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Replacing allowances for Canada's national political parties

22 Jan 2010

The annual value of the quarterly allowances paid directly to the national parties would equal the total number of votes received by a qualifying party in the previous election multiplied by $1.75 (Flanagan and Jansen 2009, 195-196). [...] If we sum the amounts in Tables 1 and 2, and so add the money raised from corporations, associations, and trade unions to the amount parties would have lost had the individual contribution limit been $5,000, the total comes to more than $68 million, almost half of which, ironically, would have been lost by the Liberals, the authors of Bill C-24. [...] A comparison of the figures in the last column of Tables 1 and 3 shows that, between 2004 and 2007, the Liberal Party received almost exactly the same amount as it had raised from corporations, unions, and individual contributions in excess of $5,000 in the previous four years (in inflation-adjusted dollars), and so has profited very little from the legislative changes. [...] The Progressive Conservatives did not offer a critique based on principle; instead, they suggested that implementation should be delayed for two years so that a new election could be held in the meantime, thus giving a more up-to-date basis for financial support of the parties.6 In the 2004 general election, the Conservative Party of Canada, into which the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives ha [...] The best-known model for such a system is the taxpayer check-off system used in the United States as part of the public funding of presidential primary and election campaigns.
government politics elections campaign finance taxpayer taxation inflation canada fundraising government policy political parties political system election parliament government budget liberal government expenditures conservative conservative party (uk) political campaigns conservative party of canada bloc québécois harper progressive conservative campaign funds canadian alliance minority government preston manning internal revenue service

Authors

Flanagan, Thomas

Pages
15
Published in
Canada

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