They like to tell you that the notion of banding together to oust the recently reelected Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government came from shitheel Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's economic statement that essentially said that everything was fine. Revisionists on the right like to pretend that that didn't happen, either. But it did.
Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15th and the End of the World began right in the middle of a Canadian federal election campaign. Flaherty and Harper spent September and October pretending that it wasn't happening and trying to distract everyone from the fact that they had pissed away a $13 billion surplus on socialist electioneering bullshit, like babysitters and hockey sticks. Conservative Party partisans like to pretend that Harper pissed away the surplus on his subseequent economic stimulus, but they lie about a lot of things, such as not being Keynesians in the first fucking place.
Flaherty did in fact deliver an economic statemement that November that basically said, in a soothingly Tracy Bonham-esque way, that "everything's fine." But that's not all that was in it. To deal with a deficit that Flaherty insisted didn't exist, he proposed abolishing the then $1.75 per vote public subsidy to the political parties.
That was what launched the Liberals and the NDP into a proposed coalition that would be supported by the Bloc Quebecois. In fact, they barely mentioned the economic crisis at all during those first few weeks. They were determined, more than anything else, to stop Harper and Flaherty's "undemocratic" dirty tricks, and they said so repeatedly. Harper responded by whipping up an idiotic constitutional crisis and destroying his chances of ever winning anything Quebec again.
The incessant lying on both sides of the political spectrum over the last three years has been nothing short of adorable, but the preceding five paragraphs of this little essay are about as an impartial and honest history of what happened as you're likely going to see anywhere. And it didn't even take me 700 pages to explain, like Peter Newman and his retarded Greek fishing hat would have.
Well, Harper has his precious majority now, he's still a Keynesian, and he brought back his plan to end the political subsidy. In fact, legislation was introduced on Tuesday, which will almost certainly pass.
Wanna hear a secret? I'm fine with killing the political subsidy. I oppose most campaign finance regulations precisely because the political parties are private entities, no different than corner stores or rub and tugs. Most folks who support campaign finance laws and regulations wrong-headedly insist they do so to prevent bribery and corruption. What they fail to see, or are too stupid to admit, is that bribery and corruption are already against the law.
Moreover, almost everyone supports keeping the revolving door between politics and lobbying, the single most destructive thing in democracy and government, well oiled. What no one seems to understand is that complex campaign and political regulations lock the scumbag lobbyists in place, since almost no one else can understand or navigate them. As I've said before, I'm not against lobbying, per se. I'm against otherwise unemployable people using public or political service to enrich themselves by corrupting everything that government is supposed to do. And I despise conservative politico lobbyists as much, or more, as I do their liberal cousins. To have anything approaching a representative government, they all need to be destroyed because they're all walking conflicts of interest.
Because I feel that political parties are private groups that should be free of government oversight and regulation, I also feel that they shouldn't be the beneneficies of government charity. If I think that they should be able to spend their money however they see fit, it's incumbent on me to demand that they raise it on their fucking own and stay out of the taxpayer's pocket. I see belonging to (or working for) a party as something of a charcter defect, and I'm outraged that those cocksuckers get a nickle of my loot, pathetically small though it is.
I'd love to support Harper's abolition of the public subsidy, but I can't because he isn't serious. It's almost impossible to believe that the prime minister is acting on principle, if only because he never has before.
For example, let's look at what Stephen Harper's is deciding to keep in the system and is rather dilligent in not mentioning at all.
Federal parties will still enjoy tax deductibility for the donations they receive that is 3-1/2 times more generous than the writeoffs available to registered charities. Four hundred dollars given to the Tories, Liberals or NDP will yield a tax credit of $300, while $400 given to a charity will lead to a deduction of just $88.My strategic vote for the NDP this past spring marked the first time in over a decade that I voted for a major political party at any level in over a decade. In last fall's mayoral election, I voted for a candidate that had dropped out of the race weeks earlier. But the major parties have been taking my money for my entire life, wheither I voted for them or not. But the minor parties and independents that I regularly support get shit. Under the tax code, my vote isn't equal to that of anyone who votes for the major parties.
The message that sends is that our elected representatives believe they and their activities are more than three times as valuable to Canada as the work of the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Canadian Cancer Society.
And at election time, individual candidates and national parties can count on refunds, too, of around one-half of their campaign expenses, totalling tens of millions of dollars. This enables national and local campaigns to fundraise only about half of the money they intend to spend. It permits them to count on taxpayers for the rest.
So even after the direct subsidies (which are worth $27 million a year) are gone, politicians in this country will still be receiving an average of more than $80 million in help - directly and indirectly - annually from taxpayers.
Any Ottawa bureaucrat that cares to take an illegal peek at my tax returns over the last 25 years will see that I've never claimed a charitable deduction. That's not because I haven't given. Rather, it's because I decided as a very young man that my giving is mine, and not something that I have any right to expect the public to subsidize. Furthermore, charity is supposed to be about sacrifice, and sacrifice doesn't entail getting a third back in April. In large part, that's why I've used this blog to support foreign charities that Canadians can't claim on their taxes. If you're a halfway decent human being, you'll give anyway.
If given the chance, I'd almost certainly repeal the charititable tax deduction because it distorts the very idea of charity. That being the case, you can bet your ass that I'd do away with the political deductions, subsidies and refunds to the parties, which are considerably less benevolent.
I earlier said that Stephen Harper is a man without principle. That's not true, at least not entirely. There has been one principle that has guided him throughout his life: Destroying the Liberal Party of Canada.
The Grits were pretty much ruined in May. Never before had they been bounced out of both government and opposition. For a party that exists only to win and exercise power, that's lethal. Almost everyone that isn't me never saw the possibility that the Liberals would hold fewer than half of the NDP's seats in Parliament. The Liberals have historically been unforgiving toward losers, and now they are losers. It's nothing less than remarkable that more of them haven't committed suicide. It's also very sad, because many of them should die in humiliating ways. May I suggest auto-erotic asphyxiation?
Their civil war remains alive and well. If you read Liberal blogs, you'll see that being leaderless is inconsequential to them. They've just turned their fire on party president, Alf Apps, instead. And anyone who thinks that an endless leadership campaign is going to accomplish anything other than fan the flames knows nothing about history and even less about politics. The Grits weren't able to unify when they were in government. Why does anyone think that they'll be able to when they aren't even marginally influential?
Would you give those people money, or ruin your reputation by running for them as a candidate? As bright people, I'm guessing that you wouldn't. That will leave them with a candidate pool of social misfits, such as those that used to run for the NDP or still run for the Green Party today. The Grits are in a logistically irrevisable death spiral. They can't get good candidates without money, and they can't raise money without good candidates. Brothers and sisters, they're well and truly fucked.
In abolishing the political subsidy, Harper is not only destroying one of the Grits' significant source of money, he's taking out their only significant source of money. The Liberals weren't like the Conservatives, who always did well with individual small donations. They were traditionally a tool of Bay Street. When Jean Chretien ended that as his final "fuck you" to the party that gave him a life, they became wholly reliant on the government in a way that no other party was.
The Harper Tories effectively killed the Liberals on May 2nd. By withdrawing the subsidy, he's shovelling dirt onto the casket.
But please don't try to tell me that Harper has a deeper principle involved than that. This has everything to do with strategic political positioning and nothing to do with Harper's imaginary belief system. If it did, he would take the parties out of the tax code in one fell swoop, which his majority makes him able to do whenever he pleases. That's exactly what he would do if he really believed that "money should come from voters, not from corporations, not from unions, and not from government."
By killing the direct public subsidy, Harper wipes the Liberals off of the face of the earth as surely and as finally as the Nazis were by military means. As a political positioning statement, he gets to make a giant show out of saving a middling $27 million. But by keeping the tax code exactly the way it has been for decades, he preserves $80 million in government giveaways with fewer people to share it with.
Imagine the tax code as it relates to the parties as a pie. If there are four people sitting around a pie and two of them are butchered to death with plastic forks, the survivors get more pie, don't they? It stands to reason that the stronger of the survivors will get a great deal more pie than the weaker one does. Who do you think is stronger, Stephen Harper or an NDP Opposition leader to named later?
For the upteenth fucking time, Stephen Harper had the opportunity to do something truly conservative, and instead just jiggered the existing system just enough to benfit himself and hurt his enemies. As someone who has read about 100 books about the life and career of Richard Nixon, I can appreciate that for what it is, clever opportunism. But I'm not going to pretend that it isn't anything other than that, and neither should you.
The dream of my lifetime, the final lonely death of the Liberal Party of Canada, has been realized. But I've woken up to the very real nightmare that the Harper Conservative have become the Liberal Party of Canada.
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