Comment 43718

By nolarry (anonymous) | Posted July 20, 2010 at 17:30:13

A friend has noted that no paper in Hamilton has yet asked non candidate
where he'll get his election contributions from. CATCH did a really good
piece in May, says my friend, on the contributions discussion outside of Hamilton.

re waiting on Larry Di Ianni now, and his WIKIPEDIA entry--
So waiting for his mayorness explains why Di ianni is painting a new Larry in Wikipedia.
During the winter and early spring of this year 2010, the sections below were part of the Larry Di Ianni Wikipedia 'bio'. When someone checked very recently, the whole thing had been 'cleaned up' and these sections BELOW were removed--like all wiki you can see them in their files of site history. The good thing is lots of Hamilton students at high school and college saw the sections below along with the Spec and other things when they studied local history, a more real version I guess, before friends of Larry were asked to make changes. Now there's something about his 2003 donations violations being like a speeding ticket--a Wiki comment several people have noticed. There was also very briefly in the Wikipedia notes a comment that probably referred to Larry's strange rantings in the Ecklund columns.

*So read these previous sections:

--Di Ianni argued, falsely, that his 2003 mayoral campaign had been run by "amateurs" when in fact it was run by experienced paid professionals. The money-raising had gone very badly by the Nov. 2003 election date. By the Nov. 2003 city election date, the Di Ianni campaign had raised less than half of what it eventually spent in total. The Hamilton Spectator had reported this in early 2005!
In that Fall 2003 campaign, above and beyond donations received, Di Ianni borrowed a small fortune for publicity to overwhelm his main opponent, who'd raised nearly as much real money from lots of individual donations; more than donated to Di Ianni. Of what DiIanni had actually collected from donations before the 2003 election, which constituted less than half of what he spent in total on the campaign, at least 25% of that collected amount was, by judges, found to be illegal donations. The local Hamilton paper, the Spectator, covered that part of this story very badly, mainly ignoring what amounts had been raised from donors before the election in favour of reminding readers what Di Ianni spent in total, except nobody claimed he overspent over legal limits for spending. The problems of illegality involved of course the donations received and accepted by the election date; so ruled the court, which also required Di Ianni to write an essay.

- - On July 10, 2006 Di Ianni was charged under the Provincial Offences Act of Ontario for violating the Municipal Elections Act of Ontario.[4] On August 24, 2006, he became the first Ontario Mayor to be convicted of violating the Act pleading guilty to six charges related to accepting inappropriate campaign donations. He'd been charged with 41 offences but plea-bargained to six guilty counts.

- - In the 2008 federal election, Di Ianni was the Liberal candidate in the federal riding of Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, however he lost the race to NDP Incumbent Wayne Marston by a margin of 6,464 votes. Di Ianni's results were far worse than the Liberal party on average did in the province of Ontario in that federal election, looking at his drop in votes and in percentage from the previous federal election [in that riding].

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