I do not know a lot about Canadian politics but when I read this article I thought that your Prime minister was seriously threatening the democratic system. He is willing to eliminate the public funding of political parties. I do not say that Switzerland is better because there is no public funding and it is becoming a real issue too. It is actually why this article interested me first.
In a world where the media has such a big importance and the campaigns can influence the results of the vote, I think that each party should have the same amount of money to campaign for an election. The problem is that is it is very hard to control the funding because it can be very indirect. Can we measure the value of a celebrity endorsing a political candidate? Can we prevent influential corporations or famous brands to express their political views? Certainly not, or at least it could be argued that it is a breach of their freedom of expression. That is what the article aptly points out.
However, even though it is hard to limit the external funding I still think that there should be a minimum provided by the state in order to ensure that each party is able to compete. As mentioned by Dahl, Schmitter and Karl, it is necessary for each citizen to be able to pick his/her preference, though if some political parties do not have enough funding they won’t be able to compete.
Therefore, it is essential for an equal political representation to have a public funding of the political parties. The argument that the suppression of this funding will save money is not acceptable. In fact, it would reduce the choice available to the citizens, therefore the money will be saved not in favor of the community but in favor of some citizens and at the expense of others.
Comments on the writing:
I did not like this post because it was a big block of text without paragraphs and without structure. Therefore I divided it into four paragraphs. I also tried to shorten the length of some sentences that were not easy to follow. I changed some words and punctuation as well. Finally I put the link in the word “this article” because I think that it looks nicer.