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Jack Knox: How new campaign-spending limits change the local political landscape

Gary Beyer pulled out of the Victoria mayoral race Thursday. Odds are pretty good that you didn’t know he was in.
Photo - generic cash money
New spending rules for the 2018 election: No more commercial and corporate donations. No more money from unions or other organizations, either. No individual may give more than $1,200 to a candidate.

Jack Knox mugshot genericGary Beyer pulled out of the Victoria mayoral race Thursday.

Odds are pretty good that you didn’t know he was in.

Such is the reality for political outsiders, particularly in a saturated market like Victoria where the ballot tends to read like a phone book.

Beyer announced four months ago that he would take on Lisa Helps in the Oct. 20 election. This week the business owner reversed course, citing the very reason he joined the race in the first place: He doesn’t want her re-elected.

“Since I announced my candidacy … other credible candidates have stepped forward to join the race for mayor,” he stated in a message on his website. “The last thing I want to do is to split the vote of the opposition in such a way that Mayor Helps ends up getting re-elected with only a small plurality of votes.” He urged the remaining seven challengers (and those still considering entering the mayoral race) to think the same way.

The truth is that newcomers like Beyer have a hard time getting noticed, let alone elected. When John Tory defeated Doug Ford and Olivia Chow for the Toronto mayoralty, few knew of the other 62 candidates who split three per cent of the vote.

In some ways it’s even harder to get traction around Greater Victoria. For this isn’t Calgary, with a single, 15-member council in a city of 1.2 million. Nor is it Toronto, pop. three million, where now-premier Ford just cut the number of councillors on the city’s “bloated” governing body from 44 to 25.

No, this is Dysfunction-By-The-Sea, pop. 367,000, where in 2014 a total of 191 candidates ran for the 91 jobs on the 13 councils from Sidney to Sooke. The witness protection program doesn’t offer as much anonymity as a Greater Victoria election campaign. Note that when Helps eked out an 89-vote win over Dean Fortin in 2014, he was one of just nine incumbents toppled in the entire region.

Compounding the challenge for newbies this year are B.C.’s new campaign financing rules for local elections.

In the past, the lack of limits allowed well-heeled (or well-supported) but little-known candidates to spend their way into the public consciousness. Not any longer. Candidates in the Oct. 20 vote must not only abide by a spending ceiling, but live with restrictions on who may contribute how much.

No more commercial and corporate donations. No more money from unions or other organizations, either. No individual may give more than $1,200 to a candidate. Candidates are even limited on how much of their own money they may spend on their campaigns: $2,400.

New campaign spending limits vary by population and the type of office being sought. In the capital region, they range from a low of $5,000 for council candidates and $10,000 for mayoral hopefuls in Metchosin and Highlands to a high of $35,742 for council spots and $70,475 for would-be mayors in Saanich.

In July, the TC’s Bill Cleverley laid out examples of how the new rules would have affected candidates in the 2014 election. For example, all of the top contenders in the last Victoria mayoral race blew past the $54,122 spending limit faced by candidates this time. Fortin spent $128,636 on his unsuccessful re-election run. Third-place finisher Ida Chong spent $108,120, with $80,985 of that coming from corporations. Helps spent $88,564, half of it from commercial and corporate donors, none of whom will be allowed to contribute now.

Other local races were less of a nuclear arms race, though candidates still have to worry about where their money comes from. Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell spent $52,838, well under this year’s Saanich ceiling, but $14,600 of that came in now-verboten corporate donations. Another $21,000 came out of his own pocket, well above the new $2,400 limit.

Overall, the new rules are a good leveller of the playing field — but they still leave the question of how, in a sea of candidates, the unknowns are supposed to bob to the surface.

One answer is the emergence of slates. They have long existed, informally or formally, with like-minded — or at least friendly — candidates pooling resources on bulk mailings or brochures to keep costs down, but more recently they have popped up as an easy indicator of candidates’ leanings. In Victoria, the New Council slate opposes the current regime, while Together Victoria leans left. Atwell’s United for Saanich slate includes oneincumbent councillor and three newcomers.

Running on a ticket with an incumbent can be a boost for a newcomer — or a double-edged sword. When the incumbent goes down in flames, the others tend to get burned, too. Former Saanich mayor Frank Leonard says those who ran with him did well over the years, right up until 2014 when he lost.

As for other advice to outsiders? Use how others feel about you to gauge your chances of success. Leonard says he never spent his own money on his campaigns, figuring that if he couldn’t attract supporters, he had no business running.

“If you’ve got a message and you’ve got people who believe in you, they will rally to your side,” Leonard says.

“If you’re not attracting donors and you’re not attracting volunteers, then you might want to look in the mirror.”