Flipping the Line: Restoring the per-vote subsidy won't help, and might hurt

Harrison Ruess on what's wrong with our politics, and what won't fix it.

The Line welcomes angry rebuttals and responses to our work. The best will be featured in our ongoing series, Flipping the Line. Today, Harrison Ruess disagrees with a recent Line article by Colin Horgan, in which he called for a return of the per-vote subsidy.

By: Harrison Ruess

As a participant in the Canadian political system for many years on the staff side, and in an ongoing way adjacently through news and agency work, let me be crystal clear: putting more money — and government money especially — into the system will not improve Canadian political discourse, or our democracy.

While I generally loathe to use the U.S. as a comparison for Canada — I think we generally do that too much, to our own loss — a key element that separates Canadian politics and democracy from our neighbours to the south is that our Canadian democracy is not ruled by money. The fact that campaigns up here must all be done on the cheap, and appeal to grassroots Canadians, is a feature, not a flaw, of our politics.

For context, the campaign spending limit for national political parties in Canada runs up to a ceiling of about $30 million during an election. Third party spending (i.e. groups who are campaigning for or against political issues, but aren’t themselves political parties) is also curtailed drastically in Canada: the cap is less than $600,000 nationally for an organization.

And keep in mind these figures aren’t just caps on advertising spending — they include operational expenses, staff expenses, office rentals, production costs, etc. Making a campaign expense budget work within the limit is, literally, a full-time job. 

All told, in the last Canadian federal election in 2021, our political parties spent a grand total of $82.9 million, combined. This is not nothing, certainly, but it is also within the realm of comprehension. 

Looking south … Anyone want to guess how much money was spent between the Democrats and Republicans? 

Might be fair to guess 10 times the Canadian total, since the U.S. is about 10 times our size? Maybe plus a little, since there are more races going on — presidential, House, Senate, etc. That would put you, maybe, guessing somewhere a little north of $1 billion? Maybe a couple billion?

Well, if you followed that logic, you’re a tad off.

The Democrats and Republicans, in 2020, spent $14.4 billion. That’s 173 times more than Canadian expenditures. That excludes the $2.7 billion spent by American third parties (aka political action committees, or PACs). 

Now a couple allowances. First, this isn’t a totally level apples-to-apples comparison — the U.S. election cycle is longer, has more races, more people, etc., so of course their total is higher. On the flip side in Canada, there are separate limits for spending outside of the writ period, including the 30-day pre-writ period, and so the $82.9 million total figure is likely a little low in reality, once you account for spending outside of the election period proper. Those acknowledgements made … if you didn’t already know, holy crap, U.S. elections are big business and hyper-partisan beyond anything that exists in Canada.

With more cash at hand, political parties are able to produce and advertise more of the content that Colin thinks is the problem driving division in our society. This will include content with very specialized messaging, designed to fire up very specific (sub) segments of the electorate, in very specific ways. Indeed, thanks to hyper-specific targeting capabilities of digital platforms, based around issues, beliefs, identity and geography, we’re already living with it. The extreme consequence of big money politics is readily apparent when we watch U.S. politics.

In fact, if you want to peek behind the curtain, you can check out Facebook’s Ad Library and see how the Liberal party, Conservatives, or New Democrats use these capabilities across Meta’s platforms. There’s a mix of positive messages, scaremongering, and fairly generic lead-gen messaging, all trying — in different ways — to get you to click, give away some data, and spread political messages. From an advertiser’s perspective, I can tell you first-hand how powerful and helpful these tools are. From the perspective of healthy political discourse advocate, I am also aware of the potential pitfalls. Giving parties more money to spend on this stuff won’t help us avoid the pitfalls.

While the Liberal party’s intentions in the early 2000s in reforming campaign finance rules may not have been entirely virtuous — as the reforms we at least partly intended as a defensive move to provide cover from the explosive, and ultimately government-ending, sponsorship scandal — the result nevertheless has been very positive, in keeping federal political budgets in Canada comparatively small. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government cemented this by lowering donation limits even further, and getting rid of the subsidy.

Another key reason not to bring back the subsidy is to encourage stability, by forcing political parties to take the time to reset after an election campaign, reconnect with Canadians, and — bluntly — refill their bank accounts by begging grassroots Canadians for money. The subsidy, on the other hand, allows parties to simply go over to Elections Canada after an election with their hat out, get taxpayer dollars stuffed in, and bingo-bango, they’re ready for the next campaign! 

Even the NDP (sort of) supported Stephen Harper in 2011 on ending the subsidy. Late NDP Leader Jack Layton called the subsidies an “attack against democracy,” though still did support parties getting government money in some form.

Finally: let’s read the room. Remember that removing the subsidy was a campaign plank that helped propel then-prime minister Harper’s new, national Conservative party to a majority government. I suspect Canadians today, during a cost-of-living crisis no less, won’t jump at the idea of using their tax dollars — which the government has already run out of — to fill the coffers of political parties.

Intense polarization is bad. Political discourse does need to improve. Identity politics needs to stop. It would be swell if we could debate ideas and issues more maturely (perhaps, even, as I am attempting to do here).

But pouring taxpayer dollars into the bank accounts of political parties won’t help. Connecting with a broad base of Canadians, who can individually decide to offer financial support directly, will. 

Harrison Ruess is the senior account director at spark*advocacy in Ottawa. He is also a former senior political staffer in Ottawa.

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