Did Canadian taxpayers save the Bloc Québécois?

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I know it's a little late to be revisiting the last Canadian general election, but when it comes to my hard earned tax dollars and how they're used, any time or place is fair game. Anyway, to make a long story short, I was clicking around a few public policy websites last night and happened to stumble upon this fascinating report on campaign finance by Frontier Centre's Mark Milke. Let me tell you, What Saved The Bloc Québécois in the 2008 Election: Public Money is a great read from opening to closing — but what caught my eye above and beyond everything else was the bar graph illustrated above.

For those who find it difficult to read the graph straight up, the blueish green bar to the left represents dollars earned from public sources (specifically the $1.95-per-vote given to registered federal parties annually by Elections Canada), while the grey bar indicates private donations. As you can see from all five examples, the party whose public funding far exceeded its private funding was the separatist party, the Bloc Québécois. They received almost 12 times as much public funding as they did from private donations. No other party even came close to that unbalanced level of financing. As a benchmark, take a look at the Conservatives, their private funding actually exceeded the funding received from public sources. Quite a drastic difference from the pathetic $73,704 the separatist raised since 2008 compared to the $1.5 million we gave 'em in that same time period. A comparative public/private ratio which works out to around 20:1 running up to the fall election. Brutal.

Anyway, as I see it, it's bad enough that the Bloc Québécois (in their 18 years of existence) only passed 4 pieces of legislation in total, not to mention, all the hefty federal pensions they built up over the years via our tax dollars, but for them to be using our money to rescue their fortunes in the last election is ludicrous to say the least. I mean honestly, how many seats did we buy the Bloc anyway?

Let's just say, my consciences hopes it was zero, but my gut suspects it was a lot more --- at the very least a handful. In my books, even one is one too many, especially when you're talking about our tax follars funding separatist. I mean really, can anyone else think of another example — in any Western country — of a government who fully funds a party or group with the intent of breaking their country?

Only in Canada my dear Watson.