In 2025, the Conservative Party of Canada spent $99 million, nearly twice as much as the Liberal Party’s $57 million in the same election year, and, despite their bluster about their ability to manage the public purse, Poilievre’s party did so at a $15 million deficit.

The irony of a party whose reputation is built around financial management outspending and underperforming their rivals without being able to balance their own books is delicious. It is an easy story to write, an easy joke to make. Conservatives can’t manage their own books — how could you expect them to manage yours?

The Conservatives are not the party of sound financial management. The right wing has never been about balancing the books or taking care of the common people. There is a reason they have spent the past century trying to turn “socialist” into a swearword, and accused anyone who opposes them of being “communist.”

The philosophy of the right is about giving license to greed, about legitimising structural imbalance, about extracting value from the public purse to their own ends, for their own purposes, and depriving wider society of its benefit to force people to turn to profit-making ventures for ever-more essential infrastructure and services.

The very fact that the Conservatives are consistently the biggest fundraisers and the biggest spenders does not mean they have the widest support among Canadian voters, the best ideas, or the competence to do the job they are ostensibly seeking. It simply means that they have the greatest understanding of the importance of spending money to make money, of the essential role of private money in the public policy forum we call politics.

We should not be shocked that the Conservatives are spending nearly $100 million in a calendar year, but rather that it is either possible of necessary for money to have that level of impact in politics, regardless of party.

There is no mechanism for someone who has bills to pay and lacks significant savings to run for political office without courting donations so high that they can collect a salary from their own campaign machinery. There is no way to do so without turning to private money.

Donors may well believe in the candidate, but they also largely believe in the candidate’s future ability to take their calls at a rate comparable to their philanthropy. The same applies to the whole political party. The donations come with strings attached, however tenuously, however little even the donors recognise it.

Electoral politics, then, revolves around access to money, not a discussion of ideas, or as a recognition of competence or hard work. Those without money are consistently left out of the debate, the discussion, the candidate rolls, the party structures. Those with money are able to spend it with impunity to influence public policy debate toward objectives that help them gather ever more money.

Open debate on policy is a public good and must be treated and funded in that manner. Public policy cannot and must not be about chasing donations or be decided on who can spend the most.

When the Conservatives manage to spend nearly $100 million in a single year, it is not a testament to their abilities, their values, their work ethic, or their public support. It is not a recognition of their competence in gathering or managing money, as their associated deficit plainly demonstrates.

Rather, it is an indictment of a political system built around money when it should be built around the people.