Turning Off the Taps

Stephen Harper wants to cut off funds allocated to political parties based on how many votes they get. Now if we only knew why.

The National Post’s Kelly McParland tries to figure out what Stephen Harper is up to with his plan to eliminate the subsidy scheme that annually gives federal parties $2 for each vote cast for them in the previous election. McParland speculates that Harper could be acting purely out of ideological hostility to the subsidies or attempting to financially hobble the opposition parties, but guesses that the truth “is that Harper is after the Bloc … he just hates the idea of Canada giving money to a separatist party so it can dominate Quebec and disrupt the ability of the rest of the country to elect a stable majority.” Interestingly, McParland points out, weakening the Bloc would benefit the Liberals more than Tories, and so Harper appears not to be acting out of self-interest, at least not completely.

The real point of the move, according to the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson, is to frame the next election as a choice between a Conservative majority government and an opposition coalition by conjuring up memories of 2008. That’s when Harper first proposed scrapping the subsidy program, causing opposition outrage, threats to bring down the government, and prorogation. Ibbitson says it’s false choice, and predicts that if “the Conservatives have by far the most seats after the next election, but still fall short of a majority, they will govern, just as they governed after the elections of 2006 and 2008.” If the vote’s close, the result could be a coalition, but it could be also be “something more ad hoc.” Sounds fun.

The Post’s Tasha Kheiriddin says the subsidies need to go, no matter what Harper’s reasons. “The result [of the program] is not more democracy… but less,” she writes. “Taxpayers are forced to subsidize parties for whom they would not vote ... Parties should rely on funds from their supporters, and no one else.” Wait a minute, isn’t that exactly what the system ensures? A party’s supporters pay taxes, and then directly decide which party gets some of that money by voting for them. Sounds pretty democratic to us in The Newsroom.