Dwight Ball is the leader of the Liberal Party.
He now has a chance to lead by example when it comes to donations for his leadership campaign.
Ball told CBC News that he spent somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 on his leadership campaign. Even though the party executive failed to provide any rules for campaign financing – as SRBP told you in July – Ball should set an example and publish a list of all donors over $100 and the amounts they gave.
Liberal leadership candidate Danny Dumaresque wants to reform the provincial election laws to ban corporate donations, as the Telegram reported on Thursday.
“I think in Newfoundland and Labrador, we’ve got to update the program,” he said. “(We’re) not living up to the expectations of the voting public, and it’s time for us to go forward and get current and have the respect for the voting public that they deserve.”
He said he wants to see a system in which the law would prevent “any possibility that big business can have access to elected officials — especially people in the government.”
So far Dumaresque is the only Liberal candidate to offer this kind of progressive reform ideas.
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Cathy Bennett’s leadership launch event was organized as one would expect. Her speech was scripted and, hand gestures and all, well rehearsed.
From the start there was the flush of jargon that one expects these days from business people getting into politics. A “decision process’ had led her to this spot. The province must be “best in class”. Things must be “actioned”. We must “start a conversation.” Energy, passion and fire - especially passion – occurred in the speech with as much frequency as “strong voice” used to turn up with others.
She pledged to be “open and accountable” as well as honest and persuasive.”
Bennett didn’t offer much beyond stock phrases on anything, though, except on three points: increased immigration, full-day kindergarten, and Muskrat Falls.
If the Conservative Party in Newfoundland and Labrador threw out people who had been a Liberal or a New Democrat before, there wouldn’t be enough people left in it to have a game of cards. Pretty well all the old Tories from the 1970s who rose to any prominence started out life as Liberals.
John Crosbie?
Alex Hickman?
Brian Peckford?
Tom Rideout?
All good Liberals once.
Lately, you could even add Ross Wiseman to the list of former Liberals who are now Conservatives.
All this talk of Senator Beth Marshall and her hefty annual stipend for chairing a committee that has met once in two years brings to mind the good senator’s role in the House of Assembly patronage scam, a.k.a. the spending scandal.
Marshall is credited with first sniffing something was amiss when she went hunting for Paul Dick’s expenses in 2001-ish. She was barred from the House by the legislature’s internal economy commission. The members were Liberals and Tories and, as accounts have it, they unanimously wanted to keep Beth’s nose out of their files.
But if you go back and look, you’ll have a hard time finding any indication Beth thought something else was on the go. While we didn’t know it at the time, subsequent information confirmed that members had been handing out public cash pretty generously by that point. Yet Marshall has never, ever indicated she felt something more than a few wine and art purchases might have been amiss.
That’s important because of Marshall’s record once she got into the House herself as a member in 2003.
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.
Last winter we took a look at the idea of cost per vote. Basically, you compare the amount of money a campaign spent with the number of votes it got.
It’s a way of measuring the efficiency of a political campaign. The lower the number, the more efficient the campaign is.
Here’s a chart showing the cost per vote for the three major parties in Newfoundland and Labrador in the four general election years 1996, 1999, 2003, and 2007. The calculations added the annual contributions for each party and the specific contributions for each general election during the year of the general election and divided the sum by the number of votes cast for each party.
The chart doesn’t include 2011 since Elections NL hasn’t released the annual contribution figures for that year yet.
Official election finance returns for two by-elections in 2010 and 2011 show an interesting pattern of political contributions.
The most interesting tidbit is that the Tories had to pull out all the financial stops to ensure Vaughan Granter won Humber West. The party transferred more than $17,000 to his campaign.
The single largest expense for the campaign was for workers’ travel. The Granter campaign spent $14,000 paying for campaign workers’ travel. In addition, the Tory party spent another $10,000 of their own on worker travel. In total, the Tory party spent $28,000 on the by-election.
The returns are the by-elections in and Conception Bay East-Bell Island (2010) and Humber West (2011). The table below shows the contributions broken down into personal donations and corporate ones. CBE-BI is on the top and Humber West is on the bottom.
It’s the mismatch between the personal and the corporate that stands out in Conception Bay East-Bell Island. Tory David Brazil received 43 corporate donations averaging $470 each, but had contributions from only 18 individuals.
Among the corporate donors to Brazil’s campaign was a numbered Ontario company that apparently operates an Italian restaurant. 1148305 Ontario Inc. (New Hope Properties) also donated to the Ontario Liberal Party in Cambridge Ontario in 2003 and 2007.
Brazil also got donations from OCI and the Pennecon as well as the gang of loyal givers from the Old Man’s old law firm.
Liberal Joy Buckle also had a large number of corporate donors. The more interesting ones show a connection to the former leader of the Liberal party and the current one.
New Democrat George Murphy was the only one of the three by-election candidates who turned out more personal than corporate donations. among his big benefactors was wannabe party leader and current MHA for St. John’s North Dale Kirby.
Check what they spent their money on and you can see the huge advantage incumbency gives you. The Tories raised more than $37,000 compared to about $15,000 for the NDP and slightly more than half that for the Liberals. But the Tories were able to transfer out of the campaign more money than the Liberals raised in total and almost as much as the NDP spent.
Out on Humber West, the story was different. Liberal Mark Watton turned up 47 donations from individuals and 11 from corporations. The geographic origin of Watton’s donors - across Canada and one from France - attests to his wide personal appeal and connections.
While Watton’s successful Tory opponent netted a large number of corporate donations, a couple of them might be looking for his help these days. Well, at least four members of the Corner Brook Firefighters Association, newly out of work thanks to Vaughan Granter’s Tory colleagues on the Corner Brook city council. Maybe the boys can ask Vaughan to intercede on their behalf. They did give him $500 - via the association - in the by-election.
Their spending and income statements, though are where things get really interesting. Watton raised way more than Granter. The Tory party had to transfer $17,000 into Granter’s campaign. Granter only raised $14,600 on his own compared to $25,000 for Watton.
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A couple of years ago, in the aftermath of Cougar 491, SRBP made some suggestions about how to improve search and rescue services on the east coast of Canada.
The recent tragedy in Makkovik had nothing to do with the Canadian Forces search and rescue service. There’s been a huge public outcry aimed at Ottawa, egged on by politicians from all political parties who have misled people. The Premier and the municipal affairs minister are just two of those politicians, even though they know or ought to know the rights of who was responsible for what.
The fact is that the ground search and rescue in Makkovik was all provincial.
Some of the ideas from that older post still apply, even if they likely wouldn;t have made a difference in Makkovik. If a major disaster occurred – like say an airliner crash – all the SAR and emergency response would have to come from the south, by air. It’s a long way from Greenwood, Nova Scotia to Goose Bay and longer yet again to get up around Nain.
Some of those suggestions for improvements in the federal side still stand. But what about the province? Well, that’s where the people responsible could do a lot more than they have been. The ground search and rescue system actually works quite well, despite the neglect or under-funding. It largely works because of the huge number of volunteers, not because of the great attention paid to it by the political types. Sure they are the first ones to claim credit but they are usually the last ones to do anything beneficial.
So for starters let’s change that. If Kathy Dunderdale really wants to do something in response to the tragedy in Makkovik, then here are some simple ideas. She should clean up her own act before she points fingers at anyone else.
Here’s the SRBP list for starters:
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The Telegram took a very light look on Saturday at the most recent figures on political contributions released by the provincial elections office a couple of months ago.
For some reason, the Telly singled out Aliant for its record of donations even though the telecommunications company is by no means the big story in the 2010 figures or indeed of the recent public record of party donations.
If you want a more detailed analysis, then check these posts from SRBP and labradore:
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Just when you thought it was safe to stick your head up now that the poll-talk was gone, along comes three party insiders talking to Peter Mansbridge about polls.
Take the time to watch this video. The front segment on polls is short. You will learn a lot about how political strategists use their own polls to drive campaign decision-making.
And you’ll also hear a pretty frank and largely dismissive discussion about the polls you read in the media. Most of that discussion will sound very familiar to you.
The simple answer as to why the public polls are so spectacularly wrong is, as David Herle notes, that the public polls don’t look at voters. They are actually looking at the population as a whole and with turn-outs dropping, those polls just don’t do a very good job at picking up on opinion in a progressively smaller bit of the electorate.
People lie to pollsters. What a shock. People lied to pollsters regularly and quite openly in the polls in this province during the recent general election.
The pollsters won’t talk about that or their abysmal accuracy because the polls they release are marketing tools. The media won’t talk about the wildly inaccurate polls because they are marketing tools for them as well.
Kathleen Monk adds a nice bit of colour on how the NDP used polling to determine the emphasis they placed on Jack during the last campaign compared to anything else.
And Jaime Watt adds the fine touch of noting that party people use a bunch of different information – he calls them data points – to figure out what is happening with the campaign. Polling is one thing. Canvassing is another and cash flow from donations is yet another of several points.
That last one will tell you why the spreadsheeters like threehundredeight.com go off in the trees. Not only are they relying on inherently faulty data – those inaccurate public polls – but they rely on basically one type of data to try and forecast how seats were going.
Just to give you a sense of how inadequate that approach can be, realise that your humble e-scribbler chewed over with a colleague used a variation on the poll analysis approach. It turned up some curious things as the polls flowed in the last provincial election. As the NDP numbers grew and the Tories dropped, a bunch of seats showed as coming into play.
St. John’s Centre and East would look like they were swinging.
But so too did Virginia Waters.
And Bellevue.
And the Isles of Notre Dame.
The only way you’d cross those off the list of seats that might actually swing is by pulling in other sources of information. The Straits never showed up on the chart and, frankly, without any signs of anything from that one seat, no one likely saw the change to the NDP coming.
For what it’s worth, your humble e–scribbler’s sister dazzled some of her townie Tory friends by naming seats in Sin Jawns that definitely flipped to the NDP. She never told them where she got the information but it came from an analysis of the polls and other tidbits.
You work with what you’ve got, even if it some of it is inaccurate, but with enough data points you can still build a pretty reliable picture of what’s going on.
The townies never saw the changes coming largely because the media never reported any of the battle. But after the votes were counted, her friends figured she was some sort of magician or witch. A little information can make a lot of difference.
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If you have eyes, be prepared to have them popped by labradore’s latest comparison of party financing.
He looks at the pattern of corporate political donations in metro Halifax and metro St. John’s from 2005 to 2009. The results are startling. In a region with a smaller population, the corporate sector in St. John’s gave more cash and they gave it disproportionately to the party in power.
Add that bit of information to a post on Monday that showed just how much the corporate sector gave in just a single year, namely 2010.
In 2010, the governing Progressive Conservatives raised $690,000 in reportable contributions, versus the Liberals $31,000 and the NDP's $59,000. That is the highest amount the Tories have ever raised in an off-election year.
Of the PC total that year, fully $383,000 — over 55% — came from business donors in the greater St. John's area.
And just to further refine those numbers, bear in mind that of the $690,000, the Tories got $235,000 or thereabouts from one sector: the construction industry.
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Town and Toronto start with a “T”.
Some Townies can be like some Torontonians sometimes.
Yes, yes.
Settle down.
Hold it down with the other “t” words, like twit, twillick, and twaddle monger.
You are getting ahead of the story.
Townies, like Torontonians sometimes seems to think that all that matters in the world orbits the tight pucker of their collective arsehole.
The news media in this province are dominated by the townie-based daily crowd. Lots of things that happen beyond their usual watering holes in the downtown or their homes in the east end of Town can go sailing past them and hence their audience.
If you wanted an example of just how much gets missed, take this media commentary on a recent poll and what it supposedly means.
Like it or not, the bulk of the wealth in this province is in St. John's and that's where parties have the most luck raising cash. The Liberals had money problems long before they started musing about "diverting oil money" to rural areas (presumably at the expense of St. John's), and when Liberal candidate Danny Dumaresque slammed the idea of giving any extra cash to St. John's, the sound you heard (over the collective gasp of the endangered urban Liberals) was the thump of every chequebook in the capital city slamming shut.
A look at the most recent financial statements from the province’s electoral office shows pretty clearly what’s been going on in the province over the past while.
The picture isn’t pretty and it also is nothing like that paragraph would lead you to believe, either.
The provincial Conservatives rake in the lion’s share of the cash compared to all other parties, bar none. Government parties usually do in this province. People like to curry favour.
What’s noticeably different since 2003 compared to previous years is that the companies that give to the “in” party no longer give to the “out” parties.
There’s a reason for that and the reason is more likely related to the attitude the Tories have displayed to political pork and electoral districts than it is to the Liberals alienating the townie money pits.
No one should be surprised if donors quietly got the message that the powers that be would look unfavourably on donations to the other guys, in the same way voters have been told bluntly they needed to vote Blue if they wanted their grandchildren to know what pavement looks like for real instead of just in pictures.
Another noticeable characteristic of the Tory political cash is that it comes primarily from corporate sources, not individuals.
That’s been especially true for the people who have made quite a haul the past four years from the boom in provincial government capital works contracts over the past couple of years. The construction industry both in the province and on the mainland gave more than $230,000 to the provincial Conservatives in 2010.
The argument in that media commentary is that the Liberals haven’t been able to raise money because they have turned their back on townies.
Now if that were true, then we’d expect to see the New Democrats, who are pretty well all- townie-all-the-time, would have more luck with donations.
Guess again.
The Dippers get lots of small donations from individuals, most of whom live in and around Capital City.
But there isn’t really a lot of cash in their bank accounts.
What’s more, their biggest single donor is a Toronto-based union that for the past two years dropped 20 large on the NDP in this province. Before that it was a Washington DC union that ponied up 10K.
That’s because, as much as anything else, political cash is tied to at least three things.
First is incumbency. You have to be in power or likely to be in power to warrant attention from donors in these parts. That’s an old connection that the politicos themselves drew decades ago and the connection has persisted over time. There are companies all over the province, not just in Sin Jawns
Second is the political culture. Individuals don’t seem to give much to parties, relatively speaking, over time. 2010 is no exception. Take a look at the analysis by labradore and you can see the extent to which this is true.
And that’s likely because – third – the parties aren’t organized and interested in individuals. Old habits die very hard and parties like the Liberals and Tories that got used to corporate cash have just kept looking for corporate cash.
Besides, they, like the NDP, also aren’t built around individual members who actually run the party. It just wouldn’t occur to them to try and build the party on appealing to individuals to get out an participate. Even if it did occur to someone, they’d go at it half-heartedly if they went at it at all.
The fundraising problems the Liberals have come from some chronic problems over the last five or six years. The biggest one is basically a lack of focussed effort. That’s also what’s caused the lack of general preparedness and the problems in candidate recruiting as well.
On a local level, in some districts, they are doing quite well and likely will do quite well. Candidates have been raising money and they have volunteers and a momentum going. There might even be some surprises. That’s all taking place well outside of Sin Jawns, though, and as a result, the details won’t show up in daily media in the province.
Consider that to be the reverse of the NDP where their usual sort of campaign – not much cash or workers – comes across as amazingly gigantic in news reports because it is so close to reporters they can’t see the wider details.
And all that sort of skewed reporting and commentary is pretty much what happens when the frame of reference is the imaginary centre of a largely imaginary universe.
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MQO, the market research company that released an opinion poll on the second day of the provincial general election, is part of a group of marketing and advertising companies with ties to the provincial Conservatives and Nalcor, the provincial government’s energy company.
M5 is the agency of record for Nalcor, a spokesperson for Nalcor confirmed for SRBP on Tuesday.
Craig Tucker is listed as managing director of M5 on the company’s website.
In 2004, then premier Danny Williams announced Tucker’s appointment to the board of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. Hydro was the predecessor of Nalcor. It appears Tucker left the board when Hydro became Nalcor.
According to a 2005 CBC story, Tucker co-chaired the Conservative’s 2003 election campaign. That CBC story was about a $150,000 contract that M5 landed from the provincial government to promote the $2.0 billion transfer deal with Ottawa signed in January 2005.
M5 has also been an active contributor to the Progressive Conservative party in the province. From 2003 to 2010, the company gave $29,200 in political donations to the PC party according to information from the province’s chief electoral officer.
SRBP contacted Karen McCarthy, the media contact on the MQO news release, via Twitter and later e-mail. McCarthy is president of M5PR and is listed on the M5 website as senior vice-president, communications.
SRBP asked:
Is M5 doing any work currently for Nalcor, the prov gov and/or the PC party. If so, what is it doing?
McCarthy replied:
MQO Research conducted the poll on the NL election over the past weekend independent of any other organization. The company is a “research force” in the Atlantic Region and feels a responsibility to report on issues of interest to people in the four Atlantic provinces. The company has done work for many governments, corporations and others throughout the region since its inception. Whether or not the company currently has projects in play with the organizations you mentioned, I’m unaware. It’s not something that MQO’s researcher’s would confirm for me due to client confidentiality. In fact, the same is true for the entire group of m5 companies. I can speak for the company of which I am President. m5pr is not doing any work for the PC Party, Nalcor or the Province.
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New Democrat candidate George Murphy is being accused of breaking the province’s election finance laws
Murphy’s chief financial officer sent out an e-mail soliciting donations for Murphy’s campaign in the upcoming election.
But that goes against section 282(3) that says only a registered party or a candidate can ask for donations. The problem is that as far as the Elections Act is concerned, Murphy isn’t a candidate because the election hasn’t been called.
People can vote for him, or his party and have been able to do so for weeks even though there is no election called.
But they cannot contribute to Murphy’s campaign.
Frigged up or what?
The election finance laws haven’t been updated since 1998.
The ridiculous bit about advance voting came along with fixed election dates under the Williams' Conservatives in 2004. But Williams and his gang had no interest in modernising the elections finance laws even though Williams promised to do just that as part of his election campaign in 2003.
There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept some famous politician used to say.
Anyway, if the CBC story on this is accurate the provincial elections office says it will insist that Murphy refund any money he raised.
Since a registered political party can legally fund-raise under the same section, the New Democrats need only change the organization doing the solicitation and everyone can happily reconcile the mess by fixed election date laws in an election finance section designed for a different situation.
No harm intended.
No real foul committed, especially when the provincial election laws are so woefully antiquated or - as in the special ballot provisions - are such an obvious mess.
What’s more, there are a bunch of ways people could contribute to Murphy’s campaign without triggering that section of the Act. it’s right there in black and white, if someone at the electoral office actually read the law they are supposed to enforce.
Instead, the same office that refused to investigate political work paid for by money obtained from the public purse through fraud when it involved the ruling Tories is going to punish a New Democrat for what could be – arguably – a misreading of the Elections Act by both the elections office and the candidate?
Something is very wrong in that.
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