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THREAD: I could say a lot about this story, including the breath-taking arrogance of the Bloc Québécois to criticize *anyone* over accepting public financing of political parties, but ... 1/16 https://globalnews.ca/news/6983011/liberals-political-parties-wage-subsidy/">https://globalnews.ca/news/6983...
2/16 ... the thing that strikes me the most is how much everyone has accepted a very defensive narrative about how our political party system is financed.
3/16 Political parties are not private social clubs, but a vital component of a country’s democratic infrastructure, and if they cannot be financed through some composite of public and small donor financing, ...
4/16 ... they will be sold to the higher bidder, or the electoral process will be taken over by interest group/third parties. Take a look down south for what happens next.
5/16 For anyone who doesn’t know the history, Ed @Broadbent advocated for years that corporate and union donations to political parties be ended in favour of a per-vote public financing subsidy.
6/16 Before leaving office in 2003, Jean Chrétien wisely enacted just such a measure, so future PMs would not be so dependent on large corporate donations.
7/16 (The Liberals had never built a mass fundraising scheme, ...and so were particularly dependent, and to a far greater extent than the NDP ever depended on union support.)
8/16 The Harper government tried to remove the per-vote subsidy during the 2008 financial crisis, leaving an opening for Jack Layton to try and assemble a governing coalition with the Libs and Bloc to better handle the financial crisis.
9/16 But Harper prorogued the House, and then Ignatieff thought he could win on his own and so pulled out. Harper backed off on killing the subsidy, but then ran on doing so, and ended it when they got a majority, ...
10/16 ... without returning corporate and union donations in its place. They subsequently removed a party’s ability to borrow from anyone but Schedule 5 banks and credit unions, or to receive bequests from people’s wills.
11/16 The upshot is that a party has to raise $40M over a four year cycle to finance a fully-funded federal election campaign, or be able to borrow it from a bank. In government this might be easy - in opposition it is not, and ...
12/16 ... particularly not when a party is in an unpopular phase, or during a minority government. It also leaves the decision to banks which parties they will finance to run for office.
13/16 If voters do not want a full set of choices to vote for in an election, the current system is a good way to remove choices ahead of time (revealing the Liberals’ interest in not undoing Harper’s changes).
14/16 The Bloc has much lower central campaign costs because it does not have to finance air travel for its leader’s tour, or provide bilingual materials. It routinely sits on large surpluses in riding association accounts from election rebates as well.
15/16 One of my major fears about the aftermath of the current crisis is the concentration of economic and political power and the weakening of public institutions. Political parties are very important institutions in our democracy: ...
16/16 Political parties choose who will run, and develop governing platform options for voters to choose between - and people will miss them more than they realize once they’re gone.