After a two and a half hour discussion, the Election Compliance Audit Committee voted in a divided 3 to 1 decision after two and half hours in-camera to commence legal proceedings against us based on a politically-motivated complaint made by a former Taggart development executive.
The past 12 months have been challenging for Horizon Ottawa. As a small, grassroots and mostly volunteer-run organization, we have had to redirect time and volunteer capacity from our important community work to a resource-intensive audit process that resulted from a complaint that was politically motivated and riddled with inaccuracies.
This has been nothing more than a fishing expedition started by someone who disagrees with Horizon Ottawa’s vision and mission. This process should not be permitted to be weaponized by the wealthy and well-connected in our city as a way to interfere with legitimate, transparent, democratic participation.
We believe that the public interest has been adequately served by the city-appointed audit and Horizon Ottawa’s explanations for its findings. There is no reason for taxpayers to bear the burden of judicial proceedings, which would serve no additional purpose, and we are disappointed with the Committee’s decision that will lead to a drawn-out and expensive process.
Clearly, there was no intent to violate the Municipal Elections Act including the contribution or expenditure limits. On the contrary, we made every reasonable effort to comply with our statutory obligations and exercised a high level of due diligence in doing so. To the extent that the Report identifies “apparent contraventions” of the Act, it is either because the city-appointed auditors relied on a different interpretation of the same rules, or misapprehended the facts as outlined in Horizon’s written submission today.
Though we disagree and are disappointed with the decision of the committee today, we understand that election compliance audits play an important role in ensuring that campaign financing rules are respected so that no candidate or third-party advertiser gains an unfair advantage in municipal elections.
We maintain that we acted with transparency and integrity throughout the 2022 election. We diligently prepared a financial return, underwent an audit by our own independent auditor and fully participated in the audit by the city-appointed auditor. As the report shows, there was never any attempt to obfuscate the nature of our revenues or expenditures or to characterize transactions in a particular way to gain an advantage.
We are looking forward to being fully vindicated in the judicial proceedings to come.
