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Thursday, July 31, 2008

"no rules" v. campaign finance reform.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of money drives politics in Alberta, but for those of you familiar/appalled with the City of Calgary's "no rules" municipal campaign financing mantra should find Naheed Nenshi's latest Calgary Herald column interesting.

1 comment:

AWGB said...

Point #6 - disclosure of property holdings - is highly relevant. I'm reading the McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Real Estate Investing Course right now, and it basically instructs residential investors to cozy up to aldermen, city hall, planners and other bureaucrats (ie, their secretaries) as a way to get into the 'inner circle' of property developers. It's close to sickening, but that's the way the game is played, and has been for years. Cities are corporations, and they want to maximize revenues any way they can. Given that property taxes are a great source of revenue (in absence of sales taxes), it follows that they want to expand their tax base, and real estate developers let them do that.