Does money matter?

How muc h does money matter in politics? Trick question. Did you think I was going to give you a simple quantitative answer? “It matters four. The exact answer is four.”

The easy way to see the complexity of money’s role in electoral politics is to look at the Republican nominee candidacy of Donald Trump. He dominates the American media for the low, low bargain price of “pretty much free;” he has spent little to support his project, by historic standards, has raised essentially nothing from donors, repeatedly humiliating lavishly funded rivals. But would we have ever heard of Trump in the first place if he weren’t a rich man who has been talking up his fortune for 40 years?

The Canadian Press has been crunching financial reports from our fall election and comparing them with the outcomes of the voting. Monday, it published the results of a preliminary analysis: money, on the riding level, was a big dud. Of the 50 biggest constituency spenders who have filed their reports, 31 were losers. The top 10 included an unsuccessful Green, four Tories who fell short in Ontario and British Columbia, and the NDP’s Paul Dewar, who laid out $200,000 to try and nab Ottawa Centre.

CP’s Jordan Press and Joan Bryden note that the unusually long duration of the 2015 election allowed higher spending limits on constituency campaigns, but even among the Conservatives, who had built this feature into their reformed finance system and set the length of the election, few candidates took anything like full advantage. If the financial health of the national parties had decided the election, you’d probably be reading a story in this space about how our genius Prime Minister Stephen Harper may be unstoppable for decades.

Probably there are people who read of parliamentary candidates spending $ 200,000 on a campaign of a few weeks and still think that this is still an alarmingly large amount. One of the phenomena that these limits lead to, of course, is dominance of the electoral conversation by traditional media. Newspapers, in particular, aren’t bound by any explicit rules of fairness — just ill-defined folkways and hazy notions of professional objectivity. (And even these fall apart a bit in the comment section.) All the same, in federal politics we seem to have reached a state with which almost everyone is broadly satisfied with the moral health of the system — as opposed to provincial politics, in which current headlines are reminding us how easily premiers can sell personal access to the highest bidder.

But it is hard to be sure whether we will feel the same way about the Conservativedesigned federal system in, say, 20 years. The 2015 experiment suggests, in an obvious way, that the Conservative rules were fair enough to allow for Liberal victory. But this experiment coincided with a return to the traditional beau ideal of the Canadian party system. We were confronted with a choice of three major national parties, all led by credible, familiar, ( somewhat) experienced insiders.

All three parties had significant presences in all the regions. The Bloc Québécois was involved mostly as a nostalgic hypothetical; the Green party failed utterly to add its special bespoke dimension to the race anywhere outside the West Coast. It was, in short, a country- wide election, one in which the basic decision faced by a voter in Sherbrooke, Que., looked an awful lot like the decision faced by his compatriot in Sooke, B.C.

How much of our relative contentment is a consequence of this familiar picture? And how much was the apparent lack of strong local money effects a consequence of it? The concentrated regional wrath that once characterized Canadian elections has dissipated. The major issues in 2015 were ones that play largely the same everywhere — deficits, the Senate, refugees; only the particular emergence of the niqab debate, which did play differently in hinterland Quebec than elsewhere, might have required party strategists to make tricky choices about local messaging.

And the personalities of the party leaders were para- mount. The election will perhaps be remembered, as much as anything, as a referendum on whether we (even tribal Conservatives) could bear any more of Stephen Harper, and whether we ( even tribal Liberals) could count on Justin Trudeau.

The underappreciated truth may be that money does not make much difference in politics right now because no one is sure how to spend it very effectively. No newspaperman wakes up without being conscious that advertising, as a general proposition, is in a great deal of peril. We sit perhaps three- quarters in the world of Old Media, where doubt about what works is universal, and one- quarter in the world of social media, whose optimum use we have barely begun to fathom. The Conservatives must have dropped a pretty penny on the last- minute commercials they injected into the Toronto Blue Jays’ playoff run, depicting a slightly contrite and defensive Harper. If those dollars accomplished anything, apart from helping to cover David Price’s last pay cheque, it is hard to tell.

THE UNDERAPPRECIATED TRUTH MAY BE THAT MONEY DOES NOT MAKE MUCH DIFFERENCE IN POLITICS RIGHT NOW BECAUSE NO ONE IS SURE HOW TO SPEND IT VERY EFFECTIVELY.