The next Conservative election platform will reportedly contain a promise to abolish government funding of political parties. This excellent proposal promises to generate a lively and interesting debate.
You'll recall that a ham-handed Conservative effort to slip this same change into law precipitated the Keystone Kops coalition/prorogation follies of December 2008. Opposition parties, displaying a streamlined unity they can muster on no other issue, rose like hungry sharks to defend their mouthfuls of public money: over this, though not over anything more meaningful to Canadians, they were ready to topple the government on short notice.
The same pre-occupation endures, to judge by a La Presse story. "If Stephen Harper gets a majority in the next election and eliminates public financing of political parties, it's the end of the Liberal Party," is the key quote, attributed to an unidentified "influential Liberal."
Think about that. A party that endured and triumphed for decades without a penny of public money - not legally obtained, anyway - is now on life support from the public purse, by the admission of at least one important member.
That the whole party thinks the same way, and the New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois with them, is demonstrated by the anxious unanimity these parties show whenever this issue arises.
The subsidy is a nice chunk of change: $1.99 per year per vote received in the last election. At present that's about $10.4 million for the Conservatives, $7.26 million for the Liberals, $5 million for the NDP, and $2.74 million for the Bloc. Compare those subsidy figures to the totals the parties collect on their own, from supporters (who get a fat tax break on their donations): Conservatives $17.5 million last year, Liberals $9.5 million, NDP $4 million, Bloc $625,000.
(The Bloc numbers are particularly noteworthy. The subsidy covers almost all of the Bloc's campaign costs, since they run in only one province and one language. So the Bloc does little fundraising; supporters are instead invited to contribute to the provincial-level Parti Québécois. In this sense, the federal subsidy brings us closer to another referendum.)
True, in our times government does subsidize almost everything. But most such subsidies at least theoretically lead to some public good. Subsidizing political parties, however, merely serves to fossilize the existing structure, as those who hold power pull up the ladder against upstarts.
Political parties are strange beasts, talking incessantly about the public interest but defining that interest each by its own lights. For voters to choose among these definitions of the public interest is natural and healthy. But for voters who don't support a view to have to subsidize it is just bizarre.
Since corporation and union donations are tightly limited, the key question is this: If a party can't scrape up the funds it needs from individual voters who identify with it, why on earth should voters who don't identify with it be made to support it with money?