Tom Kent, principal assistant to former prime minister Lester PearsonMerle Robillard
We must expect the close of the political barbecue season to be quickly followed by policy pronouncements in preparation for a 2011 federal election. Among the likeliest is a revival of the government's proposal to abolish direct public funding of parties. It suits the ideology of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's core supporters. Even more gratifyingly, it riles opposition politicians without giving them an issue on which they can rouse public indignation.
The current funding is lavish, thanks to the internal politics of a past Liberal government. The party had become utterly dependent on finance by corporations. Paul Martin had been showered with $12-million to ensure that he became the next leader. Consequently, in 2003, Jean Chrétien introduced the legislation that was to be his final and finest legacy for democracy. Corporate financing was to be all but prohibited.
The party's moguls were devastated. Its president not only proclaimed business's "beneficial" right to finance politics but also characterized Mr. Chrétien's intended legislation as being "as dumb as a bag of nails." Mr. Chrétien was faced with the threat of open opposition in caucus. He bought it off by the massive scale of increased public funding to offset the loss of corporate money.
This Danegeld, extracted by the Liberal heavyweights of the recent past, underlines what's wrong with the tax financing of political warfare. It pays for much of the stealthy spin doctoring, the attack ads, the other trivia of campaigning. Few uses of public money are more indefensible.
That fundamental fault is compounded by other weaknesses. Most conspicuously, the funding as now distributed is more helpful to a regional party than to a national one. The Bloc Québécois's share of nationwide taxation is more useful to it because its campaign spending is concentrated in one province.
Less conspicuous but greatly damaging to democratic politics is the effect of public financing on power within the parties. The money goes entirely to party headquarters, not to the constituency associations whose vigour is the root of representative democracy. Lavish tax financing has helped to make the parties more than ever centralized machines directed to manipulating opinion and power.
These and other faults could be mitigated. For example, each party's share of public funding could be paid to its constituency associations, on a scale related to their registered membership. Besides putting power where it should be, this could remove the bias in favour of regionalism.
There is negligible chance, however, that shifting money from the party centres will become acceptable to either Mr. Harper or the Liberal Party as it is. A cut in tax funding will be mainly offset by allowing bigger personal donations.
A political party is a voluntary association of people sharing views about public policy. Its members and sympathizers are the natural source for its finances. Democracy, however, requires a limit to one person's contribution. Otherwise, a party favoured by rich people, say, could have campaign resources quite out of proportion to public opinion. The issues for national politics are not whether there should be a limit to personal donations but what it should be and how far giving it should be encouraged, like charity, by tax remissions.
Under existing legislation, donations to parties are chiefly a subterfuge for public financing. The tax remission is so ridiculously large that the most money of your own you can give to the party of your choice is $450 a year. The nominal limit of a $1,100 donation entitles you to a tax remission of $650. That is money compulsorily provided to your party by other taxpayers, whatever their views.
If a census can be seen as an infringement of liberty, such compulsion to help finance a party not of your choice is an enormity that should be intolerable to Mr. Harper. In practice, we can at least be confident that bigger donations will not be accompanied by yet larger tax remissions.
With that proviso, a substantial increase in the ceiling for personal donations might rouse little controversy. For example, the amount you could contribute to your party from your own pocket would be multiplied fivefold, to $2,350 a year, if the ceiling were raised from the current $1,100 to $3,000.
In any event, other reforms are needed. But funding isn't a topic for the usual style of war between the parties. Calm negotiation of fair, firm rules is how politicians could best begin to restore some public respect.
Tom Kent served as principal assistant to prime minister Lester Pearson.