ABC's financial agent said the party believed they had followed the campaign finance rules when they endorsed four formerly independent candidates and merged bank accounts. This turned out not be the case, and the party has refunded the prohibited cash.
ABC Vancouver has returned $116,000 in prohibited donations made in the years ahead of the 2022 election where the party dominated the race for mayor, city council, school board and park board.
On Dec. 20, 2023, ABC Vancouver filed a new amended version of their 2022 election financial disclosure with Elections B.C. Unlike their original disclosure filed almost a year earlier, this new version includes three pages listing “prohibited campaign contributions and loans.”
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Most of the prohibited donations were made in 2021, the document shows, and most are described as an individual who “donated to multiple candidates.”
Reached this week, ABC’s financial agent Corey Sue said most of these prohibited donations stemmed from ABC endorsing four previously independent candidates, all of whom had already been fundraising before the party brought them into the fold.
ABC Vancouver first launched in April 2021, and Ken Sim, who ran for mayor with the NPA in the 2018 election and finished second, soon became the upstart party’s mayoral candidate. At that time, Sim had already been raising funds as an independent candidate after announcing in 2020 his intention to run again for mayor, against his former party the NPA.
Then, in April 2022, three incumbent Vancouver councillors — Rebecca Bligh, Lisa Dominato, and Sarah Kirby-Yung — announced they were joining ABC for their runs at re-election. All three councillors had been elected in 2018 running with the NPA alongside Sim, before quitting the party during the term and sitting as independents.
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Sim and the three councillors had all raised funds as independents before joining ABC, as they were allowed to do. But when they joined ABC and became endorsed by the party, it required the merging of their various accounts.
Sue said that the party believed they had followed all applicable rules when reconciling the various accounts, and it was their understanding at the time, based on conversations with Elections B.C., they were in compliance with fundraising rules related to independent candidates and ABC.
But as it turned out, that was not the case.
In November 2023, Elections B.C. contacted ABC to inform then of several instances where donors appeared to have exceeded their maximum allowable annual donation limit — which was $1,239 for 2021, and $1,250 for 2022 — because those individuals had donated to some combination of then-independent candidates and the ABC party in the same year.
“We were in a unique situation with four independent candidates doing their own thing before joining ABC,” Sue said this week. “It was brought to our attention that once they became endorsed … it has to become as if they were endorsed from day one. That was not my understanding at the beginning.”
Sue said he spent the past several weeks reconciling the accounts to return cash to donors that were found to have exceeded the annual limit by donating to multiple candidates in the same year before they all joined the same party. He believes the party is now in compliance.
There is no indication that the individual donors did anything wrong. They appear to have donated to different political candidates as they were allowed to do. The issue came when the previously independent candidates joined ABC and got the party’s endorsement.
“It was on us,” Sue said.
After campaign finance disclosures for the October 2022 election were filed in January 2023, local political party TEAM for a Livable Vancouver reviewed the other Vancouver parties’ filings and identified what they believed to be discrepancies in ABC’s donations. TEAM notified Elections B.C. in July 2023, said TEAM president Cleta Brown, and sent more detailed information in October.
In November 2023, Elections B.C. told Postmedia News they were following up with ABC to resolve findings of a recently concluded audit.
ABC has not yet faced any fines or penalties for the prohibited contributions, but Elections B.C. is “currently reviewing ABC Vancouver’s amended report,” Elections B.C. spokesperson Melanie Hull said Thursday.
“If any penalties are levied against ABC Vancouver, they will be published on our website and we will advise the media,” Hull said. “The Administrative Monetary Penalties page of our website is updated every Wednesday, as required.”
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