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Alberta Politics

Wildrose fundraised more than the Alberta PCs in 2013

The Wildrose Party raised more than the long-governing Progressive Conservatives in last year’s party fundraising, according to Elections Alberta financial disclosure reports released last week.

The financial reports show Danielle Smith‘s Wildrose Party raised $2,690,710 compared to the $2,206,419 raised by Premier Alison Redford‘s Progressive Conservatives. The gap between the two parties widens drastically in the size of donations. Reflecting an engaged base of individual donors, 47% of funds collected by the Wildrose were in the form of smaller denominations of $250 or less. The PCs raised only 8% of their funds from smaller individual donations.

The PCs have only recently begun to target smaller donors with fundraising email appeals that have been commonly used for years by other political parties.

The Alberta NDP raised a respectable $623,763, which is less than then $699,087 raised by the party outside the election period in 2012. With $339,540 reportedly raised, the former official opposition Liberals earned only slightly more than they did in outside of the election period in 2012.

Without a leader for most of 2013, the election of Greg Clark appears to have helped boost Alberta Party fundraising in the fourth quarter of 2013. While still far behind their competitors, the 81% increase in financial contributions in the final quarter of 2013 could be meaningful if it is followed by further growth in fundraising in 2014.

Alberta Political Party Financial Disclosure 2013
Annual Total PARTY  (<$250)  (>$250) TOTAL
Wildrose $1,266,171 $1,159,709 $2,690,710
PC $181,133 $2,026,284 $2,206,419
NDP $423,696 $200,069 $623,763
Liberal $269,649 $146,830 $339,540
Alberta Party $28,955 $30,451 $59,406
2013 Quarterly reports PARTY  (<$250)  (>$250) TOTAL
1ST QUARTER(JAN 1-MAR 31) PC $26,462 $525,912 $552,375
Wildrose $394,068 $133,545 $527,613
NDP $91,245 $29,549 $120,791
Liberal $41,918 $13,375 $55,293
Alberta Party $6,812 $600 $7,412
2ND QUARTER (APR 1-JUN 30) PARTY  (<$250)  (>$250) TOTAL
Wildrose $486,472 $611,205 $1,097,677
PC $25,248 $659,984 $684,232
NDP $100,622 $25,412 $126,034
Liberal $71,861 $49,255 $121,116
Alberta Party $6,025 $600 $6,625
3RD QUARTER (JUL 1-SEPT 30) PARTY  (<$250)  (>$250) TOTAL
Wildrose $265.094 $94,650 $359,744
PC $48,128 $144,389 $192,517
NDP $101,858 $37,320 $139,178
Liberal $24,919 $25,620 $50,539
Alberta Party $5,942 $1,400 $7,342
4TH QUARTER (Oct 1-dec 31) PARTY  (<$250)  (>$250) TOTAL
PC $81,295 $695,999 $777,295
Wildrose $385,366 $320,309 $705,676
NDP $129,971 $107,788 $237,760
Liberal $54,012 $58,580 $112,592
Alberta Party $10,176 $27,851 $38,027

 

10 replies on “Wildrose fundraised more than the Alberta PCs in 2013”

There is an error in your math on the NDP figures. If you add them up, the NDP raised $623,765.48 in 2013.

On another point (and I admit I might be splitting hairs), I’m not sure it’s fair to compare a party’s fundraising total in 2013 to any part of 2012. In election years, all parties tend to raise more. A better comparison might be 2009, the last year just after an election.

And further to my last comment, comparisons with 2009 contributions (the last election + 1 year) prove interesting:

PCs
2009 contributions: $2.4M
2013 contributions: $2.2M

Wildrose
2009 contributions: $428K
2013 contributions: $2.6M

Liberal
2009 contributions: $694K
2013 contributions: $340K

Ab NDP
2009 contributions: $564K
2013 contributions: $624K

Lou: Thanks for catching that number error with the NDP totals. It is now fixed.

Your comment about comparing 2013 to 2012 is well taken. It is difficult to compare elections years with non-election years, which is why I included the comparison of only non-election period donations in 2012 (which is definitely splitting hairs).

I would have liked to see constituency association totals reflected in your analysis, as this is money that will come into play in the next election and has created huge disparity among the parties. While the central wrp fund raised more than the pc’s, the pc’s out fund raised the wrp as a whole. This doesn’t give you the sexy headline, but it’s a lot more accurate to reflect the whole story.

Thanks for the comment, Frank. You are correct that some PC constituency associations raised significant amounts of funds in 2013. The totals included in this post are funds raised by central party organizations.

Unfortunately, Elections Alberta does not make the individual constituency numbers easily accessible.

They are only available to those who have time to sift through 348 PDF documents of the individual quarterly reports submitted by the PC constituency associations.

If someone has already tallied these numbers for all five parties and would be willing to pass them along to me, I would happily write a post about it.

– Dave

I tallied the NDP’s constituency association total. It is zero and presumably, as the Chief Electoral Officer reported in the 2012 Annual Report, that’s because the NDP policy was “All contributions were accepted at the party level.” During the election, the Liberals collected far more at the constituency level than at the party level. But I haven’t found time to do the math for the Liberal constituency associations. I presume that they are, like their party as a whole, in the dumps, but their total, when both constituencies and the central party are added together, are not likely as far from the NDP’s figures as are the misleading central party figures alone.

It’s clear from the chief electoral officer’s report that only the two far right parties are doing well by any measures. The NDP, even using Lou Arab’s figures, is only collecting marginally greater amounts of money than it did in 2009. Worse, it’s clear from the list of presidents and chief financial officers that there are at most 25 constituency associations for whom the NDP was able to find a dedicated, locally resident president and CFO, that is two bodies willing to sign themselves on as leaders even if they did not have to do anything else that year. So there would be even fewer constituency associations where the NDP has enough bodies to organize something that might look like a campaign–perhaps 10, 9 of them in Edmonton? The party secretary Brian Stokes is president or CFO of 49 constituency associations, meaning they exist only on paper (party employee Mary McLean is listed as the other of the two officials for most of these phantom constituency associations). A number of individuals are serving as president and/or CFO of more than one constituency association (both in Red Deer and Fort McMurray, for example, the two constituency associations share the same president and CFO–4 members of the social democratic party for cities with combined populations approaching 200,000 people? Mind you, the total Calgary membership appears proportionally much the same)

Either the NDP and the Liberals find their way to a coalition or a merger or they continue their strategy of each chasing the other to oblivion first. Though all sorts of evidence suggests that two out of five voters in the province has liberal or left values, that’s meaningless when these parties are determined to behave in ways that insure that most of their potential members and certainly voters have no reason to give these apparent losers the time of day. These parties, rather than the Wildrose itself, are making that party the only option for voters who are mostly just determined to change the government and are going to look only at a realistic option of who can form the government.

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