Wildrose fundraised more than the Alberta PCs in 2013

Thanks for the astute analysis.

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

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.

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.