06-02 Organization and Money

During a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau in 1973, I met with some of the officials in the Prime Minister’s Office and discovered that one person had been designated to follow my media exposure since I started my opposition to the White Paper on Tax Reform in 1970. He told me that during this three-year period I had the highest national profile of any Canadian next to the PM.
What I did not tell them was that since starting the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in 1971, I was fighting to keep the company alive. The organization and money that is the root of all politics was not there and I was fearful of closing it all down.
My dream of a political voice for small business stayed alive only because I mastered the techniques of selling memberships. To pay my own salary, I went out each Friday to not only learn how to sell but how to organize a national sales operation.
Years later, when asked to speak to MBA students at the University of Toronto School of Business, I went to great lengths to explain that the CFIB story was really an organizational story and not a political story.
It is the same with political parties and all forms of non-governmental organizations engaged in public policy and politics. Their secret is always related to how they organize themselves to raise money.
To give some sense of CFIB as an organizational machine, the number of small firms that pay for an annual CFIB membership is greater than the number of people who contribute to the three major Canadian parties: Liberal, Conservative and NDP.
Regarding the financing or political parties, I was very proud of Prime Minister Chretien passing campaign financing legislation in 2004 that removed unions and corporations as sources of campaign funding, and instead provided federal funds to subsidize contributions by individuals and to partially subsidize party campaign expenses.
The United States has a terrible problem, and that is what are called Super PACs (political action committees) that can accumulate massive amounts of money to support a political candidate. The rule for allowing these PACs is that they do not work directly with the campaign. They are supposed to be an instrument of “freedom of expression” for the powerful and wealthy.
So corporate money in massive ad campaigns has, in my opinion, hijacked American democracy. Love the cartoon.
There is an answer to this problem and that is to elect billionaires who can finance political campaigns with their own resources. Welcome President Trump.
I listen to the continuous debate in Canada about changing the way we elect our politicians to supposedly give a greater voice to smaller political parties. My personal judgement would be to protect the current system called “first by the post” where the winner gets the most seats.
With any other electoral structure, you live permanently with minority governments and political coalitions.
Now, if you really care about how we govern ourselves you do not need to change the rules. Change is more about passion than institutions.
There is nothing magical about my involvement in public life. I just got mad. Perhaps we need more people to get mad enough to involve themselves in the machinery of politics, if not politics itself.
That’s the way I see it anyways.