Let the parties work it out for themselves

I’ve tried to get excited about this “in-and-out” business, really I have. But I am hampered by two things. One, nothing about the Conservatives’ shuffling of funds back and forth between the national and local campaigns in the last election appears to have been against the law. And two, the law in question is an ass....

To recap: It is not illegal to transfer funds from the national party to a riding association. It is not illegal to transfer funds from a riding association to the party. It is not illegal for the ridings to pool their funds to purchase advertising and other campaign services, and it is not illegal if they buy these from the party. Not illegal, and not unusual: all are routine practices in other parties’ campaigns. What seems to have Elections Canada’s knickers in a twist is that the Tories did all of these things at the same time, in the course of which responsibility for the spending of these funds is somehow said to have passed from the ridings to the party. So what the Conservatives claimed as local expenses were “really” national.

How the agency arrived at this metaphysics is as unclear as why any of it matters. The Tories gained no particular advantage from the exchange, since it is the combined effort, local and national, that makes up a campaign: whatever extra spending they were permitted to engage in at the national level came out of unused local budgets. But even calling them “national” or “local” makes little sense, since local campaigns by and large are extensions of the national campaign -- the same themes and motifs appear, only with the addition of a candidate’s name here and there. 

What we are left with are arbitrary distinctions, selectively enforced, according to invisible criteria. That’s not a criticism of Elections Canada. It’s the law that’s the problem. It makes no more sense to set separate spending limits for national and local campaigns than it would as between TV commercials and lawn signs. These are matters best left to the parties to work out for themselves.

But then, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to set overall spending limits, either. The premise is that there should be a level playing field between the parties. But should fairness between parties be the guiding principle? The constitution speaks of the equality of every individual, not the equality of parties. And what are parties but associations of individuals? Surely it is fairness between individuals that should concern us: the equal ability of each individual citizen to make his voice heard at election time. That, after all, is why we give each of them one vote.

To constrain every party within the same spending limit, whether it has 10 members or 10 million, is in fact to put the individuals of which these parties are composed on a distinctly un-level footing: in our admittedly extreme example, each member of the larger party is permitted precisely one-millionth the “voice” of those in the smaller. Does that imply we should have no limits of any kind? Not a bit. But the place to impose such limits is not on the parties, but on individuals; not on spending, but on contributions.

Of course, we have contribution limits now. The Chretien reforms banned union and (most) corporate donations at the federal level, and set limits on individual contributions for the first time. These were tightened further under the Conservatives’ Accountability Act. But important loopholes remain. And indeed, even contribution limits, in traditional form, don’t get it quite right.

Set a limit on how much an individual can contribute to a particular candidate or party, after all, and you simply invite the establishment of parallel groups to receive donations, like the “political action committees” familiar from American politics. A similar problem bedevils spending limits: what do you do with so-called “third-party” advocacy groups, who may or may not be affiliated with the political parties? Either you end up with a total free-for-all, or you impose draconian controls on what private groups can spend to advance their cause, at great harm to freedom of speech.

The answer? Go back to the principle we established earlier: fairness between individuals -- the  ability of each to contribute to the national conversation at election time, in this case financially. If every individual had the same income, this would cease to be a concern. The nearest approximation is to set an annual ceiling on the amount individuals can contribute, not just to a particular party or a candidate, but to all of them -- the sum total of all of his political donations in that year. But how he chose to divide these up within this limit, whether between parties, candidates, or third-party groups, would be up to him. 

The beauty of this is that it’s self-limiting: the more you contribute to one party, the less you have left to give to another. Spending limits would likewise be unnecessary. Since only individuals could contribute, and since no individual would have any greater capacity to contribute than any other, the only limit the parties need face would be their ability to raise funds in this manner. And not just the parties: third-party groups would be under the same constraint, so far as they spent money to support or oppose a particular candidate or party. 

At a stroke, parity would have been achieved -- between individuals, and between the different avenues through which each might seek to express his views in the political arena. Yet at minimal cost to free speech, and without requiring Elections Canada to decide how many local candidates can dance on the end of a pin.