Toronto, ON: The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on the Ford government to scrap the province’s political welfare regime before taxpayer payments to political parties resume next month.

“Premier Doug Ford promised Ontarians five years ago that he would stop handing out taxpayer cash to the province’s political parties,” said CTF Ontario Director Jay Goldberg. “Five years later, political parties are still partying on the taxpayer dime.”

Last year, the Ford government arranged for Ontario’s political parties to receive nine months’ worth of their per-vote subsidy payments ahead of the province’s 2022 election. Because of that payday advance, payments haven’t gone out to parties since last spring.

However, the next political welfare cheques are scheduled to go out in June. The quarterly payments cost taxpayers roughly $3.6 million.

“Taxpayer payments to political parties have been on hold for nearly a year, so now is the perfect time to cancel the program,” said Goldberg. “Political welfare was scrapped at the federal level over a decade ago and it’s high time Ontario followed suit.”

The per-vote subsidy was introduced by the Wynne government nearly a decade ago. During the 2018 election, Ford promised to scrap the per-vote subsidy. Yet the payment system is still in place and is not set to end until the beginning of 2025. Ford began to wind down the program in 2019, but ramped it up again when the pandemic hit.

“In the spring of 2021, Ford claimed that he was maintaining and increasing the per-vote subsidy in place to help political parties get through the pandemic,” said Goldberg. “That was a weak excuse then and it’s an even weaker excuse now. With the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, Ford should cancel the payments today, not wait until 2025.”

Ontario’s political parties collectively raised over $27 million in 2021. That fundraising total was over $10 million higher than what the parties raised in 2019, the year before the pandemic began.