On competitive interests

Following up on this post on the general reason why I see per-vote party funding as a plus in the political system as a whole, let's turn to the NDP's strategic interests. I'll divide the question of the NDP's best possible strategy into two posts: first, a look at the impact of removing the public funding, and second, a look at how it fits into the messages the NDP should want to promote.

One of the main questions for the NDP in dealing with the per-vote funding has been that of how its strategic interests may be affected compared to those of the Libs. And indeed, part of the Cons' theory in raising the issue in their 2008 fiscal update was that the NDP might be willing to go along in the hope that the Libs would suffer more from their elimination.

But taking a closer look at how the parties are currently funded, I don't see much case to be made that the NDP actually does stand to gain from axing the per-vote funding.

In the Babble discussion on per-vote funding, JKR has already raised the point that at least in 2009, the NDP took in a higher proportion of its total income from per-vote funding than do the Libs. But the even more important comparison is Alice's multi-year comparison which also includes candidate and EDA fund-raising - and which shows the NDP and the Libs roughly on par in the proportion of their income from the funding even before the Libs' unusually high 2009 national fund-raising total.

In other words, there's absolutely no factual basis for the view that the loss of the per-vote funding would do more short-term damage to the Libs than the NDP. But would it present more of a long-term opportunity based on the NDP's having a stronger ideological message - in effect, that if the NDP puts more of a focus on fund-raising, it will enjoy greater returns than the Libs in doing so?

Sadly, the answer to that too seems to be "no". In fact, it's the Libs who spent proportionally less money to bring in their 2009 haul, suggesting that they can do more to ramp up fund-raising efforts without running into diminishing returns. And even if one substitutes in a more typical $6 million fund-raising take for the Libs, all indications suggest that they're still equal to the NDP in turning a dollar spent into a dollar raised.

So the argument that the NDP should see eliminating the per-vote subsidy as a means of gaining a competitive advantage over the Libs looks to be based on little more than conjecture and hope which isn't borne out by the parties' actual funding and fund-raising numbers. Which leaves the question of whether the NDP has some reason to want to echo the Cons' message on the subject, or whether it should instead look to use a defense of per-vote funding to reinforce its own messages.