The City of Burnaby may be the only city left in the Greater Vancouver area that doesn't post its election disclosure statements online.
Anne Skipsey, Burnaby's chief election officer, said city council would have to pass a bylaw to change from the current system of having the documents available in a binder in the clerk's office to a new system of online posting of all documents.
"Nobody has made that decision," she said. "Council has not seen the necessity of doing this (change)."
Skipsey said she still has to put together a report to council about the 2011 election, and it may be appropriate to note that Burnaby is one of the few cities left in the province not to have gone to an online disclosure system.
Coun. Sav Dhaliwal said he hasn't heard much complaint or feedback from the public asking for the election disclosure documents to be posted online.
"I don't think it's a high priority," he said. "Other than newspaper reporters, I wonder if anybody looks at them. Staff hasn't brought it up to us as a major issue.
"I think there are a few other things ahead of this that I believe are more of a priority for taxpayers."
Dhaliwal said he would ask staff what sort of work is involved in getting the documents posted online for future elections.
The issue of online election financial disclosures isn't new, as a 2010 Vancouver Sun attempt to input all election disclosure documents from the 2008 civic election into a centralized database revealed that of the 17 largest Metro Vancouver cities, only three, Langley City, Langley Township and Burnaby, had not gone to posting the statements online.
Both Langley and Langley City have now gone to an online posting system, seemingly leaving only Burnaby as a holdout.
Patrick Smith is an SFU political science professor and current director of the Institute of Governance Studies. He said it's unusual that Burnaby doesn't put its election disclosures online.
"Burnaby should know better," said Smith. "They talk about how they were voted best managed municipality (by Maclean's magazine), but I don't know how this can be considered a best practice."
But Smith said while other cities have gone to an online disclosure process, there are still problems because there is not a universal standard for each city to follow.
He pointed out that if you go to the City of Coquitlam's website, you can view all of the disclosures, but you can't print them out.
The Burnaby NOW was able to look at Coquitlam's online election disclosure documents, but the documents are passwordprotected if you want to print them out.
Lauren Hewson, legislative and administrative services manager for the City of Coquitlam, said it wasn't a conscious decision to password-protect the PDFs. She said it was probably just something that happened when all the documents were being scanned into the system and the city will look at taking the password-protection off the documents.
Hewson did offer to photocopy and send paper copies of any or all election disclosure statements.
In Surrey, a reporter had to spend more than three hours in city hall transcribing notes.
She was told by Surrey staff that the documents were scheduled to be and would be posted online, but because Surrey council didn't enact their bylaw in time, the documents weren't uploaded on March 20, the first day after which candidates had to have filed their papers.
Most cities, including New Westminster, had election disclosure statements posted on their websites prior to March 19, or as soon as they were submitted by individual candidates.
Smith said there should be a provincewide standard for all municipalities.
"It's a democratic right that the public should be able to see what candidates spent during an election," said Smith. "Why is it so difficult to have the same standard applied (everywhere)?
"It drives me nuts when there's such a protectiveness around this information. The public has a right to see it."
As part of Smith's local government course at SFU, he asks students to look at election financial disclosure statements for any city. In years past, when most cities didn't post them online, those students, along with local reporters, were usually the only people to ask for those documents.
"There is a lot of information in there if you know what you're looking for," said Smith. "Cities should make it as easy as they can for people to access that information."
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