Saturday, May 15, 2010

Why the opposition parties made the deal




They had to.
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Update : Pundit's Guide to Canadian Federal Elections dropped by and kindly left a link to quarterly fundraising by year, party, and contribution type from 2005 to 2010 - vastly more readable than slogging through search pages at Elections Canada - and some analysis of same in comments below. More here. Thank you, Pundit.
Creekside would also like to thank Pundit for not being snotty about my wee foray into realms I know sfa about.
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6 comments:

West End Bob said...

Yikes!

rather telling numbers . . . .

Greg Fingas said...

Except that the fund-raising numbers have been in that range for years now and haven't shown any sign of changing. So if the opposition parties haven't figured out how to run an election with the resources they have, when do they plan on getting around to it?

Alison said...

Well, certainly yes on getting around to fighting a smart election, Jurist.
I realize the campaign figures have been more volatile for all parties since 2007- except the Cons who consistantly show $4 to 6 million every quarter - but this time last year the Libs and Cons were matched in donations at around $4M apiece.

I can't make sense of these CBC graphs. They show the Libs pulling ahead of the Cons in contributions by 2009 but according to Elections Canada, the Cons pulled down 2 t0 3 times the contributions and contributors in the last two quarters of 2008.

The Pundits' Guide said...

The Liberals front-end loaded a lot of their fundraising in the first two quarters of 2009 with large dinners and the May leadership convention, trying to play off the Ignatieff honeymoon, and reverse what they viewed as a damaging spin that they couldn't raise money like the Conservatives.

This fell off by the final two quarters of 2009, at which point the party's new National Director left to pursue a mayoralty bid in Toronto. They have been without a chief fundraiser again until just recently.

However, the Liberals are starting to increase their number of small donors, while the Conservatives are experiencing a continued drop in theirs.

Meanwhile, the NDP had a below average first two quarters of 2009, in light of their headquarters' decision to withdraw from fundraising in favour of four provincial sections having elections and/or leadership races. They made up the difference in the latter two quarters. This year, they mostly rebounded in the first quarter, in spite of the incentive campaign they were running for their non-incumbent riding associations to raise money locally.

You can explore the quarterly fundraising data by year, party, and contribution type here:

http://www.punditsguide.ca/finances/?pane=1

There is some additional analysis, showing contributions by total size, and by week, for example, here:

http://www.punditsguide.ca/tag/party-finance/

This might give some more historical perspective.
Please note that any analysis of 2009 is only based on quarterly reports thus far, as the annual reports, which will show more data, are not due until the end of June.

Thank you for an always-interesting blog, Alison.

The Pundits' Guide said...

By the way, those CBC numbers include transfers in from riding associations.

I don't do that, because transfers from ridings are not always "contributions", and the quarterly reports don't report the transfers from headquarters back out to the ridings.

So, their totals include both apples and oranges, which I believe is inaccurate.

Rod Smelser said...

The deal was a sound one, so I don't see the need to look for ulterior motives.

On the fundraising issue, Alice has all the numbers that count. I would just add, and I take this from her database, that in 2008 (last year for annual data), the three main parties all had average donations in the same range, $180 to $190. The big difference was the number of donors. The Liberals and the NDP had about 30,000 donors each. The Conservatives had well over 100,000 donors.

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