Guy Giorno, ex-chief of staff to Mike Harris and Stephen Harper, testified at Queen’s Park Thursday, urging Ontario legislators to stop the flow of “dark money” into election campaigns.

The Progressive Conservatives chose Giorno as their witness to testify on Bill 201, the election finances statute law amendment act, for a special two-hour session. The general government committee will be holding consultations on the bill throughout the province this summer.

One of the Tories' major complaints about the bill is that it is allowing corporations and unions to pay their employees to volunteer on election campaigns. Giorno spoke at length about the “travesty” of that.

Election finance law in Ontario permits corporations and unions to send staff to "volunteer" on political campaigns at no charge to candidates while continuing to pay them, and doing so is not considered a campaign contribution. That's left unchanged in Bill 201, Giorno said.

Without laws that require the practice to be disclosed, no one knows precisely how often it occurs in Ontario or how much "dark money" is contributed to campaigns that way, but Giorno suggested the committee members would know it’s a common practice.

“We know why this loophole has not been closed,” Giorno said. “It has not been closed because all three parties benefit from it, because no party wants to stop receiving it.”

Giorno argued there “is no principled basis” in which the practice should be able to continue in Ontario, particularly when those volunteers and the companies who paid for them can turn around and lobby those politicians once they're in office. The practice is forbidden in federal politics and many provinces, with the exceptions of Alberta and PEI.

“Ontario is one of the few provinces that permit this travesty,” Giorno said.

Giorno also called for tighter restrictions on third-party advertising, warning the bill doesn't adequately prevent collusion or co-ordination between parties or candidates and third-parties. He made many of the same arguments that Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa presented to the committee on the issue.

While the bill contains a prohibition against “collusion” between third parties and parties or candidates, that’s too high a bar to ever prove, said Giorno.

“There are the sorts of ills Ontario should be addressing, not setting the bar so high no prosecutor will ever prove collusion,” he said.

Giorno suggested the threshold should be “co-ordination,” rather than “collusion,” which, following the example of U.S. federal law on political action committees, would prohibit parties, candidates and their agents from suggesting advertising to third parties, using the same advertising agencies, or allowing personnel to go between campaigns and third parties.

He noted that the provincial bill takes its language in this area from federal legislation, but where the federal legislation prohibits parties and candidates from colluding with third parties and vice-versa, the provincial bill only says third parties can't collude with candidates and parties, with no reciprocal prohibition on parties and candidates.

“There’s nothing (in Bill 201) that says a party can’t put up a front third-party to avoid the party spending limit,” he said.

Giorno also called for campaign spending limits to include travel, research and polling, which was removed from spending limits by the Harris government, arguing that would contribute to a level playing field in elections.

He also told the committee that even with stricter fundraising rules and the loss of union and corporate donations, they will still be able to raise enough money to run election campaigns, without per-vote subsidies, and showed fundraising data from the federal parties that showed they were able to raise more money after the subsidy was phased out.

Giorno addressed integrity issues that go beyond the bill. At the federal level, mixing fundraising with lobbying is restricted by policies, including the lobbyist code and the prime minister’s guidelines for ministers and parliamentary secretaries, he said.

“In Ontario, how is toxic, pernicious overlap between fundraising and lobbying addressed? Not at all,” Giorno said.

When he was Harper’s chief of staff he wrote the first draft of the Prime Minister’s guidelines for ministers and parliamentary secretaries on how not to mix lobbying and fundraising which, he noted, were adopted without changes by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he took office.

Those guidelines prohibit ministers from targeting stakeholders or lobbyists for donations, putting stakeholders on their political teams and talking about government business at fundraising events. None of that is prohibited in Ontario, Giorno said.

And all of that is central to the opposition parties' criticism of the Liberal government.

Pay-to-play, where corporations donate to a political party in hope of obtaining a government contract, isn’t prohibited by Canadian federal law, Giorno noted. He told the committee that he believes it should be. He walked the committee through several variations in U.S. state law that restrict or prohibit executives from making political donations.

The presentation seemed to be well-received by MPPs on the commission, including Liberal Lou Rinaldi, who called it “very thoughtful and very unbiased” and pronounced that Giorno was going back on his Christmas card list.

Former Harper chief of staff calls out loopholes in election financing bill

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