Changes are coming to the way local governments carry out elections in B.C. as the Local Government Elections Task Force has completed its report and handed 31 recommendations for change to the province.
The recommendations are aimed at ramping up accountability and transparency, strengthening compliance and enforcement and expanding education and advice.
"Our purpose was to identify shortcomings in the local government elections process," Community and Rural Development Minister Bill Bennett said in a news release. "Although we found the existing process to have integrity and relatively few problems, we did identify a number of gaps that we recommend filling."
Key recommendations in the report include placing expense limits on local election campaign participants, requiring registration and disclosure by third party advertisers, requiring sponsorship information on all election advertising, making campaign finance disclosure statements available earlier and in an electronically searchable form, changing local government terms from three years to four, establishing a key role for Elections BC in enforcement of local campaign finance rules and establishing a separate act for local campaign finance rules.
Premier Gordon Campbell announced the review would take place at the 2009 Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM) annual convention. The task force was made up of Bennet, UBCM president Harry Nyce, two MLAs and two other UBCM members who are also municipal politicians. UBCM has been lobbying the province for an elections review for several years.
Gibsons mayor and UBCM director Barry Janyk said the report and recommendations are a "good first start" and that he hopes there can be some changes and fine tuning of the recommendations before they are introduced in the B.C. legislature.
"I think, on the whole, they're pretty good. There's obviously some holes that still need to be epoxied," Janyk said.
He said the task force's recommendations on campaign spending limits were still "too vague," but he approved whole-heartedly of making it easier for citizens to access the information.
However, Janyk said he worried that extending the length of local government terms might dissuade people from wanting to participate in local government.
Campbell's announcement of the review came after Gibsons council had already voted to conduct its own review of elections policies after issues with vote counting in the 2008 election led to a Supreme Court challenge and accusations of suspicious financing around the campaign emerged.
"We're in the process of changing all our stuff anyways because the last thing we want to see is more problems like we had in 2008. This comes at a good time from our perspective," Janyk said.
Janyk said the Town would still look at making its own changes, but only after seeing what laws the province will change.
"We're going to probably marry the two of them What we want to do is see what the province is going to do before we make any firm decisions as to how we're going to implement it," he said.
