Edward Keenan: Want to check how much of your money councillors spent on their last election campaign? Good luck
, this “no invoices required” provision was buried in the long “comments” text rather than called out in the executive summary among the major changes recommended. Fletcher says basic transparency requires changing it back. It’s hard to disagree.
It is a shortcoming of our municipal integrity processes to begin with that the only mechanism for outside scrutiny of campaign expenses and revenues is citizen complaints. There’s no team of accountants at city hall or Elections Ontario or the police force who is going through campaign filings looking for fraud. The statements are posted on the city’s website, and they sit there ignored unless some private citizen — by default almost always a political opponent — raises a fuss.
This citizen enforcement process is an unfortunate quirk of so many city ethics laws, as we all learned back when Rob Ford became subject to conflict-of-interest litigation launched by a citizen complaint. It is as if penalties in a hockey game had to be called by fans of the opposing team, and only then reviewed by a referee who had not been watching the game up until that point. It builds partisanship right into the process.
As Fletcher and Coun. Shelley Carroll pointed out in a recent executive committee meeting, this might inadvertently make it more likely that citizens have to default to launching invasive and expensive audits, since that process is now the only way anyone is going to get to see the proof.
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