Next Monday, Canadians will vote to elect a federal government. No matter the result, we know one thing for sure: Campaign spending in the Canadian election has looked radically different from a general election in the United States. Canadian campaigns do not feature multimillion-dollar contributions, barrages of unlimited expenditures, or anything like the intense pressure American candidates face to appeal to wealthy donors.
To observers of American politics, this may be hard to imagine. But in fact, Canada offers us a vision of what could have been.
1974 marked a banner year for reformers in both countries. American legislators, reacting to the Watergate scandal, strengthened the Federal Election and Campaign Act by creating stricter limits on campaign contributions and expenditures, and instituting a public financing system for presidential elections. Meanwhile, Canada’s parliament responded to rising campaign costs and the onset of television advertising by passing the Election Expenses Act, which contained similar reforms, including caps on campaign expenditures and public financing for campaigns.
In the following decades, Canada’s parliament and courts continued to fine-tune its campaign finance laws. But the United States took a different path — not because Congress changed campaign finance regulations, but because the Supreme Court dismantled them.
In 1976, the Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that most campaign spending limits were unconstitutional. Since then, courts have chipped away at campaign finance regulations. The most famous of these more recent decisions, Citizens United, reaffirmed and expanded on the same anti-regulatory principles in Buckley, kicking off our present era of unlimited spending by super PACs. Congress has mostly been a bystander to these developments, leaving our public financing system for presidential races to atrophy.
Today, political campaigns in the United States saturate the nation with ads, fueled by millions or — at the presidential level — billions of dollars. Candidates can gain a big advantage by courting major donors, especially in the early stages of a campaign. Some can use another strategy: Be rich and willing to spend a lot of your own money.
In Canadian federal elections, strict contribution limits restrain the role of wealthy donors, and candidates can only spend up to 5,000 Canadian dollars (about 3,600 U.S. dollars) of their personal wealth on their campaigns. Wealthy individuals and corporations do not have a legal way to funnel unlimited amounts of money to candidates and parties. Caps on spending also limit the volume of advertising.
With these limits on big private spending, public financing accounts for a substantial portion of money in Canadian elections. The state subsidizes expenditures by parties and candidates while boosting the power of small donors via a tax credit that resembles the small-donor matching systems of jurisdictions like New York.
None of these policy differences follow directly from the texts of the U.S. or Canadian Constitutions. Nor can they easily be attributed to inherent political or cultural traits. After all, when given the chance, democratically accountable legislatures in both countries opted to set similar limits on the role of money in politics.
Canada’s campaign finance rules interlock to create a political system where one of the defining features of U.S. politics — massive private spending — is absent. Reformers and policymakers there operate on almost unrecognizably different terrain: Some bemoan how rich donors can contribute up to a few thousand dollars to campaigns, while recent disagreements about campaign finance have centered not on whether to subsidize campaigns with public funds or cap independent spending, but rather how aggressively to do so.
Canadians appear to be happy with their system overall. As recently as 2023, a comfortable majority of Canadians were satisfied with the way democracy worked in their country. That same year, just 28 percent of Americans said the same about the United States, and the role of large donors and other wealthy interests often ranks among Americans’ top complaints.
Meanwhile, public polling consistently indicates that a majority of Americans support a vision of campaign finance regulation, including contribution and spending limits, that resembles Canada’s system more than our present reality. In doing so, they acknowledge a principle that the Canadian Supreme Court stood by 21 years ago. Ruling to uphold limits on independent expenditures, the court’s majority opinion reads, “In the absence of spending limits, it is possible for the affluent or a number of persons pooling their resources and acting in concert to dominate the political discourse, depriving their opponents of a reasonable opportunity to speak and be heard, and undermining the voter’s ability to be adequately informed of all views.
“Equality in the political discourse is thus necessary for meaningful participation in the electoral process and ultimately enhances the right to vote.”
The author would like to thank Lisa Young of the University of Calgary and Harold Jansen of the University of Lethbridge for their time and expertise.
