I was just wondering how corporate donations are handled, legally at least, in other countries. I know due to the concept of Corporate Personhood, Corporations can donate freely to political parties in the US.
If you need more specification than that, I am talking about in Canada, France and the UK.
Canadians recognize the concept of corporate personhood, but they don’t contribute to political campaigns, or at least not on a scale that would be more than a rounding error by American standards.
In Australia corporations, including business corporations and trade unions, can and do make donations to political parties. The main restriction is that donations over a certain amount must be disclosed publicly by the party.
In the UK donations over £5,000 to a national party must be publicly declared; £1,000 and up must be publicly declared if it’s to a local party or association.
Loans must now also be declared.
Corporations are legal persons in more or less every civilized country. Legal personage is a basic (and logically inevitable) concept if you want a legal system to function.
Corporate donations in the USA are a function of having much looser campaign financing laws.
At the federal level in Canada, corporations cannot donate to political parties - only real live people can do so.
Just to add to this, political funding is monitored by the Electoral Commission. Political parties must report their donations (and donors) over £5k, and the Electoral Commission publishes a searchable register.
I wonder how long it will be before a corporation can vote.
Just a nitpick on this particular statement: the ability to make contributions isn’t an unavoidable or necessary result of personhood for corporations. There’s no requirement that a corporate person has to have all of the same rights as a natural person. As an example, a 501c3 nonprofit corporation is still a “person” and yet is unable to make political contributions if they want to retain their status.
There is no reason the laws and court decisions couldn’t have gone the other way, and prevented corporations from making political contributions. Doing so would not have conflicted with the other definitions of personhood.
In Canada there are serious limits to how much money can be raised and spent in political campaigns. The recent election in Quebec was held five weeks after it was announced (although there rumors running round for a few weeks before) and I really doubt any candidate spent as much as a million. I do watch some TV (not a lot) but I don’t recall seeing a single TV ad. The Federal Conservatives have been running desultory attack ads against the Liberals for a couple years, but I doubt they have had much impact.
Here’s the details from Elections Canada: