Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Mike Fancie offers this year's definitive response to the the misguided concept of "tax freedom":

The Fraser Institute’s math on income and taxation has been roundly criticized, including by a former Assistant Chief Statistician and by our Andrew Jackson for skewing numbers to make a point. But while we take issue with the Fraser Institute’s numbers, and setting aside the bias inherent in their tax calculator’s $150,000 income ceiling, the more important discussion lies in appreciating why we pay taxes in the first place. Our tax dollars, far from disappearing into a black hole, are the reason that our roads are paved, our public schools are exceptional, our tap water is clean, and that our public health care continues to keep Americans jealous of their Northern neighbours.

A recent BBC article on the free maternity packages Finnish new mothers receive from the government was picked up by the Globe & Mail, who raved that Finland’s “every child matters -- every family matters” philosophy contributes to their children being among the world’s healthiest. And it turns out the tax dollars Finns pay to provide programs like this, much like Quebec’s $7-a-day childcare program, end up more than paying for themselves.

All this is to say that all but the most affluent of us get much more from our tax dollars than what we pay into the system. Taxes, in the words of a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, are the price we pay for a civilized society.

- But we're far from having a fair tax system precisely because so many wealthy individuals are evading their social responsibilities. Even as the CBC reports on a few more of the Canadian names on the ICIJ's list of tax evaders, it also notes that the Cons are pointing to cases that have nothing to do with offshoring as evidence of a crackdown.

- Meanwhile, it's for the best that the Cons have at least stopped obstructing international action to improve transparency in resource industries. But the fact that they're once again allowing extractors to write their own rules leaves little reason for optimism about Canada's own policy.

- And Chris Cobb reports on the Cons' choice to privatize and commercialize Canada's national historical record.

- Finally, Frances Russell wonders whether the Cons' sense of entitlement to power is causing them to neglect a crumbling foundation.

A slight correction

Lawrence Martin's column on the aftereffects of the 1993 federal election certainly makes for an interesting read. But it's worth noting that he's entirely off base in one of his base assumptions - and the effect is to significantly change at least part of the analysis.

Here's Martin:

To find the reason for their woes, they might look back, strangely enough, at one of their successes – the election of 1993. That campaign, which gutted the Canadian political structure like no other, is known as the one that vanquished the old Progressive Conservative Party. The Tories came away with two seats. But it should also be known as the one that undermined the Liberals, who came away with a majority.

Although they won handily, that campaign effectively reduced the Grits to an Ontario party with a few regional add-ons. Post-1993, the party won successive majorities in 1997 and 2000, but in each it was an all-Ontario show, with the party registering unbelievable sweeps of 100 or so seats in that province.

That represented close to two-thirds of the party’s overall total in those elections. The warning signals were there. These majorities masked the Liberal Party’s geographical isolation.

The tumult of 1993 saw the simultaneous beanstalk ascendancies of the Reform Party in the West and the Bloc Québécois in the East. Quebec had always been a Liberal Party pillar. The arrival of the Bloc, which would take half or more of Quebec’s seats in the following campaigns, removed it. On the Prairies, the Liberals’ misfortune had begun long before. But they were still potentially competitive. Reform’s 1993 rise effectively sealed the door. Like Quebec, the West now had its own political formation.

So what's the problem with that take on the Libs' geographic distribution? Well, the Libs won 27 western seats in 1993 (including 21 on the prairies) - compared to 6 western seats in 1988 and only 2 in 1984 and 1980.

In fact, the Libs' 1993 western haul was tied with the 1968 Trudeau sweep as the party's highest since 1949. So if anything, 1993 looks to have given the Libs as good a chance to build a presence in the West as they've had at any other time in the past 60 years.

Mind you, it's fair enough to say that the Libs squandered that opportunity. And it's not hard to see how the regional politics and seat distribution discussed by Martin might play into that end result.

After all, from a strategic standpoint, why worry about trying to build off a base of a couple of dozen seats when it's possible to win an election outright simply by sweeping Ontario? And in turn, why worry about listening to the few western MPs and their constituents whose interests aren't seen as closely tied to the party's? (Needless to say, the same phenomenon played out to some extent in Atlantic Canada as well - leading to the NDP's gains there beginning in 1997.)

In contrast, Reform had nothing to build on but its western base, and thus had every incentive to scratch and claw for every available seat in the region. And that figures to explain in large part why the Libs' numbers declined again in 1997 to the benefit of Reform.

But then, even if one wants to look at the Libs' subsequent downturn, they've still managed to stay above the levels that prevailed before the election which Martin sees as reflecting a permanent sealed door. Instead, all that's happened is a return to the usual pattern in the West - leaving 1993 as less a turning point in the West than a blip which the Libs failed to use to their advantage. And that makes the rise of the Bloc the lone substantial change arising out of that election in cutting off the Libs' traditional road to government.

The road once travelled

Recently, I came across a copy of "Leaders & Lesser Mortals: Backroom Politics in Canada" by John Laschinger and Geoffrey Stevens - effectively an equivalent to Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics based on the tactics of the '80s and early '90s. And while much of the book fit with what had been my understanding of how Canadian politics had progressed during the time period, I'll take a moment to point out a few surprising tidbits - along with how they may affect some of my assumptions about the current state of Canadian politics.

First off, the major parties' campaign spending from the 1984 and 1988 elections (p. 138, via the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada):

	Con	Lib	NDP
1984 expenses	$6,388,941	$6,292,983	$4,730,723
1988 expenses	$7,921,738	$6,839,875	$7,060,563

Second, the parties' yearly fund-raising from 1979-1990 (p. 164-165, again from the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada):

	Con	Lib	NDP
1979	$8,375,716	$5,220,520	$4,741,281
1980	$7,564,120	$6,217,795	$4,920,447
1981	$6,949,797	$5,095,158	$3,855,812
1982	$8,193,660	$6,104,367	$6,984,881
1983	$14,108,012	$7,285,115	$8,590,942
1984	$21,145,920	$10,553,316	$10,371,018
1985	$14,565,652	$5,570,822	$6,284,316
1986	$15,117,750	$10,619,007	$7,795,658
1987	$12,761,155	$8,832,377	$6,697,083
1988	$24,542,036	$13,211,364	$18,754,770
1989	$13,801,368	$6,324,012	$13,864,694
1990	$11,046,654	$12,036,486	$15,438,908

And finally, some party identification numbers from 1991-1992 (p. 223, from Goldfarb Consulting):

	1991	1992
Con	19%	14%
Lib	30%	26%
NDP	22%	16%
Bloc	9%	9%
Reform	6%	7%
Other	6%	2%
None of the above	7%	24%

So what makes these numbers worth noting? From my standpoint, they suggest a rather different story from what seems to be the conventional wisdom about when and how the NDP enjoyed its previous best chance to emerge as the Official Opposition, and about what the default expectations should be among the three main federal parties.

My assumption, which seems to be in line with conventional wisdom, was that the greatest opportunity in the NDP's history came in 1988 - when Ed Broadbent was seen as the top choice among the federal leaders, and when the NDP had managed to take the lead in some polls during the 1986-1987 period. And the 1988 party spending numbers indicate that the NDP didn't lack for financial resources, as it managed to outspend the Libs and stay within striking distance of the Mulroney Cons.

Of course, it's worth noting that there were also millions of third-party dollars poured into the 1988 election on both sides of the free trade issue. Which means that the NDP's money likely didn't go as far as it would have in almost any other election cycle - and probably had plenty to with the fact that the NDP's lack of focus on the issue left it largely sidelined.

But contrary to what I'd figured, neither that electoral disappointment nor Broadbent's departure as leader in 1989 did anything to limit the NDP's national momentum. Instead, the NDP managed to build itself into Canada's top federal fund-raising machine in 1989-1990 after Audrey McLaughlin took the helm. And for a substantial period of time after the Ontario and BC elections which supposedly sapped the party's popular support, the NDP ranked above the Cons in second place, with a party identification level more than double its eventual 1993 popular vote. Which would suggest to me that 1993 may in fact have represented the NDP's best-ever opportunity to elevate itself to one of the top two positions - and raise significant questions as to what happened to turn that election into a disaster instead.

Turning to a more general analysis, the decade-long fund-raising numbers also bear mention. But first, take a look at the last four years worth of party fund-raising data by way of comparison.

From my perspective, the earlier numbers would pose a serious challenge to a couple of the default narratives around party fund-raising. For one, the Cons' current levels of fund-raising - rather than representing any new heights in party fund-raising - are really only around the Mulroney Cons' typical inflows even without adjusting for inflation. (Of course, that may require far more work in light of the current donation limits which weren't in effect during Mulroney's time. But the Cons don't seem to be that far beyond the number of donors either - as their 174,000 last year) barely exceeds population growth from their peak of 117,000 in 1983.

Meanwhile, the narrative that the relative parity in fund-raising levels for the NDP and the Libs should be seen as a new and surprising development - which I've bought into at times - doesn't seem to have much basis in the historical numbers. Indeed, it isn't even unprecedented for the NDP to out-raise the Libs while the latter hold office - and at its best, the NDP fund-raising machine has been able to go toe to toe with any in Canadian politics.

Of course, that reality also hints at how far the NDP also has to go in building from its current levels. But the fact that the NDP has managed to lead the pack before should make it clear that the task isn't beyond its reach now. And hopefully the result will be to build the party up to its 1998-1992 levels - and then to better take advantage of the resulting opportunities.

Update: In comments, Pundits' Guide notes a couple of glitches in the numbers above. First, the Cons' number of donors for 2008 is likely based on double-counting individuals who gave money in multiple quarters of the year - which would suggest that the Cons' number of raw donors may in fact be lower than it was in the '80s. Second, the NDP's fund-raising totals from the '80s may reflect provincial as well as federal donations. While that would certainly complicate the picture in assessing the relative fund-raising ability of the federal parties, it would still remain true that the NDP was able to spend to the maximum in 1988 and then increase its donations in some form after that.