Tag: strategy

Accidental Deliberations: Fund-Raising Review By Province – NDP

Following up on my previous post, let’s take a look at the NDP’s partial fund-raising numbers from 2007 to 2010. (I’ve kept the 2010 data in the chart as an FYI, but a keen-eye reader notes that we shouldn’t compare to previous years’ data since it reflects quarterly returns rather than annual ones.)

Prov/Reg 2007 $ 2007 % 2008 $ 2008 % 2009 $ 2009 % 2010 $ 2010 %
AB $307,001.80 10.31% $406,575.72 9.23% $307,350.79 10.01% $143741.94.50 9.44%
BC $805,217.20 27.04% $1,109,104.94 25.18% $680,108.02 30.22% $504,443.60 33.13%
MB $148,937.94 5.00% $251,361.54 5.71% $174,442.71 5.68% $64,005.27 4.20%
NB $34,410.77 1.16% $42,393.92 0.96% $38,635.19 1.26% $13,144.86 0.86%
NL $13,894.00 0.47% $22,273.00 0.51% $22,290.00 0.73% $11,340.00 0.75%
NS $105,734.34 3.55% $155,442.45 3.53% $110,203.00 3.59% $37,112.50 2.44%
NT $7,146.00 0.24% $21,542.00 0.49% $9,433.00 0.31% $2,150.00 0.14%
NU $2,830.00 0.10% $2,420.00 0.05% $4,018.00 0.13% $2,040.00 0.13%
ON $1,199,357.72 40.28% $1,841,233.15 41.81% $1,364,679.90 44.46% $583,063.67 38.29%
PE $7,145.00 0.24% $8,300.82 0.19% $5,952.00 0.19% $2,470.00 0.16%
QC $94,120.42 3.16% $120,570.19 2.74% $65,811.41 2.14% $30,502.58 2.00%
SK $243,518.12 8.18% $411,029.18 9.33% $278,655.30 9.08% $124,664.37 8.19%
YT $8,300.92 0.28% $11,703.92 0.27% $8,174.92 0.27% $3,887.34 0.27%
Total $2,977,614.23 n/a $4,403,950.83 n/a $3,069,754.24 n/a $1,522,571.13 n/a

The NDP received $23,019.67 in other donations included in La Presse’s dataset; as with the Cons, that extra amount looks to consist generally of donations from Canadians living outside the country. And another $1,237,818.50 was linked to a province but not classified by year.

I’ll note that the above chart doesn’t include one of the ways I played around with the data, which was to compare the parties’ 2008 donations to their votes in each province. Based on the Cons’ numbers alone I wasn’t entirely sure what to look for, but there are some rather interesting comparisons to be drawn between the Cons and the NDP:
– Both parties posted their top fund-raising take per vote in…the Yukon, with the Cons raking in $11.85 per vote and the NDP $9.17. The Northwest Territories also rank near the top of both parties’ lists, but Nunuvut breaks the territorial trend as the Cons’ lowest per-vote source of income.
– The Cons’ most efficient province for fund-raising is predictably the one where they hold a stranglehold on the popular vote, with $4.53 finding its way into party coffers for every vote won in Alberta. Next in line were B.C. ($3.89), Ontario ($3.69), Manitoba ($3.52) and Saskatchewan ($3.36).
– For the NDP, by far the most efficient province for fund-raising compared to votes received (and the lone one where it exceeded the Cons on that measure) was Saskatchewan, with $3.83 raised by the NDP for each vote it won. Surprisingly to me at least, Alberta ranks second at $2.52, followed by B.C. ($2.37), Manitoba ($2.24) and Ontario ($1.96) – making the fund-raising bases substantially the same for the NDP and the Cons, even if they’ve had varying success in cultivating them.
– Meanwhile, the NDP had two provinces far below the rest in dollars raised per vote. In Newfoundland and Labrador ($0.34), the party’s vote was itself based largely on Danny Williams’ ABC campaign, making for an obvious explanation for the disconnect. But even that effect couldn’t win the bottom place on the NDP’s list of dollars raised per vote – which leads us back into the discussion of the NDP generally.

While I noted that the Cons’ returns in Quebec has always been less than impressive, the NDP’s (at least for the years covered by La Presse’s data) have been substantially lower…and declining by the year as a proportion of the NDP’s overall fund-raising. And even in the 2008 election which saw the party make modest gains with a 12% showing at the polls and its first ever general-election seat, the NDP raised only 27 cents for every Quebec vote it won.

Which isn’t to say that the NDP can’t indeed build up its capacity in Quebec now that it has 59 MPs and a majority of popular support to work with. And one can’t say that the model of working toward winning votes based on relatively soft support which doesn’t yet reflect a donor base has been anything but a stunning success.

But there’s an awfully long way to go for the NDP to turn what had previously been its least efficient fund-raising generator into a national power base. And I’ll be highly curious to see whether the party’s fund-raising base shifts substantially based on its Quebec success.

I’ll note one other trend in the NDP’s data, as the close relationship between the NDP and its provincial sections looks to have a significant influence on how the party raises its money. The 2007 and 2009 years offer an ideal basis of comparison since the dollars raised are such a good match, and they show an almost unbroken pattern: where a provincial party faces an election (including Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario in 2007, and B.C. in 2009), the federal party’s fund-raising is lower for the year.

And the exception that proves the rule is Nova Scotia – where despite the euphoria of winning a provincial election for the first time and the added attention from hosting the party’s federal convention in Halifax, the federal NDP improved on its 2007 fund-raising numbers by less than $5,000.

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Accidental Deliberations: Fund-Raising Review By Province – Conservatives

As promised, let’s dig into La Presse’s party fund-raising data to see what we can conclude about where and how Canada’s political parties have raised money over the past few years – starting with the party which has lapped the field in the area.

The numbers are arrived at as follows:
– The full list of donations is sorted by party.
– The party donations are sorted first by province, then by year.
– Once the sorting isolates the donations for a province and year, those amounts are summed and included in the chart below, alongside the percentage of the Cons’ annual donations sourced from the province.

Due to some imperfections in the data, some donations aren’t classified by province (in the Cons’ case totalling $54,199.70) or year (totalling $3,594,456.53), while others included in more authoritative totals seem to be missed entirely. And the 2010 numbers are even more spotty since they’re based on quarterly rather than annual data. But assuming there’s no systematic reason for particular types of donations being missed, we should still be able to draw some conclusions from the partial data.

Conservative Donations – 2007-2010 (partial)

Prov 2007$ 2007% 2008$ 2008% 2009$ 2009% 2010$ 2010%
AB $2,380,340.42 20.09% $3,716,554.54 20.18% $2,664,881.58 20.00% $1,452,201.50 24.15%
BC $2,019,853.99 17.05% $3,100,353.52 16.83% $2,250,832.69 16.89% $1,038,942.14 17.28%
MB $463,520.5 3.91% $803,726.78 4.36% $664,025.63 4.98% $295,992.94 4.92%
NB $135,870.93 1.15% $262,806.92 1.43% $202,580.19 1.52% $77,061.01 1.28%
NL $20,881.78 0.18% $58,065 0.32% $18,615 0.14% $19,010 0.32%
NS $160,287.36 1.35% $301,036.59 1.63% $241,260.57 1.81% $98,618.29 1.64%
NT $24,711.25 0.21% $29,851.25 0.16% $22,008.50 0.17% $17,459 0.29%
NU $1,750 0.01% $3,735 0.02% $7,330 0.06% $7,100 0.12%
ON $4,891,693.16 41.29% $7,448,196.41 40.44% $5,409,701.47 40.60% $2,405,206.29 40.00%
PE $73,704 0.62% $77,067 0.42% $87,418.49 0.66% $17,290.02 0.29%
QC $1,172,699.74 9.90% $1,804,613.22 9.80% $1,094,044.96 8.21% $261,928.92 4.36%
SK $460,756.01 3.89% $755,387.63 4.10% $623,807.58 4.68% $306,239.01 5.09%
YT $41,450 0.35% $56,270.45 0.31% $38,505 0.29% $16,390 0.27%
Total $11,847,519.14 n/a $18,418,114.31 n/a $13,325,011.66 n/a $6,013,529.12 n/a

So what can we tell from the above? On a first look, there are a few details worth highlighting – keeping in mind that with election years and incomplete data limiting the value of looking at the totals, the most important information figures to lie in the comparison between provinces.

To start with, the most remarkable trend in the few years of data is the Cons’ drop-off in Quebec fund-raising.

It’s not much of a secret that the Cons’ strategy from the end of 2008 onward has largely involved punting on the province aside from their then-current seats. But they didn’t seem to have a lot to lose to begin with, having never brought in so much as 10% of their annual fund-raising from a province with 23% of Canada’s population. And from that starting point, it’s stunning to see how their abandonment of Quebec played out from a fund-raising perspective – with a modest but significant drop in 2009, followed by a dive off a cliff in 2010 to the point where the Cons’ Quebec fund-raising rated behind that from each of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Meanwhile, the Cons have found what strikes me as a surprising counterweight to make up for that Quebec decline.

I’d have expected the Cons to have maximized their western fund-raising long ago, while still having some room to grow in Ontario as they’ve expanded their vote totals there. But La Presse’s numbers show exactly the opposite.

In fact, the Ontario haul as a proportion of Con fund-raising has been relatively stable – which seems to signal that the Cons have already tapped the market to the extent reasonably possible. Instead, it’s the prairie provinces that have actually increased their relative contribution fairly steadily in recent years – with Saskatchewan increasing each year, Manitoba nearly doing the same, and Alberta seeing a striking jump in 2010, even as all were already contributing well above their share based on their population totals.

Finally, one other note of interest is the effect that Danny Williams’ ABC campaign looks to have had on the Cons’ fund-raising in Newfoundland and Labrador. Not that they started from much of a position of strength originally – but in both 2007 and 2009, the party actually managed to raise more from each of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories than it was able to bring in from a province with half a million residents and a nominally affiliated provincial government.

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