According to recently filed second quarter fundraising numbers with Elections Canada, the Liberals raised $4,053,567 from 19,487 contributors compared to the Conservatives who raised $3,957,662 in the same time period from 35,217 contributors.
... For the Liberals, these fundraising numbers included the fees for their April 30-May 3 leadership convention in Vancouver. A spokesman for the federal Liberal Party headquarters told The Hill times that 3,000 delegates attended their convention and all but 200 were paid delegates. The regular fee to attend the convention was $995 but the Liberal Party waived the fee for its Laurier Club members as the annual membership fee is $1,100, which is the maximum annual donation limit. To attract more delegates, the Liberal Party dropped the delegate fee for delegates coming from Nunavut and Labrador and also offered fee discounts for those who came from other far-flung places.
But Mr. Apps said that convention fees formed a small proportion of the total amount.
"I would say certainly over 80 per cent of the funds that came in had nothing to do with the convention."
Wait a minute.
$4,053,567 x 20% = $810,713 from the Convention, divided by an average of maybe $800 per convention fee (those discounts were usually less than $100), means only... 1,018 people showed up? Or maybe those 2,800 people only paid an average of $290 each?
Must've been more delegates from Nunavut than I thought. Or maybe, just maybe, more than half of those impressive second quarter numbers really were from convention fees. Meaning that the second quarter figures were just about exactly the same as the first quarter.
Sigh.
It looks like some fancy footwork here. The Liberals need to find a way to raise funds from "ordinary" Canadians. Too many years of getting big cheques from banks and aircraft manufacturers
ReplyDelete