Harper Promises to End Political Subsidy
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on April 3rd, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Politics
I'm not a fan of Jean Chrétien's campaign finance reform, but I'm even less a fan of Stephen Harper's plan to keep the system while dropping the political subsidy. The idea behind the vote-based political subsidy was to replace corporate and union contributions without turning Canada into the kind of country where the party which can fire the most passion gets an overwhelming financial advantage. Populism sounds nice if you don't think about it too hard, but if stirring up often-ugly passions is the only way to compete in the Canadian political arena, it will change the character of Canada for the worse.
For the most part, Jean Chrétien's election finance reform was misguided. In retrospect, corporate and union influence in politics via political contributions was not such a bad thing, and in a free society, the government went too far in forbidding it entirely. The practice at least promoted institutional stability.
Chrétien's reform was not an improvement, but the political subsidy helped cancel some of the negative effects and had at least one interesting result: a vote for a minor party, or a party that doesn't end up winning, is not necessarily a wasted vote, because you're at least helping to fund that party. In a small way, it makes every vote count.
In my opinion, we should either keep the system the way it is, or else roll it back to the way it was and stop taking away the freedom of unions and corporations to directly fund political parties.
The system Harper wants would not be an improvement, and furthermore it is not even conservative: he wants to keep the radical restriction on economic freedom, which is anti-conservative, but which happens to give his party an advantage because of the greater passion felt by Conservative voters. It's a way of disenfranchising the majority of Canadians by neutering the parties they support relative to his own.
Comments:
There are 0 comments on this item. Be the first to comment.
Post a Comment
* Required field, your email will not be posted.