As a tepid Conservative supporter in the last election and a former Liberal party member, I can call each as I see it and this week I'm disappointed in both.
The Tories, staying true to their Reform roots, want to do away with the $1.75 the parties get for each vote they receive in elections. Beyond their ideological motives, Harper is doing this to kick his opponents while they are down. The Conservatives do a better job raising funds from private citizens, so they need the public funding less. Clearly, their strategic calcualtions lead them to conclude that cutting out this per-vote funding will only hurt them while it decimates the other parties. So much for Harper's claim that he wanted a better relationship with Parliament. He has a duty to earn the confidence of the House, and if he's not even going to try, what is he there for?
The Conservatives have been misrepresenting this issue. First, it is not a "subsidy." It is a grant to parties based on vote share. Nobody who voted Conservative is seeing their money go to the Bloq or the NDP or the Liberals and vice versa. And if you do not vote, you send no money anywhere. So it is essentially a donation to a party of your choice. Secondly, it is not the only source of public financing the parties receive. Nor is it the biggest. Parties that get more than 2% of the national vote get 50% of their election expenses reimbursed. And candidates that get 10% or more of the vote in their riding get up to 60% back from the government. This amounts to more than the per-vote money. Why aren't the Conservatives cutting this? Considering that they spend more than any other party during elections, they benefit the most from this.
Public funding of parties may sound distasteful, but it is integral to our political process. We have banned unions and corporations from donating and have severly restricted private donations in an effort to ensure that our politicians aren't bought. Undoing this would be a terrible idea. Most democracies follow this path and we have done it for years. If you want to debate the merits of this, fine, but do not sneak it into a fiscal update and make it a confidence motion as the Conservatives have done. By doing this, they deserve the backlash of the parties. And if voters were more educated on this matter, they'd have to deal with backlash from them too.
I'm disappointed that the Liberals have been unable to find an MP who can communicate this to voters. They have pretended that they are angry with the economic update. And while that does leave much to be desired, the real reason for all the coalition talk is the cuts to party funding. The Liberals should not be afraid to say so. If they could manage to communcate their ideas to voters, perhaps they wouldn't be in the dire situation they are in now. They allowed their leader, Dion, to be defined for a year before they bothered to communicate what he was all about. They let the Green Shift get bad mouthed for a year without ever explaining it to Canadians. If they can't explain why election financing is good, then they don't deserve to form government in a coalition. A fight for election financing is worth bringing down the government for, especially since it was snuck in to an economic bill that it had no place being. Don Martin wrote in the National Post that "while the merits of political funding might be worth a debate during calm prosperous times, it has no place on an agenda that should now be devoted to important decisions." The NDP and Liberals should not be afraid to tell Canadians what they are standing up for. If they don't, then there's no way Canadians will stand with them.
