Oshawa’s Joint Compliance Audit Committe to audit mayoralty candidate’s election expenses

Oshawa’s Joint Compliance Audit Committee is moving forward with an audit of publisher and perennial mayoralty candidate Joe Ingino’s 2022 campaign expenses after a hearing at City Hall Thursday morning.

An application to audit Ingino’s election expenses had been filed by Ward 4 Oshawa Councillor Derek Giberson and five other residents and business people in the city, who claimed Ingino spent more than $100,000 above the allowed candidate limit during last year’s campaign.

The claims are based on advertising rates cards from Ingino’s weekly Oshawa Central newspaper, which the co-signers used to determine Ingino, who has run for Mayor in several recent elections, spent $219,687 on his campaign last year.

The mayoral race spending cap for Oshawa in 2022 was $111,153.25. Ingino reported on the advertising line of his campaign expense section only $3,000 in expenses.

“This suggests either an unfathomable error in financial reporting or the falsifying of an election campaign filing,” the co-signers said.

Ingino called the application “frivolous” and politically motivated” and said the claims were “erroneous” several times during his presentation to the committee, noting that he uses several rate cards for prospective advertising clients.

“The applicant, without any knowledge of my company, without any knowledge of reality … has bundled everything together and expects people to believe it,” he said. “He has no expertise to make that judgement.”

“He decided to make it political.”

Ingino, who referred to the application as “pure insanity,” also made several personal accusations about Giberson and two of his co-applicants – Domenic Albis and Roger Bouma – and had to be muted several times by the committee and reminded to remain on topic.

The committee, citing “a number of financial questions,” decided to go ahead with the audit. Ingino has 15 days to appeal the decision to the Superior Court of Justice.

Another application to audit, that of Dave Thompson, who ran against Giberson in Ward 4 in 2022, was turned down, with the committee deciding “not to proceed.”

Thompson, who came in second in a close race where the top four candidates were all within 500 votes of each other, claimed election expenses of $4,484, while Giberson claims his true expenses topped $12,000.

The controversial Ingino, who once called the gay community a “circus act,”  finished third in the Mayor’s race in 2022, totalling 2,956 votes.