For better or worse, it was Jean Chrétien's idea to ban corporate and union political donations and, instead, allow political parties to survive on receipts from the general taxpayer. And so, every quarter, Elections Canada hands out the allowance to those political parties that did well enough in the last election to qualify for that allowance. Each political party gets 43.75 cents a quarter (that's a $1.75 a year) for each vote it garnered in the last general election, so long as the party cleared the threshold of 2 per cent of all votes cast in the general election or — and this is a very important 'or' if you are the Bloc Québecois — 5 per cent of all votes cast in those electoral districts in which the party ran a candidate.
So, with that background, cheques are on the way from Elections Canada to the following parties for the following amounts:
- Conservative Party of Canada: $2.57-million
- Liberal Party of Canada: $2.14-million
- New Democratic Party of Canada: $1.24-million
- Bloc Québécois: $742,000
- Green Party: $317,000