The big picture

Alice at Pundits' Guide has put up another fascinating post based on her new database of riding-level fund-raising, this time providing what looks to be the most accurate numbers yet as to what proportion of party income actually comes from Elections Canada's per-vote funding. And for all the rumours of one opposition party or another agreeing to do away with the subsidy in order to harm another, the national opposition parties have in fact taken in nearly identical proportions of their total funding from the subsidy in the time period since 2004 - with the numbers looking more and more similar in recent years.

Having noted that it's far from clear whether anybody besides the Cons would stand to benefit even indirectly from cutting the per-vote funding out of the equation, Alice also offers this reminder about how federal funding rules should be (and once were) developed:

(I)f we go too far down the road of allowing the victor to create the rules, that’s the most anti-democratic outcome of all. Whatever I might believe about the merits of public funding of political parties, the fact remains that Prime Minister Chrétien introduced it unilaterally, thus violating a longstanding convention that the parties in the House of Commons would collectively establish rules they could all agree on, a rule that was still in effect as late as the 2000 Elections Act amendments.

The second element I hope people will consider is the importance of establishing a principled basis for making those rules, rather than picking some solutions that appear to have a short-term benefit for their own party, but might later be found to have altogether different consequences.

In fairness, all national parties in Parliament now bear some responsibility for deviating from a convention that made a world of sense. But nobody should be eager to permanently create an environment where the governing party or coalition is in the habit of dictating rules affecting its political opponents - and all of the proposals to change the current funding model should be considered with that in mind.