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…

The end of the vote subsidy

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 225 Comments

The Conservatives will, as promised, move to phase out the per vote subsidy. Marc Garneau, whose Liberal party will be most wounded, wonders if it’s time to raise the limit on individual donations.

Liberals will, however, press for an increase in individual donation limits if Conservatives do end the subsidy, he said. “If individuals want to give more than the $1,100, that’s something that should be discussed,” he said. “I think it’s regrettable. We will vote against it, but given the fact that we can’t stop it, I think that one has to put that on the table as a possibility.”

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 1:52 PM - 36 Comments

Jack Layton pitches Senate reforms.

“Unfortunately, today’s Senate is too often just partisans working for their parties while being paid with public money. No ‘sober second thought’ can come from unelected appointees with such an obvious conflict of interest,” said Layton. “Let’s take two small – but important – steps towards a more accountable Senate. First, remove all failed candidates and party insiders from the Senate. Secondly, let’s make sure all Senators stop fundraising for political parties.”

In the balance

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 2:27 PM - 56 Comments

Errol Mendes figures the vote subsidy is part of a delicate balance.

There could well be an argument that limited forms of financial contribution to political parties by trade unions are a form of political expression that may be protected by our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms — and indeed by other entrenched rights documents around the world. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision last January ruled that “political speech is indispensable to a democracy, which is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation,” thereby allowing corporations to engage in political spending in elections.

Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada has confirmed that, like individual Canadians, trade unions and corporations are guaranteed their freedom of expression under the Charter. The court will most likely strike down total elimination of such expression without some balancing reasonable limit under section 1 of the Charter. That section allows governments to impose reasonable limits on Charter rights that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. This balancing allows governments to impose the present limits on financial contributions by individuals.

Meanwhile, WT Stanbury does the math and comes up with the following. Continue…

Ted Menzies talks (about wanting your money)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 12:55 PM - 60 Comments

The Conservatives have launched a feature on their website called “Canada Talks.” So far the conversation one might expect from a title like that mostly involves newly minted minister of state Ted Menzies looking off camera and reading a series of exhortations to donate money to the Conservative party, while tinkly music plays in the background.

The case for a reduced vote subsidy

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 2:15 PM - 90 Comments

Duff Conacher suggests the vote subsidy needn’t be eliminated, merely reduced.

Cutting the subsidy in half (instead of eliminating it as Harper proposes) would give all parties a solid, democratically determined funding base, but still require them to reach out and regularly address the concerns of voters in order to attract their annual donations.

The subsidy should also be reduced even more (for example, cut by 75 per cent) for any party that operates only in one province or region, such as the Bloc Quebecois, because they have lower travel and operating costs than parties with riding associations and candidates across the country.

Meanwhile, Adam Radwanski finds various revelations in the current range of political donations from the public.

Ottawa’s power brokers take a hit

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 7:18 AM - 13 Comments

The 3,664 lobbyists duly registered, as required by law, to try to influence the federal government are hardly a model of professional solidarity. In-house government relations specialists for blue-chip corporations often clash with idealistic advocates for non-profit groups. The lobbyists-for-hire who trade on their partisan connections divide along Conservative and Liberal lines. Lately, though, this typically fractious community of clout, clustered around Parliament Hill, is united—by anxiety over a new official interpretation of the federal “Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct,” which they say might unfairly ban them from approaching politicians they’ve legitimately supported in past elections and leadership campaigns. If they’re right, the age-old linkage between partisanship and influence might have been unexpectedly ruptured.

The uproar is over a guidance bulletin, issued early last month by Karen Shepherd, the government’s commissioner of lobbying, on what constitutes an illegal conflict of interest between a public office holder and a lobbyist. Shepherd said potential cases of “improper influence” will continue to be judged individually, but she sweepingly warned that from now on, “political activities” might create such conflicts. Asked by Maclean’s exactly what activities in support of political candidates might mean a lobbyist would then be prevented from actually lobbying those politicians once they’re in power, her office listed “fundraising, communications, logistics, speech writing, etc.” In other words, just about anything.

The problem is that Shepherd declines to spell out exactly when such partisan work might disqualify lobbying later on. “This is so vague,” said Michael Robinson, a lobbyist with influential Earnscliffe Strategy Group and long-time Liberal strategist, “as to make it impossible for somebody to conduct their behaviour in a way that they’re confident they won’t cross a line.” Tories are no more sure of what’s being outlawed. “What I think this interpretation has essentially done is say, ‘There is no black and white, there is only grey,’ ” said Goldy Hyder, the senior Conservative who heads the powerhouse Hill & Knowlton consulting group’s Ottawa office.

Continue…

'Mine the anger'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 3:58 PM - 7 Comments

Peter Donolo finds hope in fury and indignation.

“[The Finley letter] is right on target in terms of the type of appeals they make, and Liberals in opposition need to be able to mine the anger, anxiety, concern that is out there with a large cross-section of the population that they hope to win votes from and translate into cash,” Mr. Donolo said.

Exclusive: The Liberal plan to respond to the Harper ads

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:43 PM - 327 Comments

The Conservative advertising campaign against Michael Ignatieff has spurred the federal Liberals to sharply accelerate their fundraising activity so they can pay for a “focused response to the personal attacks” on the new leader, Maclean’s has learned.

The Liberals are rushing ahead with a major change to the party’s organization, which only two weeks ago they had planned for the autumn, so they can be ready for a much more robust summer of activity. Emergency meetings of the Liberals’ various governing bodies are underway, with more planned for next week. The goal: a $25 million annual war chest and a vastly expanded grassroots organization to pay for it. Continue…

Party rebuilding isn't a new Ignatieff preoccupation

By John Geddes - Friday, May 1, 2009 at 2:38 PM - 1 Comment

Even as policy sessions get rolling here in Vancouver today, there remains a consensus around the Liberal convention that restoring the party machine—boosting fund raising, modernizing voter tracking, streamlining administration—is the main business at hand.

I’ve heard some Liberals talk about how Michael Ignatieff is a policy thinker who has been forced by circumstances into concentrating instead on party operations. Although there might be a bit of truth to that, it would be wrong to suggest that Ignatieff returned to Canada to try his hand at politics without realizing that rebuilding the party apparatus would be the main work of any new Liberal leader.
Continue…

What's up at the Liberal convention. (Or should that be "Liberalist"?)

By John Geddes - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 1:56 PM - 5 Comments

As delegates assemble here at the new Vancouver Convention Centre for the Liberal biennial convention, chatter in the hallways suggests to me that five points (itemized after the break) are worth watching over the next three days.
Continue…

Megapundit: Begin the wooing of Frank McKenna

By selley - Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 19 Comments

Must-reads: None. Okay, maybe James Travers.

Did somebody order a hero?
It will take more than bellyfire to lead the Liberal party.

Stéphane Dion’s decision to stay on pending a leadership convention is “a gobsmackingly bad move,” Don Martin declares in the Calgary Herald, predicting he’ll make an easy target for “gloating Conservatives across the Commons aisle while economic issues, which are hardly his forte, dominate parliamentary debate.” Dion may finally realize that “federal politics makes mincemeat of honest, high-road sincerity,” but he doesn’t yet seem to accept his own culpability in the Liberal collapse, says Martin. Given two years to “invigorate the Liberal fundraising operation,” “gel with his caucus and install a solid staff organization,” and “frame the Liberals in the centre with rational mainstream policies,” he did none of those things. The idea that he could help them do so as a “lameduck loser” is, therefore, laughable.

The Montreal Gazette‘s Don Macpherson speculates that Dion may be hanging on in anticipation of pulling a Trudeau—i.e., announcing his impending departure, engineering the defeat of the government and then marching to an improbable victory in the 41st general election. If that is indeed his intention, Macpherson advises he be disavowed of it at the party’s earliest convenience. His caucus has neither the money nor the patience to brook such shenanigans, and the various contenders for the crown—Macpherson has Michael Ignatieff as the favourite—would surely lead their troops in revolt.

Continue…

What happened to the Liberals?

By John Geddes - Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Consider a political party that’s been governing in Ottawa for a couple of years with only a parliamentary minority. Its leader is seen as a strong but aloof prime minister, occasionally harsh, and hardly a man of the people. He decides the time is right to force an election anyway, even though grim economic news has voters worried. Saddled with the leader’s image liabilities and an unsettling economic backdrop, what sort of campaign would such a party mount to leap from minority to majority?

Start by repackaging the prime minister in a way “contrived to make him seem if not folksy at least accessible,” even cast him as “a gentle father, adoring husband.” Next, provide him with a reassuringly low-key platform, nothing too dramatic, but with niche policies aimed at attracting, say, women and the “aspiring middle class.” Finally, have him “ridicule” his main adversary “mercilessly,” painting his “awkward” rival’s more daring platform as foolish, particularly given the fragile economy.

This may sound like a sketch of Stephen Harper’s position going into this election, and of the Conservative strategy for winning it. But it’s actually drawn from the late Christina McCall’s masterful account of Pierre Trudeau’s 1974 campaign, masterminded by Jim Coutts and Keith Davey, that won back a Liberal majority. All the telling descriptive words and phrases in quotation marks are drawn from McCall’s take on that election, in her 1980 essay, “Jim Coutts and the Politics of Manipulation.”

If the classic Liberal approach to manipulative politics has a home in the present contest, it seems to be in the Conservative camp. To suggest that Harper’s 2008 campaign might be consciously modelled on Trudeau’s 1974 run—with Stéphane Dion in the hapless Robert Stanfield’s role—might be a stretch. But Harper does pride himself on his knowledge of political history, routinely talks about the Liberal party’s past dominance, and once wrote that it was Trudeau who “provoked both the loves and hatreds of my political passion.” Is it too much to imagine that he’s now applying know-your-enemy logic, adopting techniques that kept the hated Liberals so long in power?

There’s an essential Grittiness to Harper’s campaign, a combination of a cautious platform and unrelenting focus on the votes he and his strategists have identified as essential to expanding their base. But these same core old-school Liberal elements are less evident in Dion’s strategy and tactics. In place of the platform pragmatism of, say, the 1974 vintage Trudeau or the 1993 Jean Chrétien, Dion is running on his Green Shift. It’s a creative, signature policy, more like Stanfield’s wage and price controls, or—to cite a much more successful case of a Big Idea campaign—Brian Mulroney’s 1988 free trade platform.

Figuring out precisely what blocks of voters Dion aims to win over with his conviction-driven message is also tricky. Harper’s target audiences are well-defined, notably Quebecers ready to ditch the Bloc Québécois, and suburbanites, especially in heavily ethnic ridings in Ontario and B.C. By contrast, a senior Liberal campaign official admitted Dion has been forced to fight a diffused, multi-front campaign—fending off Tories on his right, the NDP, Greens and even the Bloc on his left, all while defending urban Liberal strongholds. “The Conservatives are running a very surgical campaign,” the official said. “We don’t quite have that luxury.”

And yet, somehow, they were able to scrape together the necessary cash to unleash Oily the Splot on an unsuspecting world …

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 23, 2008 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

I swear, you read this fundraising letter from Doug Finley, and it’s as though the Conservatives are actually afraid of the Insane Dion Permanent Tax on Everything(tm):

It is this line, however, that really makes you wonder if you’ve fallen into a strange alternate universe:

“We can’t afford to be outspent on ads by the Liberals.”

Now, I know when it comes to fundraising, a political party always has to plead poverty — even if that party has the most overstuffed war chest in the country, and enough excess cash to burn on any number of ill-conceived off-writ ad campaigns without worrying about having enough left in the tank for the election. In fact, when it comes to buying ads during a campaign, the challenge for the Conservatives appears to be finding creative ways to spend as much money as possible without going over the legal limit – not always successfully, as indicated by the ongoing battle with Elections Canada over the in and out scheme. Not to mention that they’re the first to gloat over the financial struggles of the Liberals, from lingering leadership debts to lacklustre Laurier Club renewals.

And yet, here we have Doug Finley – the Laird of Darkness himself – predicting that the sheeplike voters of Canada are at risk of falling for the Liberals’ “multi-million dollar advertising initiative” unless right-thinking Conservative Party members dig deep into their pockets, and fork over a few hundred bucks to respond — provided they haven’t already given the maximum allowed under the Federal Accountability Act, that is. It’s just kind of — breathtaking. Then again, I guess all fundraisers pretty much have to check their guile at the door.

Full text of the letter after the jump:

Continue…

The amnesiac, the control freak, and the 'woman scorned'

By selley - Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 2:13 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on the National Day of Action; Lawrence Martin on Maxime Bernier; Greg Weston on the Olympic boycott fizzle.

Left behind
Maxime Bernier, Julie Couillard and Stephen Harper sift through the post-apocalyptic rubble.

The National Post‘s Terence Corcoran doesn’t think much of Julie Couillard, her “glamour-puss makeup,” her TVA interview with its “preposterous dialogue only a soap opera writer could create,” and her insistence that she’s not a security threat despite calling her lawyer, and then the media, instead of Bernier himself when she discovered the documents. He also doesn’t think much of Bernier’s taste in women. And he doesn’t think hardly anything of Stephen Harper’s decision to pull Bernier out of Industry, where he was “continuing a telecom revolution,” and ship him “to outer Afghanistan, a country he possibly couldn’t locate on a map prior to running for office,” and where he had no independence to put his considerable talents to good use.

Indeed, The Globe and Mail‘s Lawrence Martin notes, the leave-behind affair exposes a paradoxical and crippling weakness in Harper’s management style: he won’t suffer insubordination, but he’s quite “prepared to suffer fools.” This problem goes back to the Reform days, Martin notes, as chronicled by Preston Manning in his book. (We can’t recommend poking around Manning’s website highly enough, incidentally, starting with this.) If anything’s going to convince the Prime Minister to dial back the self-defeating micromanagement, Martin says the Bernier fiasco might be it. Making it happen will be Guy Giorno’s job one.

Continue…