This despite the fact that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been used to subsidize political parties in the past decade. Critics point to four key ways the act does not go far enough to reform how political parties account for their spending.
1. No receipts needed for political parties’ expense claims.
“At every election, parties receive $33 million in reimbursements without showing a single invoice to support their claims,” Elections Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told a Commons committee in March.
Yes, that’s right. You, the taxpayer, are giving political parties your money without any proof of how they have spent it.
The federal watchdog is the only electoral body in Canada that lacks the power to require parties to back up expense claims with documents to show that the money was actually spent, he said. Mayrand called for “this anomaly” to be corrected.
Political parties receive millions in taxpayer subsidies every year. It is not only their election expenses (which are refunded at 50 per cent) and their candidates’ expenses (valued at about $23.4 million in 2011 and refunded at 60 per cent). There is also the per-vote subsidy that will be phased out in April 2015, but was worth $28,697,486 in 2011.
And of course, there is the generous tax subsidy given to political parties whose donors receive 75 per cent off their contributions up to $400. Larger donations also receive a credit worth half or a third of the additional amount.
Conservative MP Michael Chong told HuffPost he estimates his party has received more than $300 million over the past decade in taxpayer support.
“Vast sums of money, of public money, are spent on political parties. In return for that expenditure, political parties ought to be transparent and accountable in how they run themselves,” Chong said in an interview last month.
He wants to see legislation governing how political party caucuses operate. Others suggest a baby step to transparency: forcing the mandatory disclosure of political parties’ expenses.
Right now, candidates have to file supporting documents with Elections Canada when filing expense claims. But political parties don’t have to, and Elections Canada doesn’t have the power even to ask for them.
It is a giant loophole that Mayrand and academics had hoped the Fair Elections Act would close. But it won’t.
“Without these receipts, Elections Canada cannot check to see whether the parties are compliant with the campaign finance rules,” University of Toronto law professorYasmin Dawood said.
“This is unacceptable. In any other context, if you are getting reimbursements, you have to provide receipts.”
Simply requiring detailed expense reports and receipts would serve as a deterrent to inappropriate expense claims, she said.
“Just by having to provide the document, that in itself is helpful to ensure that the rules are being followed properly,” she said.
Right now, political parties file general statements verified by an auditor of their choice.
Graham Fox of the Institute for Research on Public Policy told HuffPost he thinks Canadians who file receipts with their income tax returns would expect political parties to follow the same rules.
“It doesn’t stand the test of common sense,” he said.
“Nobody wants the red tape, but we all have it,” said Monique Deveaux, the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Global Social Change at the University of Guelph.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Gregory Thomas told HuffPost that he suspects that political parties have been more or less silent on this issue because they like the rules as they are.
“We know that political parties will use these public disclosures to mine for intelligence on how the other political parties are operating,” he said.
His group opposed the per-vote subsidy and it also opposed the tax credit for political party donors. But Thomas said there is a case for accountability given how much the political parties receive.
“Our approach is they should not be getting this money in the first place. And then if they want, [they can] enjoy privacy on how they spend their money.”
2. Individual donation limits are going up. Wealthy candidates can now give their own campaigns more money.
Under the new rules, the limit on campaign contributions is going up by as much as $1,200. Candidates running for office will be allowed to give themselves another $5,000 and leadership candidates will be allowed to give themselves $25,000 more towards their own race.
Right now individuals can give a maximum of $4,800 total each year, with caps on the kinds of donations:
– $1,200 to a registered political party
– $1,200 to riding associations, nomination contestants and/or candidates
– $1,200 to contestants in a leadership contest
– $1,200 to independent candidates in an election
The Fair Elections Act proposes to increase contributions immediately by $300 in each category to a $1,500 maximum, with a subsequent annual increase of $25.
University of Ottawa professor Patti Tamara Lenard called the changes “a profoundly bad idea because they increase the influence of money in politics.”
“Every time the government decides to increase campaign contributions rather than decrease them, which is what they should do, they're making a decision about whose voice should count more,” she told a Commons committee.
Paul Howe, a political scientist at the University of New Brunswick, told MPs that a study he conducted with his students suggested “significant inequalities” in patterns of political donations.
“Donors of amounts over $200 account for only one-quarter of all donors, but their contributions represent nearly two-thirds of all donation dollars – so larger donations, not surprisingly, count for a lot more,” he said.
Seventy-five percent of people who donate to political parties give less than $200, he said. Donors who give more are wealthier individuals who give most of the contributions parties receive, he said. There are nearly four times as many people donating that amount in the top 20 per cent of household incomes as there are among people in the bottom 20 per cent, Howe said.
“Political donating is not as widely spread as we might think and is instead significantly dominated by smaller numbers of relatively wealthy Canadians,” Howe said.
“Raising the donation limit to $1,500 is a move in the wrong direction. The limit should instead be decreased, and probably quite substantially,” he added.
Original ArticleSource: huffingtonpost.ca/
Author: Althia Raj
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