Blight

Joe Volpe - Shining Example

Under the last government, we had a new election law that was intended to help reform the unfair effect large corporations could leverage through large donations. That law limits corporate donations to $1000 and personal donations to $5400. The problem is that if a company wants to donate $108000, it could easily have its top executives, and those executives' family members (including 11 year old children) donate money. Of course that kind of collusion is illegal.

From the editorial below:
Under (the new election law), corporations are limited to giving leadership candidates $1,000. But there's nothing to stop, say, 10 directors of that firm, or their spouses, relatives, etc., from each contributing $5,400 personally, thus giving the candidate $54,000.

I don't know about you but I find it hard to believe that an 11 year old has the ability to make a decision to donate to any political party. If you aren't old enough to vote you shouldn't be able to make a donation either. At least Volpe is abiding by that, although it is not required by the letter of the law.

It still doesn't quite seem right though. And a member of the NDP has brought forth a formal complaint to have the donations investigated. In response to this, a member of Volpe's campaign team has threatened to sue.

From the CBC article below:
A spokesman for Volpe, Corey Hobbs, said all the donations were legitimate and threatened to sue over Pat Martin's allegations.

"Any statement made by Mr. Martin or repeated will be treated as slanderous and libellous and dealt with in the appropriate manner," Hobbs said, according to the Canadian Press.

Now I'm not accusing Joe Volpe of having orchestrated an illegal collusion with a large company in order to get a large donation spread out amongst many "individiual citizens". But I do think that he could do much better than simply return the money that was donated in the name of the legal minors. If I was him, I would be suspicious of the pattern of donations and ask for an investigation myself. If a company was trying to subvert my campaign by using loopholes in order to donate around the new law, I wouldn't want anything to do with that.

I'm surprised that he seems to take it in stride and publicly accepts that the donations from the twins and all the other executives' children and spouses were all made on an individually motivated basis. I think that the vote for him is going to suffer, and will speak louder than any blog commentary ever could.

There is one thing we can take solace in. And that is the fact that the laws requiring that all donations be transparent and accounted for have made this donation fiasco easily recognizable. Someone looked at the public record, saw that 6 people from the same family made the maximum donations, did some research, and found out that some of those donations came from children as young as 11 years old.

Relevant links:

• "Volpe Returns Kids' Donations" - Toronto Star
• "Liberals Refuse to Investigate Volpe Donations" - Globe and Mail
• "NDP Wants Probe of Donations to Volpe Campaign" - CBC
• "Volpe Returns Money from Young Donors" - CBC
• "Editorial: Ridiculing Volpe Misses the Point" - Toronto Sun
• "Volpe Web Page Spoof" - p2pnet
  

posted by Blight @ 4:03 PM