Introduction
“Thomas Hobbes pointed out in his book Leviathan that the emergence of political parties in British parliamentary life was the worst thing to happen to democracy there. Parties need money, money leads to favours, favours lead to watered down legislation and outside influence over policy. Parties lead to party discipline which does not necessarily reflect the views of MPs. Ban political parties I say.”
– a concerned citizen
Where Do Independent Candidates Fit Into Elections? – A Surprising History
Politics in Canada is dominated by political parties. The dominant parties are registered. The dominant parties noisy. “Independents and unregistered parties” have been crowded out. Most people think that politics in Canada is the same as “party politics” and “registered party politics” at that. This is a gross misconception. Let’s look at the history of elections in Canada.
In The Beginning There Were Independents …
Sit down. Read the Constitution of Canada. Read the Charter of Rights. You will not find a single mention of a political party. You will find references to elections and the right to vote.
Canada has a “Westminster style” parliamentary democracy. This means that when Canadians vote they are electing a parliament. Each of Canada’s 308 (and counting) ridings has the right to elect a member to represent that riding in the House of Commons. In the early days all MPs were Independents. Their duty was to the riding that elected them.
Conclusion: Independent candidates are not members of voting coalitions and do not depend on funds from the taxpayers of Canada.
Independents were followed by Unregistered Political Parties
Political parties have always been “voting coalitions”. The purpose of Parliament is (as you well know) to make laws. But, laws were the result of MPs voting on the merits of legislation. It was natural for those Independent MPs to seek alliances with other “like minded” MPs. Eventually these voting collations received names. These names were things like “Conservative”, “Liberal”, etc. It was not until 1970 the Canada Elections Act was amended so that:
- Political parties (voting alliances) were formally recognized and;
- The Political affiliation of a candidate could be shown on the ballot.
The Canada Elections Act defines a political party as:
“an organization one of whose fundamental purposes is to participate in public affairs by endorsing one or more of its members as candidates and supporting their election.”
There no requirement that a political party register with Elections Canada. The existence of a party is not dependent on registration. Forming and registering a federal political party are two different things. There is no legislation regulating the formation of federal political parties.
Conclusion: Unregistered political parties are voting alliances that have not taken the step of registering with Elections Canada. They do not have any of the benefits that are given to registered political parties. Unregistered parties are voting coalitions that are NOT regulated by Elections Canada. Unregistered parties do not receive the same benefits from the taxpayers that registered parties have.
The Next Step – The Birth of The Registered Political Party – A Tax On Democracy
In 1974, the Canada Elections Act was amended to allow political parties to register with Elections Canada. Why would a political party do this? Why deal with the Elections Canada bureaucracy? One of the answers is money. Only registered political parties have a right to have their parties funded by the taxpayers of Canada. The taxpayers of Canada fund the Liberals, Conservatives, Bloc, NDP and Green Party (among others). You may know that the registered parties receive $1.95 for each vote that one of their candidates receives in an election.
This taxpayer subsidy is of vital importance to registered parties. In December of 2008 the Conservative Government of Stephen Harper introduced legislation which would have removed this subsidy from the registered parties. The Liberals, NDP and Bloc were not pleased. It took the threat of the removal of their $1.95 subsidy to prompt them to replace the government. A coalition was formed which almost had the effect of bring the government down and installing a coalition government. Clearly the primary benefit to registering a political party is – surprise (who could have known) – money from the taxpayers.
(This post is updated on August 18/09: Green Party candidate, Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu, in a post titled “Defend Per-Vote Funding” wrote a rather good account of the number of different ways in which the taxpayers of Canada fund the political parties. Tom Flanagan recently wrote an argument in favor of abolishing “Per Vote Funding”. You should read both perspectives on this issue.)
It is one thing to form “voting alliances” and call it a party. It is quite another to take the next step of getting the people oof Canada to pay for your party.
Conclusion: Registered political parties are voting coalitions that are a tax on the citizens of Canada. Furthermore, the primary registered parties require MPs to vote along party lines without regard to the interests of the riding.
| .. | Independents | Non-Registered party | Registered Party |
| Voting Coalition | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tax on Canadians | No | No | Yes |
| Tax on Canadians |
Examples of Tax Free Independent Candidates – Bill Casey, David Marler
Examples of Tax Free Unregistered Parties – Democracy Party of Canada
Examples of Taxable Registered Parties – Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, etc.
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Join The Independents Movement – Vote Independent – Save Your Money!
There is no charge. We would ask that (assuming you believe in our principles) that you email this page to your friends and anyone else who you believe is tired of top down, autocratic, party rule.
Registered political parties receive money from you the taxpayers to fund their day-to-day operations. We don’t think that Canadian taxpayers should be forced to contribute to political parties. Shouldn’t democracy be tax free? What would Thomas Hobbes say?
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It’s interesting that many people think that registration as a party gives the party some kind of “legitimacy”. Registration means only that the party was successful in getting enough signatures.
Canada’s newest registered political party is the Pirate Party of Canada. You will find information at:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/800757–the-pirate-party-seeks-your-booty
The Pirate Party appears to be a “single issue” party.
Compare the Pirate Party which is a registered party with the Democracy Party of Canada which is NOT a single issue party and is not registered. Information about the Democracy Party of Canada is at:
http://www.democrat.ca
For the purposes of registration, it may be that it is easier to get supporters for a “single issue” party than for a party that is about better government in general.
John Richardson – Independent Candidate – Toronto Danforth
Petition of Choices will end any political party.
To: the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
“The Petition of Choices will make our government more transparent and effective. Our government will let taxpayers choose where their money will go, by setting up accounts for different government departments. For example, there will be social security account for elderly and economically challenged people; health account for hospital services, and education account for school and training, a transportation account for roads and bridges, as well as a defense account for military. Every quarter the government departments will have the mandate to publish a report telling taxpayers how much money they used and how it was allocated. Additionally, the report will estimate how much money the government will need for the following quarter and for which departments, however the taxpayers will deposit their money wherever they consider more important. There can be a pending account for overflowing funds from other accounts or for someone who has no choices. The pending account maybe used for the underfunded but valuable departments.”
Sincerely,
This just hot off the press:
January 5, 2011
Parties get New Year’s present – your tax dollars
By BRIAN LILLEY, Parliamentary Bureau
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2011/01/05/16773721.html
OTTAWA – Elections Canada has handed out the latest round of taxpayer goodies and enriched the federal political parties at the same time.
Parties are paid subsidies through Elections Canada every three months based on the results of the last election. Wednesday, Elections Canada announced the latest windfall cheques has been issued.
The Conservatives took home the most money, $2,609,418, followed by the Liberals at $1,819,999 and the New Democrats with $1,260,002.
The Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party each came in under the million dollar threshold. The Bloc is taking a $691,289 subsidy from taxpayers, and the Greens $469,686.
While the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP each collect more money through fundraising than through the taxpayer subsidy, the Greens and Bloc are heavily reliant on the grants.
In the third quarter, the last time period for which figures are available, the Green Party raised just over half the amount of their quarterly subsidy, $278,062. In the same period, the Bloc raised just $112,055 from supporters, less than a fifth of their taxpayer subsidy.
The Bloc’s third quarter efforts were a dramatic improvement over the previous quarter when they were only able to raise $71,989.
Vote Independent – Save Your Money!!
“You and I are pretty independent …”
Join us on the road to saving more – get your independence and freedom!
I believe that our democracy in Canada has been hijacked by political parties, the policies of ever increasing taxation and the surrender of our resources to the globalist elite must end and be reversed. The continued erosion of personal freedom and the rise of corporate power and rural resource monopolies threaten our nation. Will Canada wake up in time? Hit the net, speak up. British Columbia should be independant candidate coalition’s first provincial victory.We need leadership, we need to re-establish freedom. Globalism is a bad idea, we become more vulnerable to worldwide collapse and disaster daily. Who owes what to whom? Do we even know??
C’mon Steve, nix the handouts
Harper’s election promises should include abolishing tax ‘donations’ to political parties
By EZRA LEVANT, QMI Agency
Last Updated: January 9, 2011 2:00am
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/ezra_levant/2011/01/07/16804191.html
Fewer than one in 100 Canadians donate to a federal political party.
It’s not surprising, considering the low esteem in which most Canadians hold politicians. And a political party is not a charity, even though a political donation receives a more generous tax treatment than a charitable one does.
But no matter. In 2004, the Liberal Party amended the Elections Act to force all Canadians to donate to political parties through their taxes.
Now, political parties get just over $2 from the public treasury for every vote they received in the previous election. That means taxpayers have given the federal parties $27 million a year since the Oct. 2008 election.
Including a whopping $2.8 million a year to the Bloc Quebecois.
That party wants Quebec to leave Canada. But it’s not above wringing millions of dollars from Canadian taxpayers to fund that separatist project before they go.
But our scorn should not be heaped on them alone. Surely the NDP must be ashamed to have taken their $5 million annual allowance from the public purse, rather than have that amount spent on beloved social programs for the jobless during a recession.
And how do Liberals and Conservatives, both of which will tell us in the next campaign they are fiscally responsible and concerned about the deficit, justify this corporate welfare: $7.3 million a year to the Liberals and $10.4 million to the Tories?
Green gold
But no one makes out better than the Green Party. Not a single seat in Parliament, not one, often a fourth or fifth place showing. For staggering last across the finish line, Elizabeth May’s one-woman show has received cheques from the government totalling $1.9 million a year since Oct. 2008.
Sure beats having to go door-to-door earning support one cheque at a time.
But now that we have pointed out that all parties are on the take, let’s be fair. Just weeks after the 2008 election, as the country slid into a recession, the Conservative minority government proposed doing away with this luxuriant spending — including the Conservative lion’s share — to make parties raise money from Canadians who would voluntarily support them.
It was that suggestion — the thought of losing their own feathered nests — that panicked the three opposition parties, and caused them to form a formal coalition replete with a signed contract and joint press conference amongst their leaders.
The opposition parties say they despise the Conservatives on so many issues, from taxes to spending to justice to foreign affairs to global warming. But none of those disagreements were strong enough to ever cause the opposition parties to ask the governor general to depose the Conservatives.
But the fear of losing their own free money was.
And that is why the actual cost of these subsidies is so much higher.
Election saver
To stave off the opposition’s request, and a possible snap election forced just short weeks after the 2008 one, the Conservative government panicked in its own way. They retooled their 2009 budget, greatly increasing spending — and thus the deficit.
And until the threat of a coalition appeared, Stephen Harper had refused to appoint senators to the upper house, sticking to his clever strategy of reforming it by emptying it. Only when it became known that the opposition coalition was haggling over the spoils of those unfilled Senate seats did Harper fill them, lest they be divvied up as coalition booty, including for the first time to Bloc senators, and a rumoured seat for Elizabeth May, too.
It’s been two years since the formal opposition coalition, the coalition whose only core value, whose only cause for existence, was free money for its politicians. The coalition was enormously unpopular in polls, with the Conservatives reaching the high 40% range in opinion polls as a reaction.
The Conservatives lost control of the issue last time. They should take control this time and make abolishing the handout a central plank of their looming 2011 election platform.
Ezra Levant will be a talk show host on the Sun News Network
From: A Young Liberal’s advice for Michael Ignatieff
“And while we’re at it, let’s end that irritating $2 per vote subsidy for political parties. If the Liberal party wants me to fork over some dough, it should have the grit to ask me personally.”
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/Young+Liberal+advice+Michael+Ignatieff/4084215/story.html#ixzz1AgpMvs8s
I do not pay just $1.95 for the subsidy. And I do not pay for only the party for which I voted.
It’s MORE than $1.95, and as a taxpaying voter SOME of my money inevitably funds parties other than that for which I’ve voted.
Here’s how.
Of all the millions of voters, probably only 80% are taxpayers. What of the retirees, students, etc. What of those 80,000 non-taxpaying federal prisoners the Liberal Party granted the vote to? Does the Liberal Party etc. say, “Well, we won’t collect the subsidy from them, then, since they’re not taxpayers.” Hogwash! They pull it out of General Revenue like every other stealing tax these socialists grab their money from.
That means that I subsidize the non-taxpaying voters, and at least some of those are not voting for my guys, or, worse, for any Independent candidate I wish to support — who never receive any subsidy at all! Talk about boondoggle!
Cancel this darned subsidy.
Political parties are not social programs, defense, the environment or anything else we need to spend our taxes on. Let the parties collect their own donations (transparently). Then, once they’re elected, I’m willing to pay them their salaries and pensions. But not till then.
Political parties are NOT part of government!
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Does anyone know of the amount from one’s taxes that go to each party?