Only last week, as the financial crisis deepened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called on all political parties to work together. Now he is using the turmoil to deal a potentially deadly blow to his rivals. Officials say that when the minority Conservative government unveils its fiscal update later on Thursday, it will announce an end to the public financing of political parties. This would mean a 67 percent cut in overall funding for the main opposition Liberal Party, which is already in financial trouble after losing badly in last month's federal election. The left-leaning New Democrats would lose 57 percent and the separatist Bloc Quebecois a staggering 86 percent. The proposal has to be voted on by Parliament and would be a confidence measure. If the Conservatives lose, there would be another election - one that the cash-strapped opposition parties are very poorly placed to fight. Professor Richard Schultz, chairman of the political science department at Montreal's McGill University, described Harper's gambit as Machiavellian. “I think he's undermining a very important part of democracy ... it's a cynical, cunning, political ploy,” he told Reuters. At present, parties receive around C$1.95 for every vote they get in an election. The Conservatives, who have a much more effective fund-raising operation than their rivals, would lose 37 percent of their overall income if public financing were abolished. The total amount of savings would be around C$30 million a year, which is insignificant compared with the size of the stimulus package Ottawa is contemplating. That said, the money makes a huge difference to opposition parties, which over the years have been nowhere near as successful as the Conservatives in persuading people to hand over money. Donations are capped at C$1,000 per person. “It's a transparent con job and it shows just what a weakling Stephen Harper is. He can only face his opponents when he tries to have one hand tied behind their back,” said Thomas Mulcair, a leading New Democrat legislator. “The Conservatives, in this purely demagogic populist way, are trying to discredit the entire political class. It's the exact same politics practiced in Washington by Karl Rove and (President) George W. Bush,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Harper aides insist the proposal is aimed at saving money, rather than designed to cripple rivals. “It's a choice between should the government (be) overwhelmingly the largest funder of parties or should parties, especially in a time of fiscal restraint, have to rely more on their own efforts to raise money?” said Kory Teneycke, Harper's chief spokesman. “I think the public will be very much on our side in terms of this,” he told Reuters. Whatever Harper's motives, the move will clearly do great damage to the Liberals, who have governed Canada for longer than any other party but are now beset by organizational problems. They lost the last two elections and saw their share of the vote decrease in the last three. Harper and his team - whom rivals accuse of being overly partisan -have nothing but contempt for the Liberals. “People in the prime minister's office are quite open about this. They say things like ‘We want to destroy the Liberal Party',” said one high-placed political source. During the election campaign, Harper dismissed an editorial in a major medical journal criticizing government food safety policy on the grounds that it had been written by “a Liberal.” The Liberals said the proposal was designed to obscure the fact that the fiscal update would reveal Canada running a budget deficit in 2009-10 for the first time in 13 years. “Stephen Harper's trying to change the channel away from the economy. He has no plan for Canadians who are worried about their jobs,” Liberal legislator Scott Brison told reporters. A leading columnist for the usually pro-Conservative National Post newspaper said Harper had gone too far. “This isn't self-flagellation, it's self-serving. Stephen Harper's desire to geld the Liberal Party is well-known,” wrote John Ivison. “You can sympathize with the sentiments and still wonder whether Mr. Harper hasn't overstepped the mark ... it was obviously decided that this is too good a crisis to waste.”
