This is the story of how Jean Chretien single-handedly destroyed what was the most successful political party in the history of democracy.
To this day, federal Liberals can't stop crowing about how Chretien won three consecutive majority governments, the first leader of any party to do this since Sir Wifred Laurier. But like most things that Liberals crow about, it's a heavily qualified truth.
In 1984, Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Mulroney built what was thought to be an unbeatable national coalition and won the largest majority government in Canadian history. By 1993 that coalition was in tatters around his ankles. Western Conservatives founded the Reform Party and Quebec nationalists broke away from Mulroney to become the Bloc Quebecois. His successor as Tory leader, Kim Campbell was reduced to a mere two seats, the single biggest ass-kicking in history that I'm aware of.
Yes, Chretien won three majorities, but his main political opposition had to be broken in three pieces for him to do it. If you combine the popular vote for just Reform and the PC rump and excluded the BQ, Chretien never would have won at all.
Because Liberals don't like one another very much, Chretien had to find an enemy within his own party. His former competitor for the leadership and finance minister, Paul Martin served this purpose excellently. Over the years, Martin's esteem in the party surpassed even Chretien's, and the prime minister soon found himself being pushed out of office by his own party.
The way Jean Chretien reacted to this shocks me to this day, a full decade later. He decided, in 2002, to fundamentally change the way Canadian political parties are funded. As I'll explain, Chretien hobbled his own party's chances of winning government after his ouster.
Because people are very dumb, there's a common misconception among Canadians that the Conservatives were the party of big business. That couldn't be further from the truth. The Liberals were. The Grits were bankrolled almost exclusively by Bay Street (Canada's slightly more elegant and ethical version of Wall Street, for my foreign readers.) If you were an uber-banker, mega-lawyer, a scumbag lobbyist, or just an overall well-heeled motherfucker, chances are that your money was going to the LPOC.
The Reform Party (and the Canadian Alliance that seceded it) was a true expression of populist stupidity, and got very little money from special interests. After the Campbell debacle of '93, the Progressive Conservatives weren't getting much money at all.
Chretien, in his dying days as Supreme Leader, changed that. He outlawed corporate and union donations, and put the parties on a per-vote subsidy system. In doing so, he denied his own party and the NDP their primary funding sources. That was fine for him, since it was clear that he couldn't run again and he hated Paul Martin anyway. That's why you should be wary of any "reform" that pointedly doesn't effect the politician proposing it.
The merged Reform-Alliance-PC Conservative Party under Stephen Harper were expert in grassroots fundraising, and the NDP defied any sane person's expectations in building a popular and financial base in Quebec. The only people that suffered under the new system were the Liberals, which was sort of the point. Martin was reduced to a minority government in 2004 and defeated outright in '06.
After the Harper Tories violated their own unconstitutional fixed-election date law in 2008, they sought to end the per-vote subsidy entirely, The opposition parties threatened to defeat the minority Conservative government and, because the Tories don't believe in anything at all, they backed down. God forbid that those jackals be defeated on anything even slightly resembling principle.
After winning his "stable, national, majority government" in May of 2011, Harper started clawing back on the per-vote subsidy, which is something that you think would make me happy, right?
Wrong.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good start, but it doesn't even approach how far I'd go if people were crazy enough to put me in charge.
For some reason, politicians that presume the right to lord over us have rigged the system in such a way that their political machinery is actually a ward of the state, protected by law and exempted from taxes. .
Your political donations are tax-deductible, and there's no logical reason that they should be.
Political parties and their think-tanks, and now the "independent issue advocacy groups" are not only tax-exempt, so are your donations to them. And there's no logical reason that they should be.
I'm currently having this argument with Jay Batman (who, incidentally, has the best last name ever) at his stellar blog Screed of Momus. If you're smart, you'll read Jay regularly. It was Mr. Batman who suggested that I was in favour of a "speech tax," which is contrary to my actual views.
Political parties like to pretend that they're "private organizations" when it suits their purposes, but they'll wildly suck at the public teat whenever they can. Banks do this, too, but they son't write the enabling legislation - at least not overtly. Everything they do is either granted magical tax deductions when it can't be directly subsidized by the government.
They should be forced to make a choice, are they public or private?
It used to be that conservatives frowned on campaign finance reform because it inhibited speech. Transparency, they said, would solve the problem of corruption. But, like most modern conservatives, they've created a moving target. Now they want their donations - not only to politicians, but associated independent and private groups - kept strictly private, lest Barack Obama say something mean about them. Y'know, because Republicans would never have a bad word to say about, I dunno, George Soros and his subsidized political activism.
Make no mistake about it, the political donations that you write off are subsidized by the rest of us. Each and every deduction in the tax code necessitates a higher rate for everybody. Moreover, it is nothing less than social engineering.
As I've said before, I don't claim my charitable deductions (such as they are) from my taxes specifically because I don't feel that giving is actually giving if I expect a percentage of that money back from everybody else. And what I get back is necessarily paid for by someone else in higher rates, which is true of all deductions. My longtime readers will note that I've asked them to give to foreign (usually American) charities that can't be claimed on their taxes. And a lot of you did. More than anything else I've done in my nearly ten years of blogging, that makes me proud.
You can make a solid case for charitable deductions. At least they're helping folks. Political contributions don't even create the appearance of helping people, as the ongoing train wreck that is government clearly demonstrates.
By the way, under American campaign finance law (I'm unsure about Canada's), campaign funds - which are tax deductible - can be rolled over into things like legal defence funds, which are not deductible.
More importantly, the current tax situation only benefits the major parties. Over the last decade, I've voted almost exclusively for minor party or independents that don't qualify for. According to the tax code, not only is my political speech is lesser than everybody else's, I'm treated differently under the tax code for it. There is no equality under the law when you support anyone other than a candidate that meets a certain criteria determined by, you guessed it, the major parties.
Eliminating the tax deduction isn't a "tax on speech" since it just removes a deduction on your income tax that is unevenly applied based on your political persuasion. These people aren't opposing a tax on their speech, they're insisting on a reward for it. And that ain't right.
Because I consider myself a conservative, and because conservative politicians are all in a tizzy about the tax code, I think that we should go first. Where we have the power to do so, we should introduce legislation eliminating the tax benefits of political contributions to our parties and advocacy groups and dare the liberals to join us. If they refuse to, call them on it.
If Stephen Harper was truly "getting public money out of politics," I'd support him all the way. But he isn't. I'm still supporting political parties and activities that I'd never vote for through my tax dollars.
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