Private Money In Politics Is The Root Of Our Rot
Nearly all the problems we are facing today share a common root cause: the role of money — and those who have too much of it — in politics.
Canada’s electoral system is money-dependent, giving a natural and disproportionate voice to those who have money to spare. Even at small scales, the maximum political donation a Canadian can make in 2026 is $3,550. A single family of four can legally give around $28,000 split evenly between a political party and their local candidate over a four year cycle. It does not take many such families to fully fund a local campaign within Canada’s spending limits. That family could get as much as $10,400 of it back in tax refunds, too.
But those numbers are chump change for the nation’s millionaires, and completely inconsequential to our billionaires. The electoral system is merely the most visible way money influences our politics.
Someone making minimum wage who only makes around $32,000 per year — and has to somehow feed their family on that — cannot donate anything politically and still be able to eat, while wealthier donors are getting thousands back on their taxes for their generosity, and from there the first level of systemic corruption is already clear.
A candidate seeking office or re-election needs to fundraise enough to pay for their next campaign. They need to ask those who have money to share it. From the get-go, those with resources have access to the candidates not shared by those without.
I experienced this first-hand when I was door-knocking to sell memberships to win my nomination. In that cycle, party membership cost $10 per person, with cash preferred by the party. There were people that gave me $100 bills and told me to fill out the forms for their whole family with two and three year memberships to avoid bothering with change. And there were couples who bought a single one-year membership between them because $10 was already a stretch on their fixed incomes, unable to pay for one for each of them without giving up some food or medication, but wanting to support this earnest young person who’d shown up at their door.
Once elected, the fundraising does not end. There is always another election, another campaign, another political expense. But once in office with the profile and influence that is assumed to come with it, fundraising is easier. Fundraising requires conversation, and conversation is access. Money, then, buys access. The party needs money, too, and those who can fundraise the most effectively, who can most efficiently prostitute themselves out to those with money, head for provincial and federal cabinets, where fundraising becomes a significant portion of their responsibilities.
It creates an endless feedback loop. The more money you can bring, the easier your access is to decision-makers, and the higher your profile and credibility within the system. The more money you have, the more your interest is in having decision-makers protect your money, and your ability to accumulate more of it. If you have money and need more access, you can pay people who are also connected to politics to get you meetings and pass on your desires. The more you have, the easier this is. If you have limitless resources, they come with limitless access. Electoral politics funded by private money inevitably then becomes little more than a vending machine.
To break out, we need to be as disgusted with money in politics as we are with government agencies shooting unarmed civilians in the streets. We need to be demanding a complete and comprehensive end to unequal access, to private money in public institutions, to even the vaguest whiff of institutionalised impropriety. We need to remove all forms of cash-for-access or pay-for-play politics, right down to the smallest low-dollar donations.
This will not be achieved by hopes and prayers. Our political and electoral system is not about to radically change until it is politically untenable not to.
We can start by demanding incremental changes that are hard to oppose.
Forget donation limits, they miss the point. All political campaign funds must come directly from public sources, not private ones. There is no room for private money in politics, not even one single penny. Every voter must have the same weight in democracy at every stage for it to be a fair system. Having money to donate should not be able to buy you access.
For those in office, any communication or meeting between any lobbyist and any government official should be, in its entirety, on the public record. There should be no secrets here. If someone wants to exercise their access to a decision-maker in the government, then they should have the courage of their convictions that what they are asking of the public through their government is in the public interest. Every word said, every letter written, every idea proposed, on the record, available for public scrutiny. Lobbying can have legitimate purpose, but only through equality of access and transparency.
To achieve it requires an engaged public — you — to ask for it, to demand it, to make sure that at every town hall meeting and public event, that these simple demands are heard.
These two things would largely defang the disproportionate influence of money in politics, and once that happens, it is possible to fix the regulatory systems and the tax codes to become more fair. It will be possible to tax wealth rather than income, to get rid of the absurd injustices in the code that increase the costs for those who have the least, and reward those who have the most with ever-lower tax bills. To end a culture where the haves get and the have-nots get-not.
One can be wealthy without being an oligarch. All that is required is playing fair and not using those resources to tilt the system. Having great wealth comes with great responsibility, but using it to seek greater wealth through politics is to abuse the privilege that comes with it; it is what makes one an oligarch.
Our system is designed to protect wealth, not individuals. Our police primarily defend assets rather than people, judging the severity of robbery by the value of the stolen goods and the net worth of those who owned them, rather than their real-world impact on those from whom they were stolen. Theft is a criminal matter unless it is wage theft, which is civil, making redress out of reach for the underpaid. The central banks and governments continue to bail out the lenders and not the borrowers, further driving the wealthy to greater wealth and the poor to greater poverty.
If we continue to let the insatiably wealthy dictate the rules as they have, especially since the advent of Reaganomics destroyed the North American middle class, we will never recover. These oligarchs who do not believe in democratic freedoms will continue to make our system less and less functional, less sustainable, more feudal, as they chase ever more wealth.
Canada cannot allow ourselves to continue down this road, the logical conclusion of which is so clearly visible south of the border. We must demand an end to money in politics and the end of the oligarchy that it sustains.
You mention lobbying but really only in passing. The well-funded interests such as petroleum, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc. have the means to change public perceptions which in turn influences elected officials at all levels. The groups with opposing views, environmentalists, humanitarians, food banks, etc. do not have the same access to the public forum. Eliminating money from the electoral system is only one small step to eliminating the influence of money from the body politic.