Angry in the Great White North

National Direction of the Liberal Party, Greg Fergus, has sent an email to Liberals asking for yet more cash to cover election campaign expenses.

It is the latest of a stream of such emails.  Leader Stephane Dion sent out a plea for more money on September 7, President Doug Ferguson and Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff each separately on September 8, and Campaign Co-Chair Senator David Smith on September 9.

The one from Greg Fergus is particularly interesting, since it pleads for money to offset the pollution created by Stephane Dion's campaign:

So we’re doing something no major Canadian political party has ever done before – in this campaign, all the greenhouse gas emissions generated by our campaign tour will be neutralized through the purchase of carbon offsets, provided by CarbonZero. These offsets will contribute to such projects as retrofitting Canadian commercial buildings with energy efficient heating, piping and energy recovery systems.

For every tonne of carbon emitted by our campaign plane and buses, a tonne will be recovered by a newly energy-efficient building. Stéphane Dion walks his talk and does what real leaders do – sets an example for others to follow. 

However, these carbon offsets are a campaign expense, so we need you to help us lead by example. Please make a donation to help cover these costs. One hundred percent of any donation you make today will go directly towards paying for our campaign’s carbon offsets.

Both donation links on the email are tagged with a "typecode":

https://www.liberal.ca/donate_e.aspx?typecode=300018943

If I click this link, the Liberal Party website traffic logs will note the typecode as part of the referring address.  I still go to the same donation page, but by matching donations with the visits during which the donation was made, and then extracting the typecode from the referring address for each visit, the Liberals can determine all the donations that came from this email.

Is that how the Liberals will know what donations are to be directed to carbon offsets?

I don't think so.  As it turns out, the same typecode is attached to the Ferguson email of September 8, and those donations aren't directed to carbon offsets or anything else.  The other emails have no typecodes at all.

Why the typecode is being used inconsistently, and why the same typecode is being used twice, are questions that I don't have answers to.

But it would seem that today is Carbon Offset Day -- all donations today will go to offsetting the carbon offset costs, as the email says.

So I guess if you open this email tomorrow and make a donation, the donation will go to general campaign expenses.

There's nothing wrong with this.  Just observing how the Liberal virtual campaign is being organized.

But I do wonder if a carbon offset is an election expense in the first place.  The aircraft and buses are considered part of what Elections Canada calls the "Leader's Tour":

Leader's tour

A leader’s tour gives the leader national exposure, and it is generally well publicized by the media (members of which generally travel with the leaders and usually share the cost). The importance of the leader’s tour is reflected in the significant cost associated with it.

The leader’s tour is an election expense within the meaning of the Canada Elections Act because this expense is incurred for the purpose of directly improving the public image or acceptance of the party. In addition to the direct costs of chartering an aircraft, buses and other means of transportation, the party must include the costs of all other related items such as meals, refreshments, salaries of party staff assigned to the tour, communications equipment rented for the media and baggage handling.

Carbon offsets aren't listed here.  This web page was last updated on October 31, 2007, so the concept of carbon offsets was well established and commonly known (over $5 billion in offsets were sold in 2006).

Do you need a carbon offset to run a Leader's Tour?  Clearly not.  Certainly not in the sense that you need fuel, baggage handling, food and water, communications equipment, and staff.

But then a carbon offset is good public relations, at least in some quarters, so it could be considered a means of "improving the public image".  But then that's a tenuous connection.  The Elections Canada statement clearly means the tour as a whole is what improves the public image, and that the elements of the tour that count as election expenses are those that are necessary to get the tour off the ground, as it were.  A plane can fly without a carbon offset, but not without fuel.

Carbon offset seems like gold-plating to me.

Does it matter?  Probably not, but it does make me wonder.  When it comes to food and communications equipment and staff salaries, there are receipts and timesheets and payroll records to prove the amount of the expense.

When it comes to a carbon offset, there is the receipt from the offset company, of course, but that is based on numbers provided by the traveler regarding the amount of CO2 emitted.  The engines don't give receipts.

Is Elections Canada going to demand records of fuel consumption (separate from the fuel bill) and then do the calculations to determine the CO2 emitted?  Is there an official emission rate per amount of fuel set by Elections Canada for jet fuel and diesel fuel?  Is there an accepted cost set by Elections Canada for a carbon offset?  Carbon offsets can be bought for as little as $10 per tonne to as much as $50 per tonne.  Will Elections Canada accept a $50 per tonne offset or is that going to raise a red flag the way a bill for a $500 ham sandwich would?

Does Elections Canada even care about the cost of offsets (or about the cost of ham sandwiches, for that matter)?

Is Elections Canada going to depend on what the Liberal Party and NDP tell them the offsets cost, and just accept the numbers on face value?

Remember, if the carbon offset is a campaign expense, then it counts against the campaign spending limit.  Can I transfer excess carbon offsets to local ridings so that a local candidate can claim a carbon offset in campaign literature?

I guess what worries me is that unless some reasonable expectations are set to what a carbon offset means, whether it is a legitimate expense, how much it ought to cost, and how it is calculated and accounted for, a party could declare that the Leader's Tour is going to be offset, collect money from donors to pay for it, but then fiddle with the numbers as desired in order to avoid breaking campaign spending limits. 

In other words, a party could raise more money by appealing for cash to cover carbon offsets.  That would motivate some donors who would not respond to pleas to pay for signage, for example.  Now the party has extra cash.  Some of the money donated for a carbon offset could be freed up to cover some shortfall somewhere else by simply declaring that the offsets cost $10 per tonne instead of $20 per tonne.

Guidelines would eliminate a potential area of abuse here.

I'm certainly not accusing anyone of doing this, but it seems to me that calling a carbon offset an election expense and collecting money for it puts the Liberals well ahead of where Elections Canada is right now on how carbon offsets integrate into the whole campaign finance mechanism, assuming offsets belong there at all.

Unless Elections Canada has rules to cover this already.  If any knows where they are, I'd be interested to see them.