Three weeks ago, I wrote about the problem posed by the lack of limits on campaign spending by candidates in local elections. I've had some feedback from local politicians and from School District No. 46 board chair Silas White since then, and it's altered my opinion on the issue.
I had suggested local spending limits of $11,500 in Sechelt and about $5,100 in Gibsons, to keep in proportion with the $76,784 spending limit faced by Powell River-Sunshine Coast MLA Nicholas Simons in his 47,000-strong riding.
The word from local politicians is that no candidate in recent memory has come close to approaching my suggested limits. No one seems to recall more than $3,000 ever having been spent on a local campaign. It could be the Coast's meagre population precludes the possibility of "buying" an election win outright. I still support the spending limits in principle. It's clear that Vancouver and other B.C. cities stand to improve the fairness of their elections if limits are in place. Minister of Community Services Ida Chong told me two weeks ago that if the government hears strong calls for spending limits after this round of local elections, they could come into effect in 2011. In the meantime, I'd like to focus on another potentially more profound problem with our political system: voter apathy.
In Alberta's provincial election in early March, the Tories were voted in for an 11th straight term in power - after a stunningly low voter turnout of just 41 per cent, the worst in the province's history, and well below B.C.'s 62 per cent voter turnout in the 2005 election. Premier Ed Stelmach's campaign hyped the rhetoric of expanding oil production from Alberta's tar sands, a resource of nearly 200 billion barrels of extractable oil. In all, the resource contains nearly two trillion barrels of oil, most of which is inaccessible using current technology. With oil prices over $100 U.S. per barrel, the $26 U.S. processing cost is no longer a barrier.
It should be an issue that matters to British Columbians. About 80 tons of carbon dioxide are produced in extracting a single barrel of oil from the tar sands - three times the pollution associated with conventional oil production. Add to this the greenhouse gases produced by using the oil, and our carbon tax and efforts to curb climate change suddenly look futile in light of what Alberta is doing.
It's an example of voter apathy that B.C. should try to avoid. Having spending limits in place at all three political levels is the first step. The single transferable vote, which would weight a ballot by giving some value to a voter's second and third choices, is also needed. With these things in place, campaign donors like the lobbyists in Alberta would end up with a greatly reduced influence on the policies of elected officials. When voters see politicians begin to act responsibly, maybe the public trust in politicians could be restored.
