What we need in this country is less money in politics, not more

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What is an election? It is a conversation among the citizens. We deliberate together for a period of time, and then we vote.

When it comes to voting, we attach great importance to the idea of equality. Everyone gets to vote, and every vote counts equally. No matter how wealthy you are, or what high office you hold, you get exactly the same say in deciding who governs us as the poorest and humblest among us.

That being the case, shouldn’t that principle – equal voice – also apply to the conversation that precedes it? We don’t give the rich more votes than anyone else. Why should they be entitled to more time or space to recruit others to vote with them – in effect, to multiply their votes – at the expense of those with less means?

That is the principle that underpins campaign finance regulations. The intent, however imperfectly realized, is to prevent the voices of the moneyed from drowning out those of the many, whether through contributions to political parties, or through the direct purchase of advertising and other means of influencing an election outcome, so-called “third-party” campaigns.

Relatedly, it is to ensure that the conversation is limited to the people who will actually be casting their votes in the election: no corporate or union money, and no foreign money, either. If I had my way, it would also preclude government money. A citizen-based system of campaign finance, rather, is the ideal, funded entirely by voluntary individual donations, in amounts limited to what the average person can afford.

We have come a long way toward this in Canada. Individual donations have been limited in size, while corporate and union money has been banned in most jurisdictions. Why, then, is the Ontario government of Conservative Premier Doug Ford proposing to go in the opposite direction?

The Premier has unveiled legislation containing several proposed amendments to the province’s election laws. They include:

• Repealing the current law requiring elections to be held on a fixed four-year schedule, returning the province to the days when the premier alone decided when elections should be held.
• Increasing the ceiling on individual contributions to political parties, now set at about $3,400 annually, to $5,000.
• Making the current $2.54 per-vote subsidy the parties receive out of public funds – conceived as a temporary stopgap to compensate them for the loss of corporate and union donations, banned by the Liberals under Kathleen Wynne in 2016 – permanent.

Each of these is a bad idea on its own. Together they add up to a hideous step backward for the ideal of fair elections. Who, indeed, was asking for any of this? Who thinks that the problem with politics in this country is the absence of big money – that we aren’t spending nearly enough money on attack ads and push polls and the rest of the arsenal of political weaponry with which the parties seek to divide and confuse us? Whose complaint about current election law is that well-heeled donors have too little influence on the parties? Who was demanding that the Premier be given absolute latitude to call an election at a time calculated to maximize his political advantage?

Of course, fixed-date election laws, in Ontario as elsewhere, are more honoured in the breach than the observance, their framers having in every case taken care to insert a provision stipulating that they do not bind the royal prerogative, or the discretion of the governor-general or provincial lieutenant-governors to call elections whenever they like (within the five-year limit prescribed under the Constitution).

And since the King’s representative acts only on the advice of his or her first minister in such matters, the law cannot bind them either. Which is why first ministers, including Mr. Ford, have continued to call snap elections whenever it suits them, undeterred by the law that supposedly forbade them to do so.

So perhaps it is just as well to give up the pretense – though the alternative was always open to first ministers to abide by the plain sense of the statute, rather than to play the public for suckers.

But as for the rest: The mind reels. It takes, it must be said, a certain cheek to call for loosening the limits on campaign contributions, at the very moment when the Ford government is embroiled in a massive scandal over, among other things, dodgy campaign contributions.

First the province’s Auditor-General found irregularities in the Skills Development Fund, a Ford government program that doles out money to businesses to train their workers. Some applicants had been approved at the political level, though they had received a low rating from the civil servants administering the program, while others, more highly rated, were denied grants.

Then it emerged, in reporting by The Trillium, that over $100-million in SDF grants had gone to clients of the lobbying firm run by the Premier’s adviser and campaign manager, Kory Teneycke. Then it was reported by Global News that at some firms that had received millions of dollars in grants, executives and their family members had made multiple donations to the Ontario PC Party, in some cases totalling tens of thousands of dollars.

Call it pay to play, or call it a coincidence, but it seems a peculiar time to announce a 47-per-cent increase in contribution limits. Indeed, Ontario’s campaign finance laws are lax enough as it is. The $3,400 limit, for example – nearly three times what it was when the Wynne reforms were first introduced – applies only to contributions to a political party. Donors can give another $3,400, in total, to the same party’s candidates, constituency associations and nomination contestants, plus a further $3,400, total, to contestants in a party leadership race.

All told, that’s in excess of $10,000 that an individual seeking favour with a party can potentially donate, each and every year. And they can give the same amounts to any number of parties. That’s a level of largesse attainable by only a small fraction of the population.

What is more, they can give unlimited amounts to third-party campaigns – as can corporations and unions – who can spend up to $125,700 provincewide during a campaign (or $5,028 in any riding) to support or oppose candidates or parties. A further, considerably higher limit used to apply in the 12 months prior to a campaign, until the Supreme Court struck it down earlier this year.

But again, there is no limit on the number of duplicate third-party campaigns a person, corporation or union can donate to, each entitled to spend the $125,700 maximum. So long as they do not co-ordinate their activities with each other or the party – insert rolled-eye emoji here – it’s all legal.

All of this torrent of money is flooding into campaigns at a time when it has never been less needed. It has never been cheaper or easier to “get your message out” to large numbers of people: All it takes is an e-mail blast or social-media post. The only reason any of the parties spends anything like as much as they do is because the other parties are doing so. It’s an arms race, and like an arms race, all sides would be better off disarming – so long as everyone disarms at the same time.

What would a real campaign-finance law look like? Go back to the principle discussed at the top: equalizing the ability of every citizen to participate in a campaign. To make sense, that has to be about the total amount each citizen can contribute, to all parties, candidates and constituency associations combined – not the amount they give to any one of them.

And to get around the third-party problem, it should apply equally to third parties. Whether you call them parties or third parties, they are alike as instruments for individuals to project their voice in the political arena. Third parties should be treated neither more nor less leniently than the official parties, but – so far as they spend money to support or oppose a party or candidate – in exactly the same way.

So set a single global annual political contribution ceiling, and bring all the players – parties, candidates, constituency associations and third parties – under it. Then leave it to individual donors to decide how they want to allocate their contributions between them, within that limit. The multiplicity problem – multiple parties, and multiple third parties – ceases to be an issue. The more a donor gave to one, the less contribution “room” he would have left to give to others.

In fact, you wouldn’t even need spending limits at that point. So long as a party or third party were confined to spending only what they could raise from individual, globally limited donors in this way, there would be no necessity. The equality we seek, after all, is not between parties, but between citizens.

What level should the global limit be set at? Reasonable people can differ, but how about … $1,000? That’s a lot less, I realize, than is currently allowed, even for individual contributions. And it would have to be shared among multiple players. But so what? Most of what is now spent on political campaigns is spent on things that hurt democracy.

What we need in this country is less money in politics, not more. Not only should we be setting much lower contribution limits, we should abolish the various public subsidies as well: the per-vote subsidy (already abolished federally), but also the tax credit for political contributions, and the partial reimbursement of candidates’ expenses. If people want to contribute to political parties, let them do so on their own dime. If parties need to finance their operations, let them raise the funds from willing individual donors, not the taxpayer.

And if, as a result, fewer political consultants, pollsters and advertising gurus are employed, I’m not going to cry myself to sleep. Neither should you.