Are the Conservatives forgetting their Flanagan?

According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the Conservatives have deputized "democratic reform" minister Steven Fletcher to lead a new charge to end the per-vote subsidy for political parties.

As the article rightly points-out, such a move would no longer mark the financial death-knell of the Liberal Party of Canada. Under the leadership of Alf Apps and Rocco Rossi the party's fundraising machine has been reinvigorated, and the subsidy is no longer the lifeline it once was for the party.

Still, I'm not necessarily ready to support its elimination. When the Liberal government of Jean Chretien brought-in the subsidy, it was to counter the elimination of corporate and union donations, which cut-off a major source of funding to political parties. The Conservatives tightened the taps even further, by sharply limiting personal donations from around $5400 to today's cap, which IIRC is around $1100.

I remember when Stephen Harper argued money was speech and shouldn't be constrained, but I won't digress. I'll just say that I may me amenable to re-visiting the per-vote subsidy were such a move coupled with a significant increase in the personal donation limit. I think that would be a fair compromise.

But what led me to blog on this issue though was this graph from the Free Press article:

As well, the Conservatives cutting off the vote tax would not cripple the Liberals finances but would hamper the NDP and Bloc Quebecois, both of which earn more from the vote tax than from donations.

And that would be bad news for the Conservatives, whose victories are in part due to the splitting of votes on the centre-left of the political spectrum.

That's a very good point. Strategically, it's in the best interests of the Conservatives to ensure a strong NDP. That's Flanagan 101. A strong NDP pulls votes from the Liberals (not saying the Liberals own those votes or anything, just that they draw from the same well) which creates splits that help elect Conservatives. Battleground Ontario is a good example of this. A number of recent Ontario polls have pointed to Conservative losses in the 905, driven in part by Liberal strength and coresponding NDP weakness. That's a bad picture for the CPC.

So while going after the per-vote subsidy might have made good strategic sense for the CPC when the LPC was a fiscal basketcase, today you could argue it would actually be strategically counter-productive for them.

Of course, there is the chance this is about what's right for the CPC, and not strategic positioning and sticking it to their opponents.

Hey, there's a first time for everything.

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The Honourable Minister for Minitrue

I haven't been paying too much attention to the Conservative policy convention happening this weekend in Winnipeg. Which is probably how the Conservatives like it.

There has been news of a few wacky socially-conservative policies coming out of the Conservative membership. We'll see if they go anywhere but I'm doubtful. The powers that be, I suspect, will stage manage this thing pretty tiightly.

Speaking of which, that does seem to be the theme I've seen emerging from my cursory scanning of convention coverage: keeping the media far, far away from any potentially controversial discussions that may be happening.

A Tory spokesman said party officials made the decision to restrict the media from workshops until the roughly 2,000 delegates have a chance to discuss dozens of resolutions up for debate.

Resolutions include health-care privatization, declawing the Canadian Human Rights Commission, protecting the unborn from criminal violence and moving on creating balanced-budget legislation.

The media restriction will be lifted today and reporters will finally get a chance to find out what the Tory grassroots really think. The convention ends Sunday.

"Membership has its privileges," Charleswood-St.James-Assiniboia Tory MP Steven Fletcher said. Fletcher was recently appointed by Harper as minister of state for democratic reform.

Fletcher said the media blackout gives delegates a chance to get to the heart of issues. He compared the closed-door discussions to that of a private company charting its course.

But Fletcher said as a government, all new policy is open and transparent. A party spokesman fielding media complaints about the ban, said if reporters didn't like it they could join the party and become a delegate in the next convention.

I just wanted to share this passage because I find it delightfully Orwellian that the Conservatives dispatched their “minister of state for democratic reform” to explain why the media re being kept in pens, away from delegates discussing policy. What's next, renaming DND the Ministry of Peace?

If you're looking for some on the ground blog coverage of the doings in Winnipeg, Liberal blogger Danielle Takacs has been providing a lot of great coverage from the belly of the beast, and for an NDP perspective, Dr. Dawg is there as well.

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