Alberta companies, many involved in the oil and gas sector, contributed more than $2 million to Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party between 2006 and 2015.

Collectively, out-of-province corporate donations make up one-quarter of all recent corporate donations.

“No-one really dug into why he was actually there,” Kinney says. “It was a fundraising trip. Brad Wall can come to Alberta, talk directly to the oil and gas community and raise millions of dollars.”

New figures released by the Petroleum Services Association of Canada anticipate Saskatchewan will drill more oil and gas wells in 2017 than any other province.

No Cap on Corporate and Union, Out-of-Province Donations in Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan’s campaign finance laws are regarded as some of the worst in Canada.

There isn’t any cap on contributions, or restrictions on corporate and union donations. In addition, out-of-province contributions — banned in Alberta in 1977 under Peter Lougheed — are sanctioned, as are out-of-country donations so long as the company has a Canadian presence of some kind.

“Obviously the fear is that corporations will use contributions to buy favourable policies or legislation, or at least buy access to these leaders,” says Simon Enoch, director of the Saskatchewan Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

The CCPA’s Saskatchewan office published a report in December 2012 that arrived at many of the same conclusions as the Progress Alberta findings: contributions overwhelmingly funnel to the Saskatchewan Party and most out-of-province corporation donations come from Alberta (between 2008 and 2010, contributions from Alberta accounted for 42 per cent of the party’s top donations).

”The oil industry looms large as key contributors to the Sask Party,” Enoch says.

Many Alberta-based oil and gas companies have significant investments in Saskatchewan oil plays, with potential interests in reducing obligations around environmental assessments and “playing” royalty regimes off each other to keep rates as low as possible.

‘We Can All Agree That They Expect Something In Return For These Really Large Cash Donations’

Enoch said the last time the province had a serious conversation about campaign finance reform was during Erin Weir’s run for leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP, which featured a policy proposal to ban all corporate and union donations.

A corporate lobbyist registry was launched in August, which is “pretty rudimentary and certainly not as good as some other provinces, but at least we have a picture of who’s meeting with the government and why.”

But there’s still no cap on donations, unlike in Alberta which sports limits of $15,000 in non-election years and $30,000 in election years. That means that in Saskatchewan politics, individuals, corporations and unions can donate as much as desired. Oddly enough, that’s resulted in sizable donations from Saskatchewan-based crown corporations, government agencies, municipalities, health regions and school boards.

Enoch’s quick to clarify that there’s no clear evidence of a “pay to play” relationship, but that we can “all agree that they expect something in return for these really large cash donations that they’re making.”

Wall Says He Has No Interest in Changing Election Finance Laws

That’s where a ban on corporate and union donations could come in. The very first bill the Alberta NDP passed, introduced in June 2015, implemented such a measure, although there were concerns of loopholes that allowed for corporations and unions to provide loan guarantees and donate the paid time of employees to ‘volunteer’ for political parties.

However, Wall told CBC News he has no interest in changing campaign financing laws. NDP interim leader Trent Wotherspoon has indicated that his party wants to see a ban on corporate and union donations.

A similar situation has taken shape in B.C. where the ruling BC Liberals have refused to update the province’s scant political donation laws. Both the B.C. Green Party and the provincial NDP have promised to overturn or review B.C.’s campaign finance laws if elected in the spring 2017 race.

“I think there’s an opportunity for opposition politicians as well as the general public in Saskatchewan to rise up and say that this is unacceptable and unneeded and that people in Saskatchewan should be the only ones who can donate to Saskatchewan politics,” Kinney concludes.

Image: Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall. Photo: Canada 2020 via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Perhaps it’s the charming student activist, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who donated his $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award to the pipeline fight, or perhaps it was the scandalous documents leaked last week that showed pipeline company TransCanada has teamed up with one of the world’s most powerful PR firms, Edelman, to manipulate public opinion surrounding the Energy East pipeline.

Or maybe it’s the fact that at least two-thirds of Quebecers oppose the construction of a 4600km pipeline that will carry 1.1 million barrels of oilsands crude through their province (and five others) for export. Maybe onlookers, disturbed by the 50 arrests on Burnaby Mountain, have felt compelled to prevent a similar situation from erupting east of Alberta.

Who knows?

But what is becoming clear is the firestorm of public opposition that is committing to the fight against Energy East. Twelve hours after Nadeau-Dubois announced his $25,000 donation on the Radio-Canada talk show Tout le monde en parle on Sunday donations surpassed $140,000.

“If Quebec blocks this project, we will do a service to ourselves and future generations, but we also need to send a clear signal that we are prepared to contribute the global fight against climate change,” the Montreal Gazette reported him saying.

As of Tuesday, donations have surpassed $300,000.

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada says the “unprecedented outpouring of support shows the breadth and depth of opposition in Quebec to this pipeline.”

He adds it also shows the level of opposition to “the broader pro-oil, anti-environmental agenda of the federal government.”

“It shows that a lot of people want to be a part of a movement that makes the world a better, fairer and greener place, and don’t accept that we have to accept the oil industry’s false choice between environment and economy,” Stewart told DeSmog.

Council of Canadians map of Energy East pipeline route.

Mark Calzavera, regional director for Ontario, Quebec and Nunavut with the Council of Canadians, says the outpouring of support “shows very clearly that people are concerned about Energy East and that opposition is growing.”

He added people are more interested in information about the pipeline and in challenging the information that is currently available.  

“In no way is [Energy East] a nation-building pipeline,” he said. “It’s an export pipeline.”

“It’s taking the product in its rawest form that it can be shipped in, which is diluted bitumen, and they are exporting it along with any the jobs that go with refining it.”

The people of Canada have for years now been saying they’re concerned about climate change and are looking for leadership on climate change from their governments and we haven’t seen it so people are taking matters into their own hands. These pipeline projects – that lead to greater emissions – they’re opposing them personally.”

Nadeau-Dubois told CBC Daybreak Monday that Quebec is in a “serious situation.”

“We have a very, very important choice to make around that very controversial Energy East TransCanada pipeline,” he said.

Stewart said the ‘nation-building pipeline’ narrative deployed by TransCanada is now turning against the company and the Energy East proposal.

“The only nation that Energy East is building is a nation of resistance. TransCanada’s attempt to trick people and buy support for their project has backfired, and now people want to be a part of the alternative,” he said.

Image Credit: Environmental Defence Canada via Flickr

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Prior to the release of the Canada Revenue Agency’s 2003 guidelines on charities and political activities, individuals from Canada’s voluntary sector expressed the belief that Canada’s policy should look a lot more like England’s.

The rule that says Canadian charities must limit political activities to 10 percent of their time and resources should be scrapped, they said, and a Canadian charitable commission, similar to that which exists in the UK, should be set-up to regulate the sector.

Charitable organizations in England have historically enjoyed both government support and the legal right to speak out, and the Third Sector (voluntary sector) has a track record of making social change. The past decade, though, has been one of massive change for law and policy on charity in England. In some respects, Canada does seem to be taking some cues from England when it comes to the voluntary sector, but probably not in the way those who asked for it back in 2003 had hoped.

As Australian legal scholars Kerry O’Halloran and Myles McGregor-Lowndes have written, philanthropic activism was a fact of life in Victorian England.

[view:in_this_series=block_1] The children’s charity, Dr. Barnardo’s, which remains in operation today, led protests against the conditions of young children forced to work as chimney sweeps. An organization known as the Infant Life Protection Society provided services for babies born into workhouses, while simultaneously campaigning for an act forcing people taking in infants for more than 24 hours to report them, and report deaths of such infants within 24 hours. This didn’t change until the 1917 case, Bowman v. Secular Society, when it was deemed that: A trust for the attainment of political objects has always been held invalid… the law has no way of judging whether a proposed change in the law will or will not be for the public benefit…

In the UK, this decision translated into the policy that charities can undertake campaigning activities and political actions aimed at securing, opposing, or changing the law or policy or decisions by government so long as the purpose of those activities further the charitable purpose for which the organization exists. So, when, in 2012, the organization Save the Children called on the British government to stick to its targets on child poverty as part of a campaign to help children in the UK, the organization was well within its established charitable rights. Save The Children was attacked by Conservative MPS and the right-wing press, and so was the right of charities to engage in political campaigning.

The Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) published a paper called Sock Puppets: How the Government Lobbies Itself and Why. The author, Christopher Snowdon, said that the changed relationship between the Third Sector and government amounted to a Labour Party strategy that ensured the left would maintain political power even given a change in government. Financial support for charities (in the last 15 years, the report says, government funding of UK charities increased dramatically) and relaxed regulations on political campaigning meant that the former Labour government had essentially turned the voluntary sector into a public relations mouthpiece.

The ideas in the IEA’s sock puppet paper were quickly picked up by government, notably, the Department of Communities and Local Government which published a paper titled, “50 Ways to Save: Examples of Sensible Savings in Local Government" in December, 2012.

Among the recommendations is number thirty-seven: stop funding sock-puppets and fake charities that call for more state regulations and more state funding.

The IEA, it should be noted, is itself registered with the UK Charity Commission as an “educational charity.” 

Founded in 1955, this think-tank’s stated purpose is to “promote the intellectual case for a free economy, low taxes, freedom in education, health and welfare and lower levels of regulation.” It is not funded by government, but does accept corporate donations, and free-market philosopher Milton Friedman has stated that the influence of the IEA’s founder, Anthony Fisher, during the Thatcher administration was so strong that "the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to him than any other individual."

The IEA also has funded the writing of a long list of books, such as Climate Alarmism Reconsidered, which describes environmentalists as climate alarmists who use global warming as a 'justification for failed socialist policies' and Life’s Adventure: Virtual Risk in a Real World, a book that lists ozone depletion, climate change, tobacco, pesticides and nuclear power as 'junk science-based scares.'

The Labour governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did indeed make their mark on the UK’s charity laws.

Following a five-year review of the Third Sector and more than 80 hours of parliamentary debate, Tony Blair’s government passed the 2006 Charities Act.

For the first time since Queen Elizabeth passed the Charitable Uses Act in 1601, the meaning of charitable purpose was given a statutory definition including a list of 13 examples, including new additions such as the advancement of human rights and the the pursuit of impartial investigative journalism. Under this law, there are no limits to the amount of campaigning for political change a charity can undertake, so long as the political actions 'remain incidental or ancillary to the charity's purposes.'

Following the campaign against poverty in the UK launched by Save the Children, the right-wing press picked-up on the themes of the sock-puppet paper and accused the former government led by Gordon Brown of “changing the rules so charities could join political campaigns” in 2008.

The truth is that in March of that year, the UK Charity Commission published new guidelines to navigating the law on political activity for charities, but these guidelines did not change the law – the Charity Commission does not have the power for that.

However, the guidelines do explicitly state that a charity can use most or all of its resources on a political campaign, so long as political campaigning does not become the sole reason for the organization’s existence.

As Alison Dunn states in her article Charities and Restrictions on Political Activities in the International Journal for Non-Profit Law, the guidelines are perhaps an imperfect attempt at clarifying a very confusing body of law and of defining terms which are determined by the courts on a case-by-case basis, but the guidelines “overall are more encouraging to trustees, emphasizing that political conduct can be a legitimate and beneficial course of action for a charity.”

That said, even with these seemingly encouraging guidelines, studies from within the charitable sector claim the sector is losing its independence. On January 22nd of this year, the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector released its second annual report investigating the willingness of charitable organizations to speak freely. The panel’s main finding is that the independence of the sector has become increasingly threatened, and the source of that threat is the government.

The stated purpose of the “Big Society” project launched by David Cameron’s government has been to “re-invigorate civil society” in part by promising a bigger role to nonprofits in the delivery of public services.

This has indeed happened, as government has cut back on public services and contracted the work out to whoever wants the job – non-profits, social enterprises, and even corporations – creating a situation which has been described by some as a “race-to the bottom.”

According to the Panel’s recent report, this has led to a situation in which the voluntary sector “is increasingly being treated as interchangeable with the public and private sectors.” The loss of identity has led to less support from individual donors, and self-censorship on the part of organizations that fear the loss of contracts if they criticize the government.

Many of those contracts come with “gagging clauses,” and the report by the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector provides an example of one such clause:

X.3 The Supplier shall pay the utmost regard to the standing and reputation of the Prime Contractor and the Contracting Body and shall not do anything (by act or omission) which may; 39.3.1 damage the reputation of the Prime Contractor or the Contracting Body 39.3.2 bring the Prime Contractor or the Contracting Body into disrepute 39.3.3 attract adverse publicity to the Prime Contractor or the Contracting Body 39.3.4 harm the confidence of the public in the Prime Contractor or the Contracting Body

The problem of being hindered by government funding is echoed in an article titled, “Unchaining the Wolf,” written by Dil Daly, director of Age Concern, an elderly assistance organization. Daly explains that medium-sized charities like his have come to rely on government contracts for their income. Today they faced reduced funding from all sources, and higher demands from a population in need. He offers no solution to the financial challenges but does assert that reduced public sector funding could actually be a good thing:

"In the recent past, a certain element of self censorship has existed as charities have been wary of 'biting the hand that feeds.' In essence we have tended to become a little too cosy with our funders and respond like lap dogs, doing our master’s bidding on demand. In future, the golden chains of funding won’t be there to make us think twice and I can foresee charities being far more prepared to challenge statutory authorities more vigorously."

So it seem that the IEA has support for its view from within the voluntary sector, on some level at least.

It is doubtful the organizations working on poverty relief and environmental protection would agree with the reasons the IEA seems to find the diminishment of independence so appauling, the reason being, as surmised by one writer:

"charities daring to point out that the often vulnerable people they represent might be suffering and that governments (of any stripe) might have a role in ameliorating or avoiding such harm. Instead, the IEA seems to prefer that charities work to clear up the mess created by ‘free markets’ but without making a fuss.”

With ongoing cuts to public services, England’s charities are struggling more and more to do even that. According to a 2012 survey, 90 percent of charities in the UK say their futures are at risk due to cash-flow problems and the uncertainties of results-based contracts.

It is this model that Canada seems keen to follow.

The 2012 budget was called a re-shaping of Canada’s social policy, with inspiration taken from Britain’s “Big Society.”

This is happening, moreover, in the wake of government attacks charities for political action, and tightening of the rules.

Our “Big Society” (otherwise described, in the UK context, as the biggest wave of outsourcing since the 1980s) will take its own form, but its hard to imagine that our voluntary sector will actually be strengthened by it.

That might sound just about right for the Conservative government, who likes to paint politically active charities as representatives of special interest groups.

If charities are made incapable of carrying out their essential tasks – holding government to account or demanding the relation between business and environmental protection is in the public interest – then their ability to bring benefit to the public will be severely limited.

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