Politicians know voters can be bought

If an election candidate in Canada were to hand out $100 bills to prospective voters, or promise to deliver the cash once safely elected, what do you suppose would happen? Correct. They would probably win.

Right-thinking voters might have answered that any candidate offering such blatant inducements would be arrested for bribery, or at least indignantly rejected by voters. And that might be the case, in the case of cash. But cheques evidently make it all OK.

As this newspaper reported Monday, in slightly over a year since assuming office, the Trudeau Liberals have made over 3,000 spending announcements totalling $18.9 billion. Which is not in fact a cheesy $100 per Canadian, but a generous $540. And before anyone objects that it is the business of governments to raise and spend money, note that these announcements are rarely about, say, granting larger budgets to our emaciated military or finding some novel way to fund health care. They are mainly about delivering boodle to voters.

As Postmedia’s David Akin has catalogued, spending proclamations are overwhelmingly used to advertise specific benefits to specific ridings, like a new container terminal in Montreal or a refurbished bowling alley in Tyne Valley, Prince Edward Island. And if you’re wondering why the federal government is fixing up a bowling alley, please reread the preceding paragraphs.

It is possible to argue that it is natural, even desirable, for governments to publicize the things they do. After all, the basis of democracy is that good policies will be popular and bad ones will not. If not, why choose leaders by voting? But for such a system to work, citizens must take a public-spirited view of what constitutes good policy, rather than calculating how much booty just fell into their pocket or purse.

Not all government announcements are bribes. One could defend $54 million in aid to Haiti out of simple humanitarian concern. But far too many are in the category of perks: nice to have, but hardly essential to the national interest. Such as $150,250 for a new splash pad for kids in Torbay, NL, or subsidies for maple syrup producers in a New Brunswick riding that switched from Conservative to Liberal in 2015. Indeed, of the nearly $100 billion the Liberals have pledged for “infrastructure,” only about a third is for roads and bridges. The rest is: Vote for us and we’ll give you a skating rink or a subsidy.

The Trudeau Liberals did not invent this sort of conduct. Over the four years of their majority in Parliament, Conservative MPs made no fewer than 7,307 such announcements. And while the Liberals are getting more bang for the buck, averaging one announcement for every $6 million in handouts — nearly eight announcements a day including weekends — the Harper Tories needed just 72 days to proclaim $18.9 billion in goodies after winning the May 2011 election. And relabelling handouts “social infrastructure” was a bizarre and harmful if slick leap into vote-buying disguised as social engineering by supposedly frugal philosophical conservative advocates of limited government.

Such handouts are thrice cursed. They are bad for the government’s balance sheet. They sully our politics. And they undermine civil society. That splashpad in Torbay, for instance, is supposedly being built by the Kinsmen. It would be far better for community engagement if it were also funded by them.

One final way to attempt to excuse this farrago is to note that since everybody does it, nobody particularly benefits. But that’s surely an argument for eliminating such blatant vote-buying.

Unfortunately, no party can afford unilaterally to disarm here. Or rather, no party thinks it can. Although Trudeau’s Liberals denounced the Harper Tories’ 2015 “Canada 150” plan to subsidize sesquicentennial events as a reelection “slush fund,” they kept it going once elected, dipping in for over 200 PR-worthy gifts, mostly to Liberal ridings.

They won’t stop until we stop them by indignantly refusing to elect anyone who bids for our votes in broad daylight, certain we are openly for sale.