Dwight Ball is the leader of the Liberal Party.
He now has a chance to lead by example when it comes to donations for his leadership campaign.
Ball told CBC News that he spent somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 on his leadership campaign. Even though the party executive failed to provide any rules for campaign financing – as SRBP told you in July – Ball should set an example and publish a list of all donors over $100 and the amounts they gave.
In his interview, Ball committed to disclosing the amounts of the donation, a fact CBC buried way down in the story in a fairly obvious effort to make Ball look bad in comparison to his commitment to openness and transparency in government. He should do that, if for no other reason than to prove his claim that he financed his own campaign, for the most part. That will do away with any suggestion he is beholden to anyone.
Ball also noted that his donors gave the money knowing there were no disclosure rules. Well, that’s an easy one to fix. Go back and ask each donor for permission to disclose his or her name or the name of the company that gave the money.
As for CBC, they should revisit this story and clean up the bullshit that riddles it. The buried bit about Ball’s commitment to disclose is one bit.
Another is a laughable bit of invented news:
CBC News has also learned that the front runners in the race all spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their campaigns, some of it out of pocket, some of it raised from donors, but none of it was required to be disclosed.
The Telegram covered the money story in September. And as for the lack of rules, that was something they knew in July when the campaign started. SRBP posted a story on it at the time. It’s just foolishness for CBC news writers to suggest they find out about any of that in the past 24 hours, in a “CBC news has learned” way.
While they are at it, and since CBC is now suddenly interested in the issue of political donations, the crowd on the Parkway have got a decade of stories in this province on just that subject they could have told but – for some reason – decided to ignore. if they need help getting started, there’s plenty of to read at SRBP and labradore.
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