Protecting the public trough

I know this seems frantic but with only nine weeks left in the federal election, there isn’t a moment to waste. Well, actually there is a lot of time to waste unless you are a Conservative candidate trying to figure out how to spend your $200,000 spending limit. Then you have some work to do.

That is the only reason why this election is stretching out for 11 weeks rather than the 37-day elections that we have had in the past. The

Toronto Star is reporting that the cost for the election increases from $375 million for a 37-day campaign to around $500 million for the current 79-day one. Stephen Harper says he had to call the election because the other leaders were campaigning and he didn’t want to use government resources.

Having the Conservative party reimburse Canadians for his expenses must not have occurred to him. Of course, when you make a fixed election date, campaigning in advance tends to happen, just like when the Conservatives promised more than a billion dollars in spending announcements in a single day the week before the writ was dropped.

Prime ministers and premiers have been doing this for years. Usually it’s in the form of a snap election when their opponents are down in the polls or are broke, like what former Alberta premier Jim Prentice did. It is what fixed election dates are supposed to stop.

Harper is just going in the other direction. By going with a long election, he takes advantage of the Conservatives’ massive war chest. A long campaign is the only way he can fully exploit that advantage.

The other parties will struggle to spend enough to keep up and will find themselves at the end of the writ deeply in debt. If we are trapped in another minority government situation, it will make both the NDP and Liberals reluctant or unable to pull the plug on the election until they have had time to pay off debt from this election and build up a war chest.

If in the same situation, it is unlikely that the Liberals or the NDP would do anything differently. The NDP thought they could get away with opening up offices in parts of the country where they had no MPs and then put some partisan staff in them while billing the Canadian government. Then, when the Board of the Internal Economy asked them to repay money that was spent clearly against the rules, they refused.

This begs the question, can any party come up with election rules and not act in their own self-interests? If Canadian history is a guide, the answer is no. It may not be as blatant as what Harper has done but new riding boundaries and seeking electoral advantages is wired into the DNA of all parties.

What is the solution to politicians behaving badly? Take the ability to write and exploit elections laws away from them. Here is why. If you take any political leader and put their actions up against, let’s say, the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, you are going to see a lot of similarities. It’s all about winning.