I apologize that it’s taken me so long to put this up, but here, at last, are the campaign finance disclosures that mayoral candidates Raymond Louie and Allan DeGenova filed with Vision Vancouver. (My late-night struggles with blog technology are finally paying off.) They aren’t available at the city clerk’s office because the city clerk wouldn’t accept them, saying that there was no provision for filing these kinds of campaign disclosures at the office.
Vancouver elections, if you’ll recall, have rarely involved mayoral nominations. Usually the parties agree in the backroom who the mayoral candidate will be (Larry Campbell, Jim Green, Philip Owen, Jennifer Clarke of years past) or are sent out as sacrificial lambs to do their duty for the party (David Cadman, Jean Swanson, Carmela Allevato, et al).
The first real mayoral nomination in recent memory was between Sam Sullivan and Christy Clark in 2005. Neither filed disclosures saying how much they had spent, to my knowledge. (And I’m not even sure anyone asked, we were all so agog in the media with the novelty of the race.)
This time, because of the many rumours about how much various parties had spent — Sullivan, Louie, De Genova, and Gregor Robertson — it became much more of an issue. In spite of that, there is no clear city requirement that mayoral candidates, whether winning or losing, have to file accounts of their campaign donations or spending.
In any case, here at least, Raymond Louie’s disclosure here: Raymond
And Allan DeGenova’s disclosure, remarkable for how much information is blacked out, here: de-genova-mayor
P.S. I notice that my tireless conspiracy-theory friends over at city caucus think my posting of these docs is all part of some “backscratching” between me and Vision. Life really is easier if you never make a phone call to check anything, I guess. Anyway, ALL reporters who asked for these docs from Vision got them. I posted them because I have had requests for me to do so — okay, one request, from Kennedy Stewart. I presume others didn’t because they reported on them extensively/couldn’t be bothered/don’t have blogs. I’ve had them since all other financial disclosures were filed (as have EVERY OTHER REPORTER who asked for them) but due to my staggering technical ineptitude, only put them up now.
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