The recent controversy over the way in which the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government allegedly monetized access to its ministers, through donations of $100, has reopened debates on the supervision of electoral financing in Quebec . In the process, François Legault and his minister Jean-François Roberge proposed putting an end to private contributions from political parties and relying only on public financing. If this proposal appears to be a simple solution to a problem of parliamentary ethics, it also threatens to considerably impoverish our democratic life.
Since the law on electoral financing of the government of René Lévesque in 1977, Quebec has always been a leading figure in the regulation of political financing. The latest example is the Act to amend the Quebec Election Act, adopted in 2013 and which caps the amount of private contributions at $100 per year (an amount to which another sum of $100 may be added during election periods). Thus, Quebec is one of the strictest states in this area. For comparison, this limit is $1,725 at the federal level.
There are excellent reasons to applaud this social choice. The health of a democratic regime depends on mechanisms that protect the political equality of citizens. Through this ceiling, we minimize the risk that parties whose electoral base is more fortunate are advantaged over those whose base is less fortunate, or even worse, the risk that parties adapt their electoral platform according to the preferences of the most fortunate. rich. To put it simply: these limits aim to reduce the gap in political influence induced by economic inequality.
It should also be noted that in Quebec, parties benefit from significant public funding, which represents a large part of the resources they need to carry out their mission and participate in democratic competition.
In this context, should we, as the CAQ suggested, abolish private financing?
First, this would result in a significant cut in funds for small parties, and particularly for newcomers. Since public funding is largely calculated based on the valid votes obtained by a political party in the last general election, an emerging party would be largely deprived of it. It is also thanks to private donations that the Conservative Party of Quebec was able to raise the funds necessary for its last electoral campaign.
Then, the donation is a gesture which maintains the feeling of belonging to a party, which allows the citizen to get concretely involved and which consequently encourages citizen participation. But above all, private financing requires candidates and parties to make the effort to convince a large group of citizens to make a concrete commitment in their favor. This allows citizens to express their political preferences more regularly, ensuring a certain “democratic dialogue” with parties outside electoral periods.
Donation amounts do not have to be large to achieve these goals. But the participation of citizens in electoral financing is a condition.
We could of course consider changing the role of private financing. For example, the French economist Julia Cagé suggests, in The price of democracy, the creation of democratic vouchers. The State would then have to reserve part of the budget allocated to public financing of political parties and distribute it to all citizens in the form of vouchers allowing them to support a political party or movement. This could be done for example when completing their income tax return, in which a person would be asked to choose the political party towards which to direct their contribution. It is a model that would ensure adequate annual public funding for political parties while retaining the democratic virtues of private funding. But such a reform would require complex legislative work.
These are all the issues that the untimely proposal of the Prime Minister, who already sees himself “completing the work of René Lévesque”, seems to ignore. And, let us finally say it, if there is a problem of inequity in political influence, it will not be solved simply by abolishing the possibility of making $100 donations.