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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

In Canada the government used to give funds to each party that had more than x seats in the parliament. One of the first things the current neo-con government did was abolish that, and let donations from individuals and businesses fund each party. It's disgusting to be honest - businesses always have deeper pockets and could care less (actually actively oppose) individual liberty.

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In fact, businesses (companies) are not permitted to donate to political parties in Canada. And this same "neo-con" government has lowered the maximum personal donation from $5000 per person to $1000 per person.

If anything, this has encouraged a more 'grassroots' approach to fundraising, as it's more the number of people you can engage, rather than a particular (wealthy) demographic.

If only the established parties who already have seats in parliament get funding, does that favor the establishment and make it difficult for new parties to win seats? Genuinely curious.

If you're still interested: the funding is / was distributed by number of votes, not number of seats won. Any party that gets over 2% of the vote gets a cut, which means the threshold for entry is fairly low.

Of course, a party with 50% of the vote will still get 50% of the money, which does favour incumbents.

To some extent, but I think they just need to win 1 or 2 seats. So it can be a local effort. Funding lets them be more national.

Probably, but so does single-member district plurality voting, which is what we currently have. :-/

I don't follow the ins and outs of Canadian politics quite as closely as perhaps I should, but I was under the impression that the federal funding still exists. Wikipedia[1] seems to agree:

> For each registered federal political party that received at least 2% of all valid votes the last general election or at least 5% of the valid votes in the electoral districts in which it had a candidate, the per-vote subsidy, also referred to as the "government allowance", gives the party an inflation-indexed subsidy each year of $2.04 per vote received in the last election.

Now, Wikipedia can be inaccurate, I know, but major changes like this do tend to get documented, and major pages like this tend to have a lot of people watching it, so I'm reasonably confident in this content.

If you have a citation which refutes this, however, please do share because I'd hate to walk around believing false facts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in...

It has been eliminated after the next election

I like how you refuted me with another part of my own link. I'm embarrassed to have missed it.

It seems to be a fair bit worse than you've stated, actually. One of the citations in that section leads to a Globe and Mail article[1] which states that the subsidy will be phased out over the next few years:

> The government said it will introduce legislation to gradually reduce the allowance of $2 a year per vote by increments of 51 cents starting on April 1 of next year until it is eliminated by 2015-16.

I'm assuming that means that the subsidy won't appear at all in the 2015-2016 budget, which means that it will actually be gone by the time the next election rolls around in October 2015. Hopefully the NDP will be able to get enough seats to bring it back after the election, preferably alone but possibly with the Liberals.

Incidentally, I was surprised to find that the subsidy has only existed since the beginning of 2004. I suppose that has a lot to do with my age, since I wasn't quite 19 then, and anything that happens before the first time you vote tends to be regarded as "the way it's always been."

Thanks for the clarification.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/budget/news/pa...

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