NDP allege Khan broke election finance rules

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This article was published 11/04/2022 (1284 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The NDP has asked Manitoba’s elections commissioner to investigate whether Fort Whyte MLA Obby Khan violated election finance legislation, alleging his business employees worked on his recent byelection campaign.

Khan, a former professional football player turned entrepreneur, denied the accusation Monday.

The newest Tory MLA narrowly won the March 22 Fort Whyte byelection, filling the seat vacated in October by former premier Brian Pallister.

The Opposition wrote a letter to the elections commissioner and provided screenshots of reported text messages between Khan and a business contact. In the images, Khan appears to reply to a request from the unnamed business owner Jan. 22, saying he’s “super busy right now with my campaign going on” with “most of my staff away from the businesses to help me, so not much has been done.”

The NDP called it a violation of the Election Financing Act, as corporations can’t pay staff to work on campaigns.

“There’s no truth to what the NDP are alleging today,” said Khan, owner of local restaurants Shawarma Khan and Green Carrot and co-founder of the e-commerce venture GoodLocal.ca.

“I had one former staffer on unpaid leave work on my campaign,” he told reporters in a scrum outside the chamber. “That is the the fact. That is the truth.”

Khan said the New Democrats have repeatedly made false accusations against him because they’re sore losers who did poorly in the byelection. The NDP candidate, Trudy Schroeder, finished third.

Earlier this year, the NDP went after the Progressive Conservatives for nominating Khan as a candidate. He received $500,000 in provincial funding to set up GoodLocal.ca in 2020 to help local businesses struggling during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

During question period Monday, NDP house leader Nahanni Fontaine raised the issue of having paid corporate staff working on a campaign, and asked government house leader Kelvin Goertzen if that is illegal.

“The member for Fort Whyte had paid staff from his businesses work on his campaign,” Fontaine told the house. “He wrote that himself… That’s deeply concerning and that’s why we asked the elections commissioner to investigate.”

Rather than answering the question, Goertzen questioned Fontaine’s credibility and brought up past wrongdoing by the NDP. He did not respond to a request for comment after question period.

Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said the public deserves an explanation.

“Mr. Khan needs to explain what he meant when he said he had ‘most of (his) staff away from the businesses’ working on his campaign,” Lamont said in an email Monday.

“What is critical is whether they were paid or not, because paying anyone to work on a campaign is an illegal donation. That’s been the case for about 20 years, because the NDP and PCs alike used it as a way to funnel money to campaigns without people being able to see it.”

Elections commissioner Bill Bowles has said his policy is not to confirm or deny whether a complaint has been received, nor disclose the status of an investigation.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca