Jo-Ann Roberts during book signing at Tidewater Books in Sackville

Jo-Ann Roberts says she thought she had a good understanding of politics and democracy after 40-years as a journalist, many of them working for the CBC.

But after she became a political candidate for the Green Party in the 2015 federal election, she realized there were many things she didn’t know including why money matters so much in determining how much influence various political parties have in our parliamentary system.¹

“I’d say the most significant thing I didn’t know about was the financing that goes on with parties in terms of rebates,” she said during an interview last week at Tidewater Books in Sackville where she signed copies of her new book Storm the Ballot Box: An Insider’s Guide to a Voting Revolution.

“For example, if a party in Canada gets 2% of the vote, they get a 50% rebate on everything they spend in an election. And if a candidate gets 10% of the vote, they get 60% back.”

Roberts explained the rebate money not only helps parties and candidates pay their campaign expenses, it also allows them to continue working and raising issues between elections.

That public money, she says, is crucial for smaller parties like the NDP and the Greens.

Per-vote subsidy

Roberts mourns the fact that after he won a majority government in the 2011 federal election, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper eliminated the per-vote subsidy that the Liberal Chrétien government had introduced in 2003 along with measures to limit campaign contributions from wealthy donors, big corporations and unions.

“Chrétien wanted to reduce the political influence of the rich and powerful and to recognize that, despite our first-past-the-post election system, every vote had some value,” Roberts writes in her book.²

The subsidy paid to qualifying federal political parties was $1.75 per vote, per year, for every vote they had received in the previous election.

She writes that it’s something candidates from smaller parties can point to when voters ask why they should vote for someone who isn’t likely to win.

“I can say from experience that when a candidate knocks on a door and tells someone that, if they vote for them, their vote will help fund the party’s work — even if they are not elected — it makes a difference,” she adds.

Life-line for parties

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons

Money that is generated by political support is a life-line for parties, Roberts writes.

“And if we care about our democracy,” she says during our interview, “we should be very careful that we don’t let politicians kick out some of the legs of the stool.

“And that’s what Stephen Harper did,” she adds. “He wanted to bankrupt smaller parties. He wanted us to be in a two-party system very much like we see in the U.S.”

Now, aside from the rebates based on vote percentages, parties rely on individual donors who have enough disposable income to make a contribution that will earn them a tax deduction later.

Roberts argues that makes political parties more responsive to people with money.

“The per-vote subsidy was a much more democratic way of financing political parties,” she writes.

She urges voters to push federal governments to bring it back.³

“This is the single, most significant change we can make to election financing and the simplest way, barring proportional representation, to make every vote matter and let the public know their vote has value,” she concludes.

This is the first of three reports based on Roberts’s ideas for electoral reform.

1. Roberts has been a Green Party candidate in four elections and is also a former interim leader of the federal Green Party.
2. In a first-past-the-post or winner-take-all system, the candidate with the most votes in a given riding wins even if all other candidates combined receive more than half of the votes.
3. Some provinces, including New Brunswick, continue to have per-vote subsidies. In New Brunswick’s case, the subsidy is more generous for female candidates to encourage parties to recruit more women to run for office.