In B.C.’s big money politics, the buck needs to stop now
Alex Hemingway is the public finance analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. office. Shannon Daub is the CCPA-B.C.’s associate director and a leader of the Corporate Mapping Project
While British Columbians were divided over which of the main parties to support in the provincial election, most seem to agree on one thing: the need to get big money out of our politics.
But trying to contain big money is a bit like squeezing a balloon: press it in one place and it expands in another. That’s why it’s not enough to simply stop direct-cash donations by corporations and unions.
Any ban must be comprehensive, meaning no contributions of property and services, prohibiting loans or guaranteeing loans and banning institutional contributions to party leadership and constituency nomination races.
We need strict limits on individual donations to political parties so wealthy people don’t have an advantage over the rest of us. Limits on personal donations exist in most Canadian jurisdictions, but they’re still quite high, which encourages political parties to court the affluent.
The obvious solution is to limit political donations to a much lower level like Quebec did in 2013, capping donations at $100 a year, with an extra $100 allowed during election years.
We must also reduce the amount of money parties can spend during and between elections.
The expense limit for political parties in the 2017 B.C. election was a whopping $4.9 million. Allowing so much money to be funnelled into our elections means parties with big bucks can finance slick advertising and armies of campaigners. In Quebec, party election spending is limited to 68 cents per elector, a formula that would limit spending to about $2.3 million if applied in B.C.
Without limits between elections, parties can spend heavily in the months leading up to the formal 28-day campaign period. We saw this with the huge war chest the B.C. Liberal party has accumulated thanks to massive corporate donations. Unless a spending limit between elections is enacted to curb the undemocratic influence of corporate money, the millions in remaining funds can be used in the next election.
Once we have strict donation and spending limits in place, we need a fair and transparent system for financing political parties.
Premier Christy Clark has suggested that banning big money means taxpayers will have to subsidize political parties. But we already do — it’s just not very fair as political donors get major tax breaks that cost about $16 million per election cycle.
Here are three viable alternatives for funding B.C.’s political process:
• Per-vote subsidy: This was used federally between 2004 and 2015, when Canadian political parties received $2.04 annually for each vote they won in the previous election. The per-vote subsidy is problematic, however, because it favours the incumbent party by locking in funding from one election to the next, even though a voter’s preference may change substantially over a government’s four-year term.
• Matching small donations: Small donations up to a certain amount — for example, $25 — are matched with public funding. Under New York’s innovative system, for example, donations are publicly matched six to one, leading parties and candidates to value and pursue small donations.
The New York system successfully increased both the number of small donors and the proportion of small donations, and made the demographic profile of donors more representative of the population. Tailoring this model for B.C. would build incentives for bottom-up political engagement right into our campaign finance system.
• A universal citizens’ voucher could be rolled into the elections section of an income-tax return, where the voucher amount — say, $10 or $20 per year — could be directed to the political party of a voter’s choice, or withheld if dissatisfied with the available options.
It’s important to remember that changing how we finance elections is a critical first step in containing the influence of big money. To make our democracy more vibrant and fair, we must also tackle problems like huge corporate investments in lobbying and the root causes of deepening inequality in our society.
Banning big money needs to be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation among British Columbians about restoring integrity to our democracy. Money in politics is powerful, but it’s not all-powerful. As has been said: The only thing more powerful than organized money is organized people.