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Speaking from my experience running in four municipal elections, I think Quebec’s election financing law is excellent. Contribution limits and limits to campaign spending are both reasonable and necessary. 

A successful campaign needs three things to appeal to voters: money, followers, and ideas. Abundance in one can make up for shortages in another. Good ideas can attract followers and money, and followers can attract money and generate good ideas.  BUT money can never be allowed to dominate. Quebec has it right.

Where Quebec does NOT have it right is all the ridiculous rules and bureaucracy it has created! Let me give you some examples.

I lost my first election in 2013, but with more than 15% of the vote, I was entitled to be reimbursed 75% of the $1000 I had contributed myself. After filing all the necessary reports, which is unnecessarily complicated, I was given a cheque for $750. I asked what spending restrictions there were. None, I was told. It was my money to do with what I pleased, with one exception. I could not bank the money for the next campaign. If I were in a political party, I could, but as an independent, I could not. Why should Elections Quebec give this advantage to parties? How is that fair?

There is a distinction between being authorized by Elections Quebec to be a candidate and having your nomination as an actual candidate be officially recognized.  It took me three elections to figure that out. As an authorized candidate, you can open a campaign bank account and start collecting contributions and issuing tax receipts. You can even spend money. But don’t expect your name to appear on the ballot just because you’ve been officially authorized. It won’t. 

An authorized candidate can contribute $100 per calendar year to himself and another $100 in an election year, just like anyone else. In an election year, once nominated, a candidate can also contribute an additional $800 of his own money, but if you’re only authorized but not nominated, you cannot.

Confused? Don’t worry, I was myself until after my third campaign, when Elections Quebec called me out for an innocent and inconsequential mistake. They forced me to study their idiotic rules in order to point out how stupid those rules were —which I did, and Elections Quebec then backed off. But I am not the only one who’s been confused.

In the 2021 election, one prospective candidate collected all the necessary signatures and completed all the necessary paperwork, and his candidacy was duly authorized by Elections Quebec. He thought that was that. He was good to go. Nope. Sometime after the nomination deadline, this person realized that even though he was officially authorized to be a candidate and had been going door-to-door for months, his name wouldn't be on the ballot.  He learned his lesson and made it on the ballot in 2025. He lost.

In the 2024 calendar year, an individual registered his intention to run in the 2025 election. But he never raised any money, and, in the end, he chose not to run. As I said, the only reason to register your “intention” with Elections Quebec is so that you can be authorized and can start raising and spending tax-receipted money. I guess this person was also confused. And he is a very intelligent and well-organized fellow. Didn’t matter. But if he had raised money, he would have had to give it all back and destroy whatever receipts he had issued or turn it over to the city.

In the 2017 election, I went out and collected 50 or 60 signatures — well beyond the 15 necessary to be authorized to run for our city council. I presented the paperwork to the returning officer and was told I had used the wrong form. Wrong form? All the information was there, and it was clear the people knew why they had signed. Didn’t matter. They weren’t going to count. So off I went collecting another few dozen signatures. 

I actually didn’t mind because knocking on doors — getting signatures encourages people to identify issues that are important to them BEFORE you commit to a platform, and it starts them thinking about voting for you. That’s how I discovered weekly garbage collection would dominate the 2017 election and that the poor state of our infrastructure was what bothered people most in 2025. Development was the clear issue in 2021. I didn’t need to go door-to-door, though, to figure that one out.

So, what happened in the 2021 election that forced me to dig into the rules? Elections Quebec told me that I owed the city money. While it was perfectly OK for me to have donated $800 to my campaign in an election year, which I had done, it was not OK to have done it WHEN I did it. I was told very sternly that I had deposited the $800 in the bank 19 days too early! And so I was ordered to reimburse the city the money. 

I fought back.

I started to dissect the layers of rules. That’s when I finally understood the significance between being authorized and being nominated. In any year a candidate can contribute up to $100 to support his own or any authorized candidacy. In an election year he can contribute another $100 to any authorized candidate, including himself. He can also give an additional $800 to help fund his own campaign. BUT the $800 can only be given once he’s nominated. A couple of months before the 2021 election, I was authorized to be a candidate. I opened a bank account and made the initial deposit of the $100 I could contribute to anyone any year, plus $100 more that I could contribute to anyone in an election year, plus the $800 I could contribute to my own campaign in an election year for a total of $1000. That is where I had made my mistake. I was an authorized candidate, but I was not a nominated candidate. I was 19 days too early. I prepared my attack.

I pointed out that the rules obscured rather than clarified the distinction between authorized candidate and nominated candidate. I pointed out that no electoral advantage was gained by having $800 sit idle in one account rather than in another. I understood there could have been some advantage, although I couldn’t figure out just what, IF any of the $800 had actually been spent, but it hadn’t. And, lastly, I argued that the law permitted me to give a maximum of $100 in this new calendar year, and it would be hardly in the interests of democracy to oblige me, now a duly elected councillor, to go out and get $700 in additional contributions. I would have to go to people and tell them I needed a favour — could they please give their council member a hundred bucks? Does that make sense?

I compiled these arguments into a letter, which I sent to Elections Quebec by registered mail. I could have sent an email, but I wanted the desk-bound bureaucrat looking over my file in Quebec City to sit up and take notice. She did. I soon received a letter explaining to me that this one time, and this one time only, they would use their discretionary power to quash their finding. So in the end, I owed nothing.