End corporate welfare for politicians
Fewer than one in 100 Canadians donate to a federal political party.
It’s not surprising, considering the low esteem in which most Canadians hold politicians. And a political party is not a charity, even though a political donation receives a more generous tax treatment than a charitable one does.
But no matter. In 2004, the Liberal Party amended the Elections Act to force all Canadians to donate to political parties through their taxes.
Now, political parties get just over $2 from the public treasury for every vote they received in the previous election. That means taxpayers have given the federal parties $27 million a year since the Oct. 2008 election.
Including a whopping $2.8 million a year to the Bloc Quebecois.
That party wants Quebec to leave Canada. But it’s not above wringing millions of dollars from Canadian taxpayers to fund that separatist project before they go.
But our scorn should not be heaped on them alone. Surely the NDP must be ashamed to have taken their $5 million annual allowance from the public purse, rather than have that amount spent on beloved social programs for the jobless during a recession.
And how do Liberals and Conservatives, both of which will tell us in the next campaign they are fiscally responsible and concerned about the deficit, justify this corporate welfare: $7.3 million a year to the Liberals and $10.4 million to the Tories?
Green gold
But no one makes out better than the Green Party. Not a single seat in Parliament, not one, often a fourth or fifth place showing. For staggering last across the finish line, Elizabeth May’s one-woman show has received cheques from the government totalling $1.9 million a year since Oct. 2008.
Sure beats having to go door-to-door earning support one cheque at a time.
But now that we have pointed out that all parties are on the take, let’s be fair. Just weeks after the 2008 election, as the country slid into a recession, the Conservative minority government proposed doing away with this luxuriant spending — including the Conservative lion’s share — to make parties raise money from Canadians who would voluntarily support them.
It was that suggestion — the thought of losing their own feathered nests — that panicked the three opposition parties, and caused them to form a formal coalition replete with a signed contract and joint press conference amongst their leaders.
The opposition parties say they despise the Conservatives on so many issues, from taxes to spending to justice to foreign affairs to global warming. But none of those disagreements were strong enough to ever cause the opposition parties to ask the governor general to depose the Conservatives.
But the fear of losing their own free money was.
And that is why the actual cost of these subsidies is so much higher.
Election saver
To stave off the opposition’s request, and a possible snap election forced just short weeks after the 2008 one, the Conservative government panicked in its own way. They retooled their 2009 budget, greatly increasing spending — and thus the deficit.
And until the threat of a coalition appeared, Stephen Harper had refused to appoint senators to the upper house, sticking to his clever strategy of reforming it by emptying it. Only when it became known that the opposition coalition was haggling over the spoils of those unfilled Senate seats did Harper fill them, lest they be divvied up as coalition booty, including for the first time to Bloc senators, and a rumoured seat for Elizabeth May, too.
It’s been two years since the formal opposition coalition, the coalition whose only core value, whose only cause for existence, was free money for its politicians. The coalition was enormously unpopular in polls, with the Conservatives reaching the high 40% range in opinion polls as a reaction.
The Conservatives lost control of the issue last time. They should take control this time and make abolishing the handout a central plank of their looming 2011 election platform.
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