Dear Editor:
Recent months and years have led to many people decrying about the decaying state of our democracy. A lot of that is partisan hot air being spread around, trying to demonize the opposing viewpoint without providing one's own viewpoint for scrutiny.
In all of this, not much is said anymore about campaign financing. Federally, there's a ban on corporate and union donations to parties and a strict limit on individual donations. At the provincial and municipal level, there are fewer restrictions, which is how more than half of all B.C. Liberal fundraising can legally come from corporate bodies.
You can bet that these groups don't fund candidates and parties simply from the goodness of their collective hearts. There's an assumption that once in power, politicians will remember who funded them and pay them back through legislation and regulation.
The United States presents an extreme example of this, where powerful industries control entire congressional delegations that are too afraid to vote against the sources of their campaign dollars. Public policy suffers, because politicians are too busy catering to the special interest groups that got them into their own cushy jobs.
Once they leave office, the corporate golden parachute kicks in with a do-nothing job, as a reward for faithful service. Sadly, that service is not to the constituents of their riding or the jurisdiction as a whole. It's to the funders and wielders of monetary power. We don't need that kind of government-corporate kickback scheme.
Trevor Ritchie, Burnaby
