How About Some Campaign Finance Reform?

Jean Chretien was a mean old bastard when you crossed him. If he thought that you were looking to end his career, as his finance minister Paul Martin was, he would tear the temple down around him, Samson-like, and ensure that if he wasn't running the show, nobody could.

After it became clear that his days as Liberal leader and Prime Minister of Canada were nearing an end, Monsieur Chretien began railing endlessly about the corruption of our electoral system. Because he's such a helpful cat, he pushed through a reform bill that banned corporate and union donation and instituted a cash-per-vote government subsidy for each of the five major parties.

Of course, that was easy for Chretien to do when it became clear that he wouldn't be running again. You see, the Grits were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bay Street banks. That's where most of their campaign money came from. The Tories, on the other hand, had long before mastered the art of small, grass-roots fundraising in a way that the Liberals could never hope to seriously challenge. That left Martin, who had spent years undercutting Chretien, suddenly in charge of a party that couldn't raise money. Chretien single-handedly made the Liberal leadership not worth having.

I've never belonged to a political party for the simple reason that I've never found one that doesn't drive me up a fucking wall. Also, Canadians don't register to vote with a partisan affiliation, you actually have to go out and actively join a party, paying dues all the way. Since there's only a minimal chance of my getting laid that way, I can't be bothered.

I've voted for minor parties or independents in every federal or provincial election since 2002. If I was American, I would have registered as a Republican from 1988 through the 2000 primaries, at which point I would have switched to independent. So I really don't have a dog in this fight.

What I resent is campaign finance laws in their totality. Yes, I know that they were drafted to stop things like bribery from occurring, but that overlooks the fact that bribery was already against the law. Ultimately, the people are responsible for the governments they elect, and as long as they insist on electing James Michael Curley from jail, or practically anyone in Louisiana, New Jersey or Quebec, all of the laws in the world aren't going to change anything. The law is essentially a pacifier to make stupid people feel better about themselves and a way for politicians not to have to work very hard.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made a big spectacle about ending Chretien's vote subsidy over the last couple of years. Indeed, the stillborn Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition was a direct response to it. Harper still brings up killing the subsidy from time to time, if only because it causes Michael Ignatieff to stutter with impotent rage.

A Globe and Mail article from yesterday, however, puts the lie to Harper's "principled stand". Terminating the Chretien subsidy would do almost nothing to stop the flow of public money into Canadian elections. It certainly wouldn't go as far as I would.

The allowance makes up a large chunk of every party’s finances, but not all of it. Including donations their various riding associations received, the Conservatives raised about $22.6-million in 2009, compared to about $12.5-million that the Liberals raised. The NDP was able to draw in about $5.1-million in donations, the Greens about $1.5-million and the Bloc about $1.4-million.

The Conservatives are in the best position financially because they do the best job raising money. In 2009 they had over 100,000 donors to their national headquarters, and in total raised about $4.33 per vote earned in the 2008 general election. This compares favourably to the Liberal average of $3.42 raised per vote and $2.01 for the NDP. The Bloc comes out on the bottom, raising about $0.99 per vote.

But a fine-tuned fundraising machine is not without its costs to the taxpayer. A donation of $400 or less to a political party or riding association results in a tax credit of $300, or 75 per cent, more than twice the credit given to donations to charitable organizations. According to the Department of Finance, the cost of the tax credit in 2009 was an estimated $20-million. Assuming the credit is doled out in a proportion similar to the share of money raised by each party, that equates to a cost of $10.5-million on donations given to the Conservative Party, $5.8-million on donations to the Liberals, $2.4-million on donations to the NDP, and $700,000 and $600,000 on donations to the Greens and Bloc Québécois, respectively.

If it were up to me - and these things really should be - the political donation tax credit would be immediately discontinued. It is little more than a welfare program for political parties and does nothing to prevent fraud, corruption and bribery, as the Sponsorship Scandal demonstrated pretty clearly.

As I noted earlier, I haven't voted for, or given money, to a major party candidate since 2000. Why then are my tax dollars essentially subsidizing the donations of people I see as my blood enemies, particularly when candidates and parties that I support receive nothing at all? Indeed, why am I subsidizing anybody's political preferences?

Even if you assume that this massive giveaway of public money to political hacks "keeps elections clean", there is absolutely no moral justification for the tax credit to politicians being nearly double that of charitable contributions.

The parties, although the overwhelming majority of their money comes from the public treasury , still fancy themselves private institutions that are allowed to create and enforce their own rules and charters and are compelled to provide only the minimal amount of transparency.

If Harper was even halfway honest, he would end that by discontinuing all public support for the parties or introduce legislation forcing them to live with the same disclosure requirements that registered charities do. That means that everybody's salary and expenses would be disclosed, from the janitor right up to the president. If the party is paying for a candidate or MP's clothes or diction lessons, that would be immediately disclosed, too. The same goes for legal fees. You could actually line those bastards up against a way and find out where every penny is going.

I would go even further than that in addressing the role of lobbyists in the parties and in elections. There wouldn't be one. No registered lobbyist would be allowed to work (including in an unpaid role) for a political party at any time. If they truly wanted to participate, they would be barred from lobbying government at any level for a period of twenty years. Elected MP's and their parliamentary staffs would be prohibited from lobbying for life. If you want to do something about "the appearance of wrongdoing", there's no better place to start than with lobbyists.

People would still have the "right to petition their government" but they would no longer be able to play both sides of the fence. Few things undermine public confidence in their democracy quite like political hacks and senior bureaucrats getting rich as a direct result of their political or public service, and as long as the parties thrive with public money, that can and should be stopped.

My preference would be to end all public subsidization of private political groups. They can raise their money the same way everybody else does, by earning it and paying taxes on it. After all, the Criminal Code of Canada already addresses the things that campaign finance laws are supposed to prevent. If the parties are completely private entities, then lobbyists could do whatever they wanted within them, however, they could still be dealt with in the government and the public service.

Let's look back for a moment to President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 campaign, It as funded by a very small group of bankers and industrialists because there were no campaign finance laws on the books at the time. TR gladly took their money, won in a landslide, .... and promptly screwed his patrons directly into the ground with anti-trust laws. At the same time, people like Curley were still going to prison for fraud, although they were often reelected from the hoosegow. The point is that the system worked just fine prior to federal campaign finance oversight.

Look at Barack Obama's campaign of three years ago. He broke his promise to take federal matching money and the spending limits that come with it. This allowed him to outspend John McCain by a margin of nearly ten to one. But it doesn't follow that this made his general election "privately funded." No, each and every one of Obama's donations were tax deductible by their contributors, which essentially means that they were subsidized. The Democratic National Convention in Denver also received a shit-ton in public subsidies as well. Obama and the Democrats paid absolutely no price for evading the limits of the federal matching funds system.

Having said that, I'm far more open to the idea publicly financed elections than I used to be. It wouldn't be my first preference, but there is something to recommend it. Public financing would forever destroy the illusion that political parties are purely private entities and their rules and charters could be regulated in a way that would better reflect the wishes of the voting public. We would also know exactly how much money they're taking in and where every penny of it was going. If public financing was combined with meaningful lobbying reform, you could theoretically accomplish a great deal.

If you went down a public financing road, I would insist on every candidate getting an equal amount to campaign with. The late Tooker Gomberg and Enza "Supermodel" Anderson would get exactly as much money as Stephen Harper does. Doing otherwise just rewards incumbency and perpetuates the same problems we have now. Sure, giving fringe candidates tens of thousands of dollars might be a giant waste of money, but it's hard to say that the system we have now isn't. I can't honestly say that a drag queen is any more laughably irrelevant or ridiculous than, say, Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper.

The fact is that politics in North America is already almost completely publicly funded. but the parties remain able to hide behind the facade that they're completely private institutions as they raid the public treasury through the tax code. I would much prefer yanking all of their public support - every last dime of it. But if they insist on maintaining their welfare lucre, they should be regulated even more strongly than charities are. After all, charities don't often wind up writing the laws that the rest of us have to abide by and political parties do.

Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that Harper is even halfway serious about meaningful political financing reform. He merely wants to eliminate the only thing that makes the Liberals even marginally competitive. The Harper Conservatives aren't about to do anything that would effect the tax breaks to their donors, which they would if they weren't as insanely wrong-headed and corrupt as everybody else in the system.

Harper is using this to destroy the Liberals, which I'm actually fine with. I believe that they'll be a smouldering ruin within the next 20 years anyway, so anything that speeds that along is fine by me. But I'm not going to pretend that he isn't doing anything that's not to his primary and solitary benefit. He's every bit as sleazy as Chretien was, he's just better at it.