Subsidies for parties to be phased out.
tell me I'm not the only one.
Sigh. I knew this was coming, but somehow it doesn’t stop me from feeling a sense of disgust. One of the biggest complaints about the previous few elections has been how the voting patterns across Canada do not match the makeup of Parliament at the end of the process, with a majority government winning on roughly a third of the popular vote. It makes it difficult for people, esp young people, to really care about our government when we know our vote is futile. With the introduction (or extroduction?) of the vote subsidy, I feel like this will further remove the Canadian public from the political process.
Two dollars isn’t a lot per voter, but it was one of a few rare mechanisms that kept democracy running somewhat like a free market. Everyone has the same amount of currency and everyone’s interests matter to the same degree. Voting with a ballot was like literally putting your money where your mouth was. It was the purest form of an election market, unmarred by the difficult and complicated processes tangled up in ridings, strategy, vote-swapping, etc. It is an insurance policy that even if the man who represents our Parliament is not what we want, we have concrete evidence that we have contributed in some small, monetary way, towards a cause that is going to fight him on the policies that we care about the most.
With the subsidy being phased out, the market is gone and politics drifts further from its original core: finding a way to voice peoples’ concerns. Not only are the results undesirable, our ballot paper will no longer have the currency to promise us any better luck the next time around.
I’m hoping that there’s a bit of a silver lining to this. Harper may have a current advantage in terms of fundraising, but we will need to see an equivalent push, to newer, younger, possibly previously marginalized voters from other parties. Barack Obama did it three years ago, and we may yet see the kind of ingenuity that market pressure produces. Let’s just hope it’s sometime soon and we end this government because Harper creeps me the fuck out.
