Oil money on the campaign trail

As regulatory hearings take off this week in Kitimat, the heated debate around Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline has got the whole country talking.

• Tory-linked “Ethical Oil” website slams Canadian enviros over foreign funding
• NDP MP Nathan Cullen condemns Harper’s “witch hunt” on environmental charities
• Unethical oil and its Canadian friends
• Harper concerned about “hijacked” Northern Gateway hearings

Allegations from the government about environmental “radicals” and funding from foreign special interest groups have led many to question funding to groups on the other side of this argument.

Why is Prime Minister Stephen Harper so passionate about the oil sands and about pushing this pipeline through? Surely the billions of dollars in estimated “economic benefit” must have something to do with it. But to risk the environment and the trust of an entire province, there must be more to it than that. Lobbyists are one thing, but what about campaign funding?

To get a sense of Enbridge's influence, VO decided to take a look at political contributions and other donations to Harper and the Conservatives, as well as campaign contributions from the company most deeply involved in the Northern Gateway debate – Enbridge.

Federal contributions

According to the Canada Elections Act, registered parties and political candidates must disclose the source of any financial contribution over $200. And as of 2007, only individual citizens are allowed to make campaign donations, meaning leadership candidates like Stephen Harper can no longer directly accept funding from corporations. 

A quick search through Harper’s campaign finances for the last election in May 2011 shows minimal contributions from a list of individuals (each individual is only permitted to give $1,000 per election or calendar year). Such “contributions” totaled just $11,088 while “transfers” from the “Calgary Southwest Conservative Association” added up to $68,000.

There are detailed regulations around transferring funds between affiliated political entities, but they must be reported and are therefore available on the Elections Canada website. What’s more unclear is the source of funding for individual party associations, like Harper’s Calgary Southwest Conservative Association. But even if it did come from corporations, these numbers are still pretty small in the scheme of things.

In 2008, the Ottawa-based group Democracy Watch released a statement urging politicians to close loopholes in the law around financial contributions. They say these loopholes effectively permit secret and unlimited donations, potentially from corporate interests. So could this be what’s happening? If it is, they certainly don’t make it easy to find out.

Provincial contributions

Federal election reports don’t appear to reveal too much, but provincially it’s a different story. Most provincial election websites provide easy access to party and candidate financial reports. So how is money from big oil distributed at the provincial level?