Kathy Dunderdale defended the Muskrat Falls project at a speech on Wednesday night, according to cbc.ca/nl’s story.
That’s an odd phrase given that Dunderdale was speaking to a Tory party fundraiser, as the headline noted. That would be the textbook definition of a friendly audience for any talk about Muskrat Falls.
But if you look at the record of political donations you can see some rather interesting things.
As labradore graphically illustrated on Thursday, the friendly audience at the $500 a plate Tory dinner likely contained a lot of corporate donors. He put the Tory record of political donations by corporations (dark blue) and individuals (light blue) over the past 15 years into a pretty chart.
In 2010, the Tories collected about $575,000 in corporate donations.
As SRBP noted last year, almost $240,000 of that came from the province’s construction industry. Spare your calculator. The construction industry accounted for about 42% of the Tories’ donation haul in 2010.
The builder boys and girls gave about $4,000 to the Liberals and not a penny to the New Democrats.
Sweet, eh?
Hold on to your hat and drill down a bit more.
In 2011, corporations gave the Tories $645,165 during the general election campaign according to figures released recently by Elections Newfoundland and Labrador.
A dozen companies gave individual donations of $5,000 or more. The top donor was Coleman’s Management Services – the grocery crowd – who gave Tom Marshall a $7,500 donation. 10565 Newfoundland, a mining company, gave Keith Russell $5,000. Academy Canada gave Vaughan Granter two donations of $5,000 each.
The other eight top Tory corporate givers – each $5,000 – were construction companies.
The province’s finance minister benefitted disproportionately from their corporate largesse. Elections NL reported a total of $56,000 in corporate and personal donations to Marshall’s 2011 campaign. Of that, $7,100 - less than the single Coleman’s donation - came from individuals.
The rest were corporate.
Tom Marshall’s campaign received $25,000 from construction companies.
If you add in the donation from Coleman’s, six corporations accounted for 58% ($32,500) of Marshall’s campaign donations.
| Atlantic Engineering Consultants | Tom Marshall | 5,000 |
| Brook Construction | Tom Marshall | 5,000 |
| Hearn Fougere Architects | Tom Marshall | 5,000 |
| Johnson’s Construction | Tom Marshall | 5,000 |
| Marine Contractors | Tom Marshall | 5,000 |
| Infinity Construction | Shawn Skinner | 5,000 |
| J-1 Contracting | Kathy Dunderdale | 5,000 |
| PHB Group | Darin King | 5,000 |
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