Dogwood BC – The Back Door

Part One examined the survey: what Dogwood takes from you before it asks a single question, and what that form is actually built to do.

This is Part Two. It is about the money behind it.

A Society, Not a Charity

A registered charity files a public return with the Canada Revenue Agency every year. Anyone with a browser can open it and see the money in, the money out, the salary bands, and the broad categories of where the cash came from. A society files nothing comparable, no public tax return, no mandatory financial statements. There’s no provincial rule that forces Dogwood to publish a single number about its funding.

So here we have an organization moving roughly $1.9 million a year with no legal duty to account for a dollar of it to anyone outside its own walls. Thousands of BC societies operate under the same light touch. Most of them run curling clubs or community halls. None of them have spent the last decade running a province-wide political machine aimed squarely at elections while demanding that everyone else open their books.

The American money they used to talk about

American money in a British Columbia election. Dogwood hunted it, publicized it, and turned it into a provincial scandal. Ban Big Money became a campaign frame. The premier dropped her fundraising bonus. The RCMP opened a file. Dogwood’s LinkedIn page still claims credit for helping ban unlimited out-of-province corporate and union donations. No one in this province understands the political power of undisclosed money better than the people who spent years teaching the rest of us to care about it.

Six years later the 2023 report struck a different note: original research on corporate lobbying intensity and the revolving door, followed by volunteers confronting MLAs and generating messages demanding stronger lobbying rules.

Fair enough. Let’s ask Dogwood the question it used to ask everyone else.

For years they answered it without being asked. The 2017 report thanked sixteen funders by name: Mountain Equipment Co-op, Vancity, Patagonia, the Wilburforce Foundation, the Bullitt Foundation, Brainerd, Moore, West Wind, Winky, Timken Sturgis, Climate Solutions, the Salal Foundation, a Canada Summer Jobs grant, and, written exactly this way, “Tides Foundation USA.” Not Tides. Tides Foundation USA. In the same year they were building a national story about American money in BC politics, they listed American money among their own supporters and labelled it clearly.

The 2019 report named fourteen, including Tides Foundation USA again, the Oak Foundation, Wilburforce, Bullitt, Brainerd and the rest. The 2020 report named eleven institutions and went further, thanking eighteen individual major donors by name. It also disclosed public money: Canada Summer Jobs grants, a $350,132 pandemic wage subsidy, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council partnership grant with University of Victoria researchers.

Named institutions, named people, named public programs, published by an organization that no one could have forced to publish anything.

The 2020 report is the last one that named anyone. No funder list appears in the reports for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025. The most recent one mentions institutional money only once, when board chair Ingrid Kastens writes that Dogwood’s work “continues to resonate with individual donors and foundations.” Which foundations? She doesn’t say. No one at Dogwood has said, in any public document, for five years.

Now look at the numbers. In the financial year ending March 2021, grant revenue was $88,435, nine percent of the total. In the year ending March 2025 it was $747,669, thirty-nine percent of the budget, more than eight times higher. Detailed disclosure stopped in the year the grants nearly disappeared and hasn’t returned while those grants multiplied.

In the 2022 report, offered unprompted, Dogwood wrote: “While foundations remain an important source of funding for Dogwood’s work, no single source of funding accounts for more than 10% of our budget, a fact that keeps us independent and resilient.” Grants were twenty-one percent of revenue when they wrote that sentence. They’re now nearly double that share. Whether the promise still holds is impossible to test, because the organization that made it stopped publishing the only information that would let anyone check.

Look at where those earlier donors actually sat. Tides Foundation USA. Wilburforce, Bullitt and Brainerd, all Pacific Northwest foundations. Timken Sturgis, Winky, West Wind, Moore, Climate Solutions, Patagonia. None of those donors vote here, pay property tax here, or live with the decisions made by a British Columbia council. The Oak Foundation, based in Geneva, appeared on the 2019 list; that’s worth noting and doesn’t change the overall picture. The last time Dogwood told the public where its institutional money came from, a substantial share came from outside the country, much of it from a single American city three hours down the interstate.

Then the lists stopped. The grants rose eightfold. What’s come in since, and from which side of the border, is something only Dogwood knows.

Alberta spent two years and roughly $3.5 million on a public inquiry into foreign funding of advocacy inside its borders. The inquiry named Dogwood among the recipients and found no wrongdoing and no breach of any law. Alberta at least treated the question as one a government should be able to answer. In British Columbia no government has asked it, and no statute requires an answer.

No law ever forced those funder lists into the open. That’s precisely what makes the silence significant. Dogwood published for years because it said the public deserved to know. Then it went quiet. In five years it hasn’t offered its donors, its subscribers, or the people filling out its forms a single sentence of explanation.

The same organization that directed volunteers to press their MLAs for lobbying transparency won’t tell you who funds Dogwood.

What a list like this can do

Thousands of people moved by an outside organization into a governing party to influence who would lead British Columbia. The party’s response was revealing: the New Democrats retroactively rewrote their leadership rules. Dogwood itself recorded the purpose, to exclude “participation by third parties like Dogwood.” Political parties don’t rewrite their constitutions over ordinary civic engagement.

Elections BC opened a review into whether the activity amounted to an unlawful in-kind contribution, then closed the file. The reason should give every voter pause. Anjali Appadurai was never formally approved as a leadership contestant, so the campaign finance rules of the Election Act never applied to her campaign. On 20 October 2022 the agency stated it clearly: “the activities of Dogwood BC in relation to the Anjali Appadurai campaign were not regulated by the Election Act.”

Not cleared. Not blessed. Simply outside the rules the province had written. An outside organization came within reach of shaping who governs British Columbia, and the regulator’s position was that it had no jurisdiction.

Four years later the same organization is collecting names, telephone numbers, postal codes, voting histories and issue rankings from voters across the province. No rule reaches that either.

The machinery that makes it possible

What it captures are arrangements with foreign states. After all that legislative effort, it won’t touch a single organization working ordinary political influence on your October ballot. Ottawa has shown, at considerable expense, that this country knows how to build a public transparency register when it decides something matters. It has built one that reaches Victoria City Hall while covering a category of influence that barely exists at the municipal level. The influence that actually shapes your council remains outside anything a resident can look up.

The federal Lobbying Act goes further still. An organization doesn’t need to meet a minister to trigger reporting. Paid grassroots campaigning, appeals to the public through media or direct contact that urge people to pressure a public office holder, is registrable in its own right. Ottawa decided years ago that mobilizing the public is itself a form of influence the public is entitled to see on the record. Dogwood does this work and describes it in its own reports. Aimed at Ottawa, that kind of organized pressure is a matter of public record. Aimed at the legislature in Victoria, Dogwood registers and files properly. Aimed at your city council in the middle of a general local election, it is nothing at all. Not exempt after consideration. Simply outside every regime this country has built.

At the municipal level in British Columbia almost nothing else applies. The Lobbyists Transparency Act stops at the provincial door. An organization can meet your mayor, your councillors, your chief administrative officer and your entire planning department as often as it likes, on any file, for any purpose, and no registry in this province records that it happened. Victoria keeps no municipal lobbyist registry. Neither does Saanich, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, Colwood, Langford, Vancouver or Burnaby. Surrey and Kelowna operate voluntary ones, a polite way of saying registries nobody has to use. Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Brampton have run mandatory registries for years at trivial cost.

The responsibility for that gap is traceable. Under provincial law a BC municipality may create a voluntary registry but has no authority to compel registration. Only the legislature can change that. The cities have asked. Saanich pressed for a province-wide system. The Union of BC Municipalities formally requested one that municipalities could opt into. In September 2025 Victoria council directed legal staff to report on the viability of a registry or of pushing the province to extend the existing legislation, on a motion moved by Councillor Jeremy Caradonna. David Eby’s government hasn’t moved. The gap that remains is the exact gap a province-wide political operation is currently using. A government that wanted municipal lobbying on the public record could put it there in a single legislative session. This one hasn’t, while its own party was rewriting its constitution to keep the same organization out of its leadership races.

In March 2023 Saanich council voted five to four against a motion that would have done nothing more than direct staff to examine what a registry might involve. Five elected officials decided the question of who is lobbying their own government wasn’t worth the staff time. Those decisions were taken in public by people whose names are in the minutes. They’re choices, made repeatedly, and their combined effect is that municipal political influence in British Columbia is among the least visible political activity in the country.

The one name that appears

At the provincial level you can see exactly what he does, because the law requires him to write it down. Activity reports record contacts with MLAs and ministers across parties: Adam Olsen of the Greens, opposition members Greg Kyllo, Kevin Falcon and Mike Bernier, and New Democrat ministers Mitzi Dean, Josie Osborne and Bruce Ralston. Lobbying Activity Report 3244-40436 records a contact on 7 March 2025 with the Hon. Diana Gibson, Minister of Citizens’ Services. Name, date, subject, filed under statutory obligation. A functioning transparency regime produces that kind of record. Dogwood complies with it.

Take the same organization, the same officer and the same methods down one level of government, to the council that decides your zoning, your policing and your taxes, and the entire record disappears. Not because anyone hid it. Because at the municipal level no one is required to write anything down. The same person may meet your mayor as often as he likes and nothing is logged: no report, no name, no subject. No citizen has any practical way of finding out.

Elections BC’s contributions database holds three entries under that name: five dollars on 10 March 2022, fifty dollars on 3 October 2022, and $77.42 on 8 January 2023. All three went to Jeremy Caradonna, elected to Victoria council in 2022 and now also a Capital Regional District director. They total $132.42. A search returns those three records and nothing else, in any jurisdiction, ever.

A hundred and thirty-two dollars buys nothing and isn’t meant to. Read it as a measurement instead. That figure is the complete extent of what the disclosure regime in this province will show you about how Dogwood relates to the people sitting on your council. Every meeting, every call, every conversation about a file before it comes to a vote falls outside any registry that exists in British Columbia. What the public gets is $132.42, disclosed only because a provincial statute happened to reach it, and nothing else.

The front door of Canadian democracy has guards, cameras, a visitors’ book, and, as of this week, a federal commissioner carrying a million-dollar penalty. The back door doesn’t even have a latch. An organization can build a province-wide file of identified voters aimed at a municipal election, promote it with paid advertising, work it through the campaign, keep it afterwards, and walk into the office of any councillor in British Columbia without a single municipal disclosure obligation attaching to any of it.

In 2009-10, foundations, businesses and organizations made up 63 percent of Dogwood’s total revenue. The annual report named all sixteen of them, right down to “Tides Foundation USA – Tar Sands Fund.” In 2025 institutional grants are 39 percent of a much larger budget, and they won’t name one.

Part Three is about sovereignty.

Every factual claim is drawn from public documents: Dogwood’s annual reports for the years ended 31 March 2010 through 2025; its privacy policy, LinkedIn profile and website; the Instagram survey advertisement and linked form captured 4 August 2026; Elections BC’s 20 October 2022 news release, third-party sponsor register for 2026, and political contributions database; the BC Lobbyists Registry; BC Registry records; minutes of Saanich council (March 2023) and Victoria council (September 2025); UBCM resolutions; municipal lobbyist registries in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Brampton; the Lobbyists Transparency Act, Local Elections Campaign Financing Act and Personal Information Protection Act of British Columbia; the federal Lobbying Act and Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act; and the Alberta Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns.

Disclaimer

The documents, figures, dates, quotations and filings above are matters of public record. The characterisations and judgments built on them are the opinions of the writer, offered as fair comment on a matter of public interest, the general local elections of 17 October 2026. No person or organization named is alleged to have broken any law. The central argument is the opposite: that the conduct described is lawful, and that its lawfulness is the problem. Matt Takach is named solely in his public capacities. The three contributions total $132.42; no improper purpose is alleged. Jeremy Caradonna is named as an elected official; no claim is made that any contribution influenced any decision. The Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act is cited for comparison only; no suggestion is made that Dogwood holds an arrangement requiring registration under it. Dogwood is registered with Elections BC as a third-party advertising sponsor for the 2026 general local elections.