CRD Watch Homepage

When Prohibited Campaign Donations Disappear from Public Databases

Is Elections BC Playing “Whack-a-Mole” with Prohibited Campaign Contributions?

The vagaries of the Financial Reporting and Political Contributions (FRPC) system exposed.


By Sal Robinson
Nov 12, 2025

Elections BC’s Financial Reports and Political Contributions System (FRPC) is an online resource intended to provide transparency on who contributes to the campaigns of candidates and parties at the local and provincial level.

It fails to do that because if a donor’s contribution has been returned it disappears from the searchable system, only to pop up, maybe, in a scanned document that is more opaque than transparent.  But as far as the public knows, it might never have been made.

In Vancouver, a supporter of candidate Ken Sim gave him $1200 on four occasions in 2021, $3600 more than he was entitled to keep. That $3600 was in his campaign war chest until more than a year after his election as mayor and finally refunded on December 20, 2023, as seen on page 69 of ABC Vancouver’s second amended disclosure.  An inquisitive voter would have to pore over scanned reports to find that it ever happened.

There are several reasons why a donation must be returned.  It may have exceeded the annual limit for an individual to contribute as in the above example; it may have come from a corporation; there may have been insufficient information about the donor, such as no last name or a non-residential address; the donor may gave given, or received, funds from someone else in order to contribute (known as an “indirect contribution”).

Is this a widespread problem?  I did spot checks of provincial contributions and found nothing untoward.  But after my experience examining the donors to ABC Vancouver, whose returned contributions to the 2022 civic campaign topped $200,000, I looked into other local election reports and easily found examples, though nothing on that scale.  But the only way to do that was to work backwards from amended disclosures.

If an Elections BC scrutiny of a party’s or candidate’s disclosure turns up something wrong or missing, it requires the party or candidate to file an amended disclosure. If something’s wrong in the amended disclosure, another one is required, and so on (ad nauseam, it seems). 

How does the contribution information get into FRPC?  Elections BC uploads the details which come from reports that financial agents for candidates and parties are required to file following elections and annually.  And it uploads details from amended disclosures, details which wipe out what was in a previous disclosure.  And that’s the problem.

For example, a supporter of Burnaby mayor Mike Hurley had her $1200 donation returned. She gave it in December 2020 after she’d already donated the maximum in January that year. The refund date of January 2023 is shown on page 22 of Hurley’s first amended disclosure (screen shot here).  Hurley’s campaign had the money for more than two years.

Today, FRPC shows the donor’s first 2020 contribution, but there’s no sign of the refunded one, because it was deleted when returned.

Adding to the confusion, records are not only deleted from FRPC but added  – often long after the fact –  when amendments turn up donations that had not been reported before.  How did ABC Vancouver miss a $1250 contribution made in February 2022 until its fifth amended disclosure, filed July 17, 2024?  Your guess is as good as mine.

A year and a half ago I wrote to Elections BC suggesting a simple solution to this unnecessarily enigmatic practice:

“Citizens interested in knowing who is funding their local campaigns are not served by a system that deletes returned contributions with neither record nor explanation.

SOLUTION:   The addition of three columns to the FRPC database:

•    one for the amount of a refunded prohibited contribution

•    one for the date of the refund

•    one indicating the reason why the contribution was prohibited (over the limit, indirect, etc.)”

The response was little more than an acknowledgement that they delete the data. 

Not good enough.


————————————————————————————————–

See also: The BC Local Elections Campaign Financing Act is a Farce. Like a yo-yo, it allows donors, who made prohibited election contributions, to get their money refunded to them after the election. – CRD Watch Homepage

Who is Tavish? Victoria City Councillor Matt Dell reported to Elections BC, a Tavish as having provided $500 for his 2022 election campaign, yet Dell did not provide a last name for him to Elections BC. – CRD Watch Homepage

Index of Articles and other Material regarding Local Government Elections, and Elections BC – CRD Watch Homepage