BURST
Corey Sue, the financial agent for Mayor Ken Sim and the ABC Vancouver party, has been fined just over $12,000 for violating election rules during the 2022 election campaign.
According to an enforcement notice issued by Elections B.C. on Tuesday, Sue was dinged for accepting prohibited contributions and for failing to return prohibited contributions in a timely manner.
When reached for comment Wednesday, Sim’s office deferred questions to ABC Vancouver.
In January 2024, Postmedia reported on Sim and his party’s amended 2022 election financial disclosure that listed three pages of “prohibited campaign contributions and loans.”
In an interview with Postmedia at the time, Sue said most of the prohibited donations stemmed from the party’s “unique situation with four independent candidates doing their own thing before joining ABC.”
Sim, along with incumbent Vancouver councillors Rebecca Bligh, Lisa Dominato, and Sarah Kirby-Yung, had all been fundraising independently — which was allowed — before joining together under the ABC banner. The consolidation of their individual campaigns also required the merging of various financial accounts.
At the time, Sue said the party believed it had been following campaign financial rules when the accounts for the four independent candidates were reconciled.
However, it appeared some donors had donated to some combination of the four candidates and, in effect, exceeded the annual limit on donor contributions.
In the enforcement notice posted Tuesday, Adam Barnes, Elections B.C. director of investigations, detailed the back-and-forth communication that continued between Elections B.C. investigators and Sue from March 2024 to March 2025, including how the excess contributions were handled and returned to donors.
In the case of two contributions, Sue was penalized for not returning them to the original donor within the 30-day time frame mandated by the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act, though he noted they were unable to reach the original donor. Those funds have since been handed over to Elections B.C.
Barnes also noted that while Sue in his capacity as financial agent for Sim and ABC Vancouver had contravened election rules, Sue had been “responsive to (the) investigation” and that the contraventions “were honest mistakes and not intentional.” Sue also has not previously been penalized for breaking election rules.
As a result, Sue has been ordered to pay $11,888 for accepting prohibited contributions and $960 for failing to return prohibited contributions.
More to come…
With files from Dan Fumano