There have been a couple challenges to the comment in the Babel Manifesto that American politics are corrupt. If you ever need proof of that claim, you should read the New York Times insight into the cost of a vote in the November 14 issue. The Times was complaining that in the U.S. mid-term election this month, candidates were spending an average of more than $40 per vote. How times change.
Back in the beginning of the 20th Century, in Canada, it was commonly believed that the cost of a vote was a $5 bill, a mickey of rye whiskey or ten minutes with a hooker. Then they gave women the vote and costs started climbing.
It was in 1968 that a Toronto steel tycoon complained to his friends at his club that inflation was serious as it had cost him $79,000 to buy a seat in Canada’s Parliament for his son-in-law. Sitting in a meeting with that son-in-law when this openness was being discussed, I quietly commented that I thought the campaign cost more like $85,000. He agreed but added that he did not get money from just one source. Mind you, with the very high turnout in that election, his cost per vote in that riding was less than $3.
It was the year before that I had spent about $12,000 (a little more than $1 per actual vote) on a provincial campaign in the same area. How much more it would have cost to win, is hard to judge. We lost by less than a thousand votes. It was not just the vulgar amount of money the opponent spent but the cost of the criminal charges that were brought later against the overly-partisan returning officer in the riding.
It might be foolish to suggest that politics is squeaky clean in Canada today but you rarely see the wholesale corruption that Americans seem to take for granted. Creative accounting by Harper’s Conservatives has caused more than just raised eyebrows in our federal politics. There also seems to be no upper limit to the amount of taxpayers’ money that Harper’s people are willing to spend on their re-election, before the election is called.
Provinces do their own thing on election expense rules and my experience is limited to Ontario. If the rest of the provinces have rules as clumsy as Ontario, we are all spending too much on accountants to try to keep things organized.
And since municipalities are creatures of the provinces, municipal election rules are the poor stepchild. In the recent municipal election in Babel, explaining the rules was made more difficult by the fact that the people explaining and enforcing them rarely understand them. And in an age when people are getting away from using cheques, candidates are supposed to only accept cheques for donations. Cash is a no-no but credit cards can be used through the candidate’s web site. Ontario’s municipal donors are limited to $750 total donations to one campaign but, strangely, there is no limit for the candidate (up to the spending limit). Mind you, each candidate has to report all donations and expenses after the election and you are only permitted to expend about 90 cents per potential voter.
It all makes our municipal elections penny ante compared to the American mid-term figures. The final reports are not in from either but a best guess in Babel shows an overall expenditure by all mayoral candidates combined of close to $4 per net vote. That is about one tenth the estimated figure in the American mid-term elections.
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