CYA Group Blog

With the new budget haven been presented on the hill, one of the hot topics has been the decision to phase out the per vote subsidy for political parties. Now I've read and listened to a lot of the debates about whether this was a strategic move by Prime Minister Steven Harper to cripple the already reeling Liberal party. Personally I like to think that this move is done to make strides to getting Canada out of a deficit, but that just may be me hoping that our new prime minister isn't leading his majority government to make decisions based off of personal grudges or gain. However what concerns me about this decision to phase out the per vote subsidy is the impact it will have on the green party, a party that has made tremendous strides with Elizabeth May winning the parties first seat in parliament. This has been a party that has pushed hard for programs such as the per vote subsidy, since this allows them to continue to keep up with larger parties such as the conservatives. With these new changes I wonder how the green party will continue to keep up and whether more Canadians will be willing to open there wallets to help support this party. Following that thought however I began researching more into the funding of political parties and learned that people who do donate to there political parties 400 dollars or less receive a tax credit of roughly 75% when the department of finance does the calculations up for this in comparison to the per vote subsidy is portioned out more evenly between the five major federal parties, the tax credit option leaves the conservatives with over 50 % of the tax credit donations given out by the Canadian revenue agency and addition to the reimbursement which continues to cripple the smaller parties such as the green party, thus the per vote subsidy helps to somewhat level the playing field, but with that being scrapped now I find myself circling back again to whether this move is in the best interest of helping to balance the budget or whether this is the conservatives taking their majority and tilting the field to their favour.
*RobbyJF*