OTTAWA’S OVERSIZED SUBSIDY.

Until we learned he was guest of the Aga Khan, whose foundation Ottawa has given $310 million since 2004, how many of us really cared where the prime minister and his family spent their Christmas vacation? Sir John A. himself regularly disappeared for weeks on end on drunken binges and the country didn’t suffer for it. If Mr. Trudeau provides good government, he can do it from Mars as far as I’m concerned.

Besides, even though I didn’t know exactly where he was, I was in virtually constant contact with him over the holidays. In fact I got an email from him New Year’s Eve — I and untold thousands of Canadians who are also on the Liberal Party of Canada’s email lists, that is. He couldn’t make the Canada 150 celebrations that night but he did find time to write and remind us what a great job his government is doing and to ask us to think of someone we cared about and then make a donation to the party, “not just because you believe in our movement, but for them. Because you both deserve a government that believes that in Canada, better is always possible.” (As opposed to all those other would-be governments who keep telling us in Canada better is never possible. Which would those be again?)

I should make my donation before midnight, Mr. Trudeau said, in order to take advantage of my unused 2016 political contribution tax credits. There, beneath his rococo signature, was a handy table outlining the cost of different levels of contribution. Contribution $20, cost to me $5. Contribution $100, cost to me $25. As deals go, it’s better than Boxing Day. Only when we get to the upper ranges of contribution does the 75-percent tax credit begin to fade away. Thus, if I give $500, it costs me $150, or 30 per cent of the gift rather than just 25 per cent, while if I give $1,500 and become a member of the Laurier Club, the hit to me is $850 or 57 per cent of what I give. Of course, for $1,500 I may also get a private meetgreet-and-talk-about-themiddle-class with the PM, depending on which Liberal ethics code is in effect that week.

In fairness, Mr. Trudeau isn’t the only prime minister pitching these tax credits. I’m also on the Conservative Party of Canada’s mailing list. (I hope readers appreciate the burdens we columnists bear on their behalf!) On January 5th, I got a Happy New Year from one Stephen Harper, telling me about what a terrible job the Liberals are doing, including destroying Canadian jobs with higher taxes while sending aid to small Asian and African countries to create “clean jobs” there.

His message came with a link to a webpage that handily calculated the tax credits associated with various levels of contribution.

The economic case for tax credits to political parties is the usual one that there is a collective interest in our having strong parties—which is actually debatable, although the parties certainly believe it—but that left to our own devices each of us will act as a free rider, reaping the benefits but letting someone else pay for them. If everyone did that, no one would pay for parties and we wouldn’t have them.

The tax-credit offsets this temptation to freeload. Make the credit generous enough and even the most jaded observer of our politics may decide “Sure, why not?”

But a 75-per-cent tax credit?! Credits for disaster relief, cancer research, taking in stray animals and so on top out at 33 per cent. Politics really deserves more than twice that? You hardly ever see subsidies that generous. Jack Mintz and Duanjie Chen did calculate several years back that the marginal tax rate on investment in P.E.I.’s forestry sector was minus — yes, minus — 58.2 per cent, which may explain why there aren’t many trees on P.E.I. But even if it’s not a record, 75 per cent is still a honking subsidy.

What’s puzzling is how it gets less generous the higher you climb on the income scale. It’s there to make up for the free-rider effect. Is that effect really greatest among low-income Canadians? Are they more cynical or myopic or less publicspirited than the rest of us, so they need a bigger incentive to get them to do what’s right?

In the end, the subtext of this oversized subsidy is actually encouraging: politicians evidently recognize that taxes affect people’s behaviour. With a bigger tax incentive you get more political contributions.

It’s not a great leap from that to: Taxing something more will give you less of it. Politicians do all understand the virtues of negative taxes. For 2017 we just have to keep working on their grasping the harms of positive ones.

DISASTER RELIEF AND CANCER RESEARCH GET LESS THAN HALF THE TAX CREDITS THAT PARTIES DO.