The Kandola cheque

The Grewal cheques that has attracted the least attention was written for $200 by a Mr. Kondola. How do we know about it? It was never mentioned in the CBC report, or in any subsequent media coverage.

We know it from the letter that Jim Holt (president of Grewal's riding association) wrote to CBC reporter Terry Milewski giving the official response to six cheques, a letter that was subsequently leaked to Kate at SDA. Kondola's cheque is mentioned first:

Firstly, we have a Mr. Kandola, who for some reason contacted you (or was referred to you by others) to indicate that he hadn't seemed to have received a receipt for a $200. political donation. To your credit Terry, and we thank you for saving us some time, you yourself were able to determine by examining public Elections Canada records that his cheque was indeed properly receipted. But I guess a question we have back to Mr. Kandola, via you, is just why did he make such a claim in the first place, and why was he in apparent error re the veracity of his claim?

Kondola's contribution was indeed registered with Elections Canada, as we can all see for ourselves here (or you can save yourself an enormous amount of work by using the tool engineered by Andrew over at Bound by Gravity

But Kandola's complaint was surely not that the donation had not been registered with Elections Canada, but that he had not received an official receipt, which would give him a substantial tax deduction. Now, there are lots of possibilities here. Perhaps he got it and lost it; perhaps it was issued and lost in the mail; perhaps it was never issued. (The processes of reporting a contribution to Elections Canada and sending it to the donor are surely related--but could a mistake not have been made here? There was a clerical error with Mann's cheque to Nina. Why not here?)

Which raises another point. Holt is defensive in his letter--perhaps justifiably so. But now that it's public, wouldn't Holt have looked better if, instead of being critical of Kandola, he wrote something like "our records suggest that a receipt was issued. If it has been somehow lost, we'd happily issue a replacement" (I assume there are ways to do this).

Kandola did, after all, give money to the Conservative party. Wouldn't it have been better to have given him the benefit of the doubt instead of critizing him?