Justin Trudeau becomes first male politician to publicly acknowledge knees

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 6, 2013 at 10:53 AM - 0 Comments

Mr. Trudeau announces that, since he became leader, the party has taken in more than $1 million in fundraising.

Now all the Liberals need to do is maintain that pace for the next two years.

In 2012, the Conservatives raised $17.2 million. In 2011, they raised $22.7 million. In 2010, they raised $17.4 million.

Raising a million every three weeks would give the Liberals $17.3 million over the course of a year.

The ‘Kate effect,’ charity edition

By Patricia Treble - Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 5:03 PM - 0 Comments

That everything Kate, duchess of Cambridge, wears is an instant retail hit has been such a long-proved commercial reality that it’s got its own moniker, the “Kate effect.”

Witness what happened the moment she appeared on Friday at the Warner Bros. studios wearing a polka dot dress from Topshop. It sold out instantly. It’s happened again and again.

Now the fairy dust that rubs off on everything Kate touches is doing more than just boost corporate profits. It’s benefitting charities as well.Organizations lucky to have her as a patron report big increases in interest.

Continue…

How to fundraise

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 3:06 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, Liberal Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette apparently sent out a tweet suggesting that an alignment with U.S. policy would somehow draw the interest of terrorists.

On that basis, the Conservative party is now appealing for funds to help spread the word of Justin Trudeau’s unfitness for office.

Yesterday, the RCMP announced they had foiled a potential terrorist attack here in Canada – and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal team thought it was a good idea to use the moment to score cheap political points against our Conservative government.

Here’s what Trudeau’s senior Quebec advisor, Senator Hervieux-Payette, had to say on Twitter: “Harper wants to align Canada with the US, wants the same republican policies: he will get also the same terrorists.”

I guess now we know what Trudeau meant when, instead of condemning the Boston bombers and calling for their swift punishment, he opined that we needed to look for “root causes” because terrorists are probably feeling “excluded.” Trudeau’s Liberals think Conservative policies are the real “root cause” of terrorism.

The media are deliberately ignoring this story to protect Justin Trudeau. We tried to get reporters interested, but the media would rather report on an NDP news release about Earth Day.

That’s why we need your help. We need to make sure every Canadian knows that Justin Trudeau lacks the judgement and experience to be Prime Minister.

Can you chip in $5 or whatever you can afford so we can keep the pressure on Justin Trudeau?

He’s the most inexperienced leader of the Liberal Party in history – and it shows. Help us send a message to Justin Trudeau that his comments on terrorism are unacceptable.

Sincerely,

Jenni Byrne
National Campaign Manager, 2011

I’m not sure what evidence there is that the senator is Mr. Trudeau’s “senior Quebec advisor.” (I’ve asked Mr. Trudeau’s office for clarification.) She endorsed Joyce Murray in the Liberal leadership race.

Update 6:02pm. Liberal House leader Dominic LeBlanc was asked about this after QP today.

I actually don’t follow madame Hervieux-Payette’s comments on Twitter. My understanding is that a staff person has apologized for in fact having used her account to put on Twitter views that certainly are reflected by myself, by the Liberal caucus or by the Liberal leader. What’s interesting for us is that Mr. Harper probably holds the speed record in trying to exploit a tragedy like the Boston bombings for political advantage and this week he gets another prize for the record in terms of speed of trying to exploit for financial gain for his Conservative Party these tragic events. There’s no depth to which he won’t sink to try and collect money for the Conservative Party, sending a fund-raising letter with a series of falsehoods, that’s only one of them, there are others, but we’re not – we’re not particularly surprised or worried about that.

I’m told Senator Hervieux-Payette was not Mr. Trudeau’s senior Quebec advisor.

The Laurier-Sainte-Marie mystery solved?

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, November 24, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Cheques are produced and memories are refreshed in connection with donations to the Conservative party in Laurier-Sainte-Marie.

Italo Barone, who owns a banquet hall in Montreal’s Little Italy, earlier had stated that he had never donated to the Conservatives, and had emailed the financial agent for the riding association in Laurier-Sainte-Marie asking for a copy of his cheque from 2009. On Friday, after the story appeared in print, he learned that he was mistaken. “This morning I was informed that we did make cheques to the Conservatives,” he said. “I have a friend who was volunteer fundraiser for them, and he asked me for a favour and I said yes.”

… Montreal construction entrepreneur Rocco Carbone confirmed Friday night he had in fact made the donation.  

… Many of the donors are registered as having donated $666.66 on the Elections Canada web site but the cheques produced are in the amount of $1,000. A party spokesman said that the party is required to deduct the cost of fundraising events from donations, which could explain the discrepancy between the amounts.

What’s going on in Laurier-Sainte-Marie?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 23, 2012 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

Postmedia raises questions about Conservative fundraising efforts in the Quebec riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie.

The unexplained donations – Postmedia News uncovered 11 – fall mostly into three groups: a group of donations of $666.66, totalling $99,999; a group of donations of $733.33, totalling $32,999.85; and a group of donations of $333.33, totalling $14,333.19. Postmedia tried to contact all the donors on the riding’s donor list from 2007 to 2009, almost 550 people. Many failed to return calls; others could not be located. Some said they couldn’t recall making donations, and others declined to discuss the issue. But 11 said they definitely did not make donations, and would like to know how their names ended up on the list.

Rocco Carbone, who owns an asbestos removal business, was surprised to hear he was listed as a donor to the Tory riding association. “I gave money to the party?” he said. “I never gave no money to no party.” Italio Barone, who owns a banquet hall in Montreal’s Little Italy, said he is not a Conservative and doesn’t know where Laurier-Sainte-Marie is. “I have nothing to do with the Conservatives,” he said. “I want to find out who the guy was doing the fundraising because I have a few words to say to him.”

More questions for Peter Penashue

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 2, 2012 at 8:58 AM - 0 Comments

Laura Payton raises more questions about Peter Penashue’s election campaign. Chris Hall wonders when the Intergovernmental Affairs Minister will be allowed to respond.

And then there’s Penashue himself. While all this plays out he sits in the Commons, taking the heat, but taking no questions. It’s a difficult position to be in. Attacked, but muzzled. Apparently unable to defend himself, or to explain, which is the essence of parliamentary accountability … The Conservatives clearly believe the best tactic is to let others answer for the weakened members of the herd, and to turn the focus back on past opposition breaches whenever they can. It certainly muddies the water. But it doesn’t allow people like Penashue to see their own way clear of a controversy, even in cases when it could be of their own making.

Following the money

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke reviews the third quarter fundraising returns.

For the first time ever, since early 2008, the NDP has reported a higher national quarterly contributions total than the Liberal Party. The upstart party filed a third quarter return late yesterday showing $1,459,561.05 in contributions, versus $1,440,761.34 for its former “natural governing” competitor, a gap to the upside of $19K after falling $60K short of that objective in the second quarter…

A look at the Conservative Party’s fundraising record shows the long-term importance of building a base of small donors, as they have clearly been able to promote many small donors to larger donors over much of the intervening six years or so. But that party showed a bit of retrenchment in Q3 of 2012 as compared with recent non-election third quarters, posting the lowest number since 2007 ($3.42M vs $3.15M), though notably that was also the year just following a successful election campaign. And you can’t really ever call it a bad quarter when you continue to raise as much as your competitors combined!

Cereal Athletes

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 7:30 PM - 0 Comments

Once upon a time you had to be a champion to get your face on a cereal box. Now you just have to champion a good cause. Buffalo Bills defensive end Mario Williams launced his own branded breakfast treats last week, “MariO’s.” The honey-toasted oats aren’t going to revolutionize mornings, but a decent portion of sales will benefit a children’s cancer charity. The cereal joins a long list of sports-star themed packaged goods with a higher purpose, all manufactured by PLB Sports Inc. of Pittsburgh. The company, an offshoot of a food distributor, now boasts more than 100 celebrity products, like Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander’s Fastball Flakes, and a Dijon mustard bearing the name of Pittsburgh Penguins’ winger Pascal Dupuis. Somewhere between fundraising gimmick and collectible, they’ve found a unique place in the market, says Doug Ritchart, a PLB account manager.“We always encourage people to buy two boxes. One to eat, and the other put up on the shelf.”

The benjamins, it is all about them

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 1:48 PM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke reviews the second quarter returns, including the competitive race for second place.

At some $3.74M year-to-date the NDP has raised nearly as much by the end of June as it usually raises in an entire non-election year. For example, this amounts to 86% of the party’s best ever non-election year haul of 2010 (then $4.38M). These two developments combined raise the spectre that the NDP might surpass the Liberals in fundraising by the end of December. The Liberals, meanwhile, are succeeding in increasing their numbers of small donors. And while the NDP is also demonstrating some real progress in increasing its number of overall donors over previous non-election years, the Liberals have been able to move and stay ahead of them on that score…

Now, part of what’s allowing the NDP to compete with the Liberals are some significant bequests, and they got another one in the second quarter of 2012 — just over $296K from the estate of a William Giesbrecht of Coquitlam, BC, along with another bequest of some $23K from Anne Murray Powell of Toronto, ON. The estate of the late Jack Layton made a $50K bequest in December, 2011 and another $50K in March, 2012, though no further bequests from the party’s former leader were recorded this quarter.

While the New Democrats have held a polling advantage over the Liberals for more than a year now, they have not yet been able to translate that into a fundraising advantage. Of course, both still trail the Conservatives, but the NDP’s ability to get past the Liberals in this depart seems (feels?) like an important marker.

Running, biking and riding across Canada for a cause

By Aaron Hutchins - Friday, July 13, 2012 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP

Kieren Britton can see the light at the end of the tunnel of her cross-Canada bike tour. Two months after starting out from Stanley Park in Vancouver, the 21-year-old has been on her red, 27-speed Devinci Caribou every day to raise money for prostate cancer in memory of her grandfather. Before she reaches the East Coast, she expects to be passed by Ross MacKinnon and his three brothers, biking across Canada to raise money for Parkinson’s research, also inspired by their late grandfather. And when the MacKinnons first set off from the West Coast, they crossed paths in Mission, B.C., with a trio known as 8000km, who are cycling coast to coast on an Easter Seals fundraiser. “It’s incredible, this group of five Quebec people were ahead of me by two hours, and I know [another woman] is behind me a day,” says Britton, now in New Brunswick. “You bump into people all the time.”

Terry Fox inspired a nation with his cross-country Marathon of Hope, and raised a huge amount of money for the fight against cancer. In the years since, increasing numbers have taken up the journey for equally noble causes. But getting noticed is proving a feat in and of itself. The fact is, Canada’s criss-crossing arteries are jam-packed like never before with people traversing the country for a cause. There are walkers, runners, rollerbladers, and even a knight in shining armour, Vincent Gabriel Kirouac of Quebec, riding on horseback to raise awareness of “honour and friendship and valour.”

Just how many people are undertaking the journey right now? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it’s not far-fetched to suggest 50, perhaps even as many as 100. Talk with one person crossing Canada and he or she will tell you about two others doing the same thing. Speak with those two and they will tell you about two more.

This poses a challenge for would-be fundraisers trying to gain attention. “I didn’t realize how many people do it,” Ross MacKinnon says. “It’s cool to see, but at the same you get that competitive flare, like, ‘We have to try and get ahead of them because most newspapers wouldn’t want to do a story on the exact same thing a day apart.’ ”

Now on foot and running west, Troy Adams and Curtis Hargrove are in regular contact, despite never having met one another. They heard about each other’s journey through their respective fundraising pages and call each other occasionally to chat about important factors like weather and road conditions. “There’s this community that I didn’t even know was out there,” Adams says.

The two will meet each other soon. By their estimates, Hargrove, 23, is expected to overtake Adams near Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., in the next few weeks. But this isn’t a race to the finish, they say. It’s about why they run. For his part, Adams is near Barrie, Ont., pushing northward, halfway toward his goal of $100,000 for brain injury awareness. He suffered a brain injury when he was 16, which plunged him into depression, but found that running helped him recover. “It brings out more of a story than just the plain old ‘man running across Canada,’ ” Adams, now 25, says. “I connect with the people in towns who read my story and see we have something in common.”

More people have been reading about Hargrove lately, but not for the right reasons. He was arrested in early July for running along the Trans-Canada Highway in Quebec. “People post online, ‘what a great way to get media attention,’ but they don’t realize that I do have a chance at having a criminal record—and that will affect me,” he says. “I wouldn’t do something stupid like that just to get media attention.” Even so, after the arrest, traffic on Hargrove’s fundraising page spiked, with many people coming forward to support him and the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation. He has an ambitious goal of raising $1 million and, though he admits he’d brought in just $14,000 before his arrest, he believes his target is still achievable.

Standing out is only going to get harder as the number of cross-country charity runners grows, says Michael Nilsen, with the Association of Fundraising Professionals. “Are they as effective as they might have once been in terms of the novelty factor and the uniqueness? I think we can safely agree they’re not,” he says. “But I’m not convinced that these types of campaigns are necessarily ineffective because you can still raise significant amounts of money.”

After all, as common as the feat seems nowadays, people realize it’s a punishing physical undertaking. It can take longer than two months of cycling daily to cross from one side of Canada to the other. Even the fittest of runners would easily take twice that long.

It also takes money, which means crossing Canada for charity remains the domain of people with time and resources. “Everyone keeps asking, ‘How do you finance this?’ ” says MacKinnon, who adds he and one brother are living off student loans, while their other two brothers work as a teacher and an oil rig hand, respectively, both with downtime this summer. “It’s probably the only time in our lives it could work out like this.”

‘I will be fully exonerated’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 5, 2012 at 9:46 AM - 0 Comments

In the process of making an unrelated announcement yesterday, Dean Del Mastro emerged to plead innocence and lament for the questions being raised about his campaign. And also to proclaim the Prime Minister’s greatness.

He spoke about the effect of the allegations on the Del Mastro name, that of his late father, which appears on the sign above his family`s car dealership. “This does bother me. I grew up a poor farm kid,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot growing up. My two heroes in my life were my mother and father.”

But he said he was bolstered by the prime minister`s ongoing support. “I think Prime Minister Harper is the greatest leader in the industrialized world,” he said. “I`ve always appreciated the trust he placed in me.”

As to matter of the cheques to employees of his cousin’s company, Mr. Del Mastro apparently deferred questions to his cousin (said cousin subsequently declined to speak with the Citizen). As to the question of whether Mr. Del Mastro has been contacted by Elections Canada, the Citizen reports that the agency offered to take a “cautioned statement” that could be used against him in court, but Mr. Del Mastro declined. He apparently called the Peterborough Examiner to explain.

After an early version of this story appeared at www.peterboroughexaminer.com, Del Mastro called The Examiner, repeating that he would not agree to meet with Elections Canada if a cautioned statement is a requirement. “It’s not a dialogue,” he said. “It’s questions without a back-and-forth dialogue. I have to have a process.”

Del Mastro said repeatedly he wants “a process” for dealing with the allegations, and that hasn’t come yet. “If (Elections Canada) wants to come to Peterborough to interview me, I’d be happy to do so,” he said. “I can’t clear my name through a cautioned statement.”

While Del Mastro told The Examiner weeks ago that he would release documents proving his innocence, he has not done so, and said again Wednesday that he wouldn’t. “I’m not going to prove it to the media, and I don’t think I should have to,” he said. “If I thought The Peterborough Examiner could defend me, clear me of this, I would do it,” he said.

The case of Dean Del Mastro and the cheques

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 5:04 PM - 0 Comments

Two weeks ago, Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher reported that three donors to Dean Del Mastro’s 2008 campaign had been reimbursed for their donations by a company owned by Mr. Del Mastro’s cousin. Today, McGregor and Maher report that two donors have produced cheques from Deltro Electric Ltd. of Mississauga, Ont in the amount of $1,050.

One of the cheques obtained by the Citizen is payable to a former Deltro employee who, earlier this month, signed a statutory declaration describing how Deltro staff were asked to enlist family and friends in the alleged reimbursement scheme. David Del Mastro “advised me at that time that he wanted to make a large monetary donation to the re-election campaign of his cousin, Dean Del Mastro Member of Parliament,” the statement said. “My employer assured me that if I would do so, my employer would cause his company, Deltro Electric Ltd. to reimburse me for the full sum of $1,000, plus a further bonus of $50, and that I would receive an income tax receipt for the donation.”

The alleged scheme was intended to circumvent the limit on political donations, the former employee said.

The Commons: Whatever Dean Del Mastro did, somebody somewhere probably did something worse

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 5:44 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP Images

The Scene. “Mr. Speaker,” Liberal MP Scott Andrews declared, “there is no more denying the facts.”

Apparently fun time was over. Our reckoning, or at least someone’s reckoning, was at hand.

“The Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs is under active and serious investigations by Elections Canada for election fraud,” Mr. Andrews reported. “How can the Conservative member for Peterborough conduct himself as Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and hold his position on the ethics committee while he is being investigated for breaking the rules at Elections Canada?”

This was not quite Mr. Andrews’ question.

“My question is to the member for Peterborough,” he continued, seeming concerned that the member for Peterborough be the one to respond. “Why does he not do the honourable thing, step aside as the Prime Minister’s private parliamentary secretary and step aside from the ethics committee while he is under active investigation?”

Duly, Dean Del Mastro did stand to speak both for himself and of himself. Continue…

The late money

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 5:41 PM - 0 Comments

Tobi Cohen reports that Nathan Cullen won the final week’s fundraising.

Financial statements from Thomas Mulcair and Brian Topp are now posted and it looks like Mulcair added $18,547 from 164 donors to his coffers in the final week. Meanwhile, Topp added $10,973 from 68 people in his final week of fundraising. As noted earlier, Cullen’s  final weekly campaign expense report shows he raised $20,686 from 208 donors.

Weighing the race

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke follows the money.

Secondly, and on the other hand, it was not in fact the weekly fundraising totals that predicted the 2003 outcome, but the cumulative ones. If that’s the better indicator, why might that be? Well, for one thing, because late money is hard to spend well. It’s too late to hire full-time organizers and put them to much effective use signing up members or lining up local endorsements, too late to invest in national mailings, or predictive dialling phone banks, or well-designed database systems, or to organize a full-on get-out-the-vote campaign. It will buy some robocalls and telephone town halls (the first advertise the second, no matter what any candidate says about running a “robocall-free campaign”), and it might cover a quick IVR survey, a bit more travel, and a better floor show at convention.

And Greg Fingas tries to pinpoint what New Democrats should be thinking about.

But that leads to what may be the key question in evaluating the candidates: who, if elected, would best recognize and apply the collective strengths of the leadership candidates, caucus and party at large? And my suspicion is that the answer to that question – viewing the candidates in terms of organizational leadership, rather than either personal profile alone or compromises among camps – should be our guiding principle in deciding which candidate to support.

Who has the momentum?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 19, 2012 at 1:15 PM - 0 Comments

Joanna Smith looks at the latest fundraising numbers.

According to the latest fundraising data released by Elections Canada, Cullen has now pulled ahead of Toronto MP Peggy Nash and Ottawa MP Paul Dewar in terms of total net contributions to his campaign. Cullen received more than $32,700 during the Feb. 25 to Mar. 3 time period covered by the weekly report, bringing his total since the start of the campaign to almost $174,600 after the central party removed its 15 per cent administrative fee from donations. That means he is now in third place in terms of money contributed to his campaign behind Mulcair and former party president Brian Topp, who has raised about $204,300 since the beginning of the campaign.

The latest numbers for Mulcair were not available online Friday, but campaign manager Raoul Gébert said the weekly report would show an increase of about $35,000, which means he outperformed Cullen and remains in first place with about $261,400 in total.

The measure of the race

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

According to the latest figures, Thomas Mulcair leads all other NDP candidates in fundraising.

According to the reports, which cover all expenses from the start of the campaign up until Feb. 25, Mulcair has raised nearly $206,000 from some 1,347 contributors. That’s nearly $60,000 more than his campaign reported for the previous period ending Dec. 31.

He’s also pulled ahead of competitor Brian Topp who has raised about $183,000 from some 984 contributors. Topp, who was the first to enter the race with major endorsements from the likes of party stalwart Ed Broadbent, ended the year in the top spot but has since added just $14,000 to his coffers.

Meanwhile, Paul Dewar has edged out Peggy Nash in terms of fundraising to claim the No. 3 spot. According to the figures filed with Elections Canada, he’s raised more than $144,000 from 782 contributors. Nash has raised $139,449 from 727 contributors, while Nathan Cullen has raised $129,555 from 1,123 contributors.

The futures market

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke considers the possible predictive value of yesterday’s NDP fundraising numbers.

If the 2003 NDP leadership race is anything to go by, a candidate’s share of the overall funds being raised for the contest could predict his or her first ballot vote-share to within 1.5 percentage points … That being the case, roughly half-way through the 2011-2012 NDP leadership race, Brian Topp and Thomas Mulcair are leading the pack. With 23.6% and 20.4% of the total take respectively, the two early front-runners represent 44% of all the funds raised to December 31, 2011 between them.

Peggy Nash, Paul Dewar and Nathan Cullen are behind with 15.1%, 13.1% and 12.0% (representing another 40% of all the leadership fundraising to the end of 2011), while the other four registered candidates trail below 7%.

Please give

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Over the weekend, Thomas Mulcair responded to the Glen McGregor’s look at his donation history.

Mulcair said prior to 2011 he contributed to his own riding association or election campaigns because it was the only way to ensure that the money would remain in Quebec and be used to build NDP support in that province.

“We’ve given thousands of dollars to the party since I was elected in 2007,” Mulcair said in an interview with iPolitics. “Prior to the breakthrough (in the May 2011 election), most of the money I would give was to the riding association for obvious reasons – we were cash poor in Quebec and whenever we did fundraising, it went to the federal party.”

Glen returns to the story with more details. Continue…

By the numbers

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 3:54 PM - 0 Comments

Liberal party president Alf Apps has delivered his report to the party membership. The key portion would seem to concern fundraising.

Notwithstanding the improved financial position in which the Party finds itself today, its ability to compete politically between elections at the national level continues to be crippled by the fact that its basic fundraising capability is dwarfed by those of its principal opponent. As figure 2 shows, the Conservatives raised a total of $80 million in donations over the period from January 1, 2008 to September 30, 2011 and are projected to raise more than $24 million this year alone. Our Party raised only $32 million nationally over the same period, or about 40% of the amount they raised, and approximately $9.4 million for the 2011 year. Our donor base has been growing steadily over that period but, at only about 40,000 donors today, is estimated to be about on-third the size of our opponent’s. More troubling, the gap is continuing to widen. Perhaps most troubling, fewer than 30% of Party members today are also Party donors. While progress is being made on this front, it has been far too slow. The Party is still a long way from achieving an organizational culture where ‘membership’ translates into ‘donorship’.

In the context of the ‘permanent campaign’ environment which has persisted since well before the 2006 election to the present day, the Party simply has not had adequate resources to fund a modern and technologically-enabled political outreach infrastructure to communicate effectively with Canadians and activate their support.

A communist memorial seeks capital

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 2 Comments

The group behind an effort to erect a national monument to the victims of Communist regimes is having trouble collecting the cash to do it. Last year, the $1.5-million project, known as the “Monument to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism,” got the go-ahead from Ottawa’s National Capital Commission (NCC). The Conservative government remains vocally supportive (when mentioning the project, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney still leaves off the “totalitarian” qualifier, added in 2009 at the insistence of the NCC); but the monument has yet to receive any government funding, project coordinator Carolyn Foster tells Maclean’s. Now it is up to the group, Tribute to Liberty, to convince the public to foot the bill.

So far, they have received just $100,000 in donations. Most of that, Foster says, has been gobbled up by administrative costs. At this rate, it will be well over a decade before they have enough money to design and build the memorial (a national design contest will be held once about two-thirds of the project’s total cost has been raised). “We’re a very small operation,” says Foster. “We don’t have the money to do big advertising.”

Beside that, much of the difficulty comes from a lack of public understanding about atrocities committed in places like the Soviet Union or Cambodia under Communist rule, she says. “People can’t get their heads around what the project is about,” she says. Atrocities like the Holocaust are simply better known than Communist crimes, which also included the execution of thousands of people without trial, and the forced starvation and deportation of millions more.

Continue…

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 11:18 AM - 5 Comments

Seven candidates from the Liberal leadership race in 2006 still have campaign debts. Alice Funke thinks the system needs to change.

It is in the public interest that political parties be able to attract a wide range of potential candidates during a leadership race, and that viable candidates not be dissuaded from running for fear they will be unable to pay their debts later on, or be subjected to potentially corrosive pressures in order to do so.

Thus, I urge Parliament to consider amending s.405(1)(c) of the Elections Act, at the first opportunity, to change the leadership campaign contribution ceiling from a per-contest one into an annual one, and I also urge the various political parties who will be launching leadership contests over the coming months and years to set rules and spending limits that don’t force candidates into impossible situations after the fact.

Follow the money

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 24 Comments

Alice Funke summarizes the latest fundraising figures.

In terms of their overall second-quarter results, the Conservative Party turned in another record performance in the second quarter of 2011; raising $8.2M from 52,805 contributors, with roughly half the take coming from small contributors ($200 or less over the quarter), and the other half from their larger donors (over $200 for the quarter). As compared with the last similar election quarter (2008-Q3), the party has increased the amount raised from the small donors by a bit over 10% (up to roughly $4.0M from $3.6M), but from the larger donors by nearly 50% (up to roughly $4.1M from $2.75M).

More from Susan Delacourt on the NDP’s windfall.

Buy, sell, donate

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments

Dominic Chan/CP

When the news first broke a few weeks ago that the Canadian Cancer Society spends more money fundraising than it does on cancer research, it set off alarm bells for many of the charity’s donors. Shortly after, the Canadian Press dug through tax filings of the country’s many registered charities and found that thousands of employees earn hefty six-figure salaries. The revelations raised questions about how charitable organizations use the money people give them. Which is why some say it’s time to start evaluating charities with the same unforgiving eye that equity analysts bring to valuing stocks.

“We could have a far more effective charitable sector than we have now, if funds are redirected properly,” says Greg Thomson, director of research at Charity Intelligence Canada, a Toronto organization that rates charities on their performance. “We’re trying to make it more market driven so that the charities doing a good job get more money and can expand, and the charities that aren’t are forced to pull up their socks.”

That’s not the type of language one normally associates with philanthropy. Neither are terms like return on investment, cost-coverage ratios and operating efficiencies—just a few of the measures this new breed of charity analysts like Thomson is using to scrutinize charities. While it may seem like there’s little in common between for-profit companies and philanthropy, the charity sector has become a big business. Last year, Canadians donated $6.5 billion and the sector employs more than one million people.

Continue…