long, nor does she seem to find anything wrong with the rules:
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