First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
As the Trudeau government continues to stave off an election despite ever-plummeting public support, one clue as to how may be that the parties keeping them in power are too broke to afford a campaign.
The NDP, in particular, counted less than $300,000 in cash in its most recent audited financial statements. At the close of 2023, the party had cash assets of just $289,808.
This is the exact opposite of the Conservatives, who are sitting on more money than they could ever legally spend in a campaign. Their cash reserves at the end of 2023 stood at $16,197,685.
In a social media post this week, Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said the contrasting cash reserves of the major parties were a clue as to “the dynamics of (Canadian politics) today and the likelihood of an election.”
Writer Alex Zoltan also took note of the bare cupboards at the NDP in a widely circulated X.com thread. Zoltan attributed it back to the party funding a massive advertising blitz in the 2021 election that yielded virtually no gains (the NDP caucus grew by just one seat on election day). “It was a giant financial risk that failed to pay off and now we’re all paying for it,” he wrote.
In a full-scale federal election campaign, $289,808 would barely be enough to cover the travel expenses of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, much less afford the resources needed to coordinate 343 candidates across six time zones.
In fact, it’s not much more than what Singh bills the taxpayer each month for his normal duties as a parliamentarian.
From April to June (the most recent quarter for which numbers are available), Singh expensed a total $675,943 – an average of about $225,314 per month. And that figure doesn’t include his $271,700 per year salary.
The quarterly expenses included $143,382.54 just to run his Burnaby South constituency office, another $294,286 expensed in his capacity as leader of the “Other Opposition Party,” and $238,275.61 to run the NDP’s National Caucus Research Office.
The Conservatives are also running up a high tab in parliamentary expenses each month. In that same quarter, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre expensed $987,014.17 just in his capacity as Leader of the Official Opposition.
But in sharp contrast to the NDP, the Conservatives have more than enough in their coffers to keep up that level of spending in a campaign.
The Tories have been breaking fundraising records for quite some time. In 2023, the Conservative Party brought in $35.2 million – the highest annual total for any political party in Canadian history. The year before, they collected $20.7 million.
As campaign spending is strictly regulated in Canada, this is way more money than the party would be allowed to spend in the course of a campaign. In the 2021 general election, Elections Canada capped the parties’ campaign budgets at about $30 million apiece.
Regardless, all throughout 2024 the Conservatives have continued to pull in money. A detailed breakdown published last month by The Writ found that the Tories raised $20.5 million in the first eight months of the year. This was more than double every other party combined (the Liberals brought in $6.8 million, the NDP $2.6 million, the Greens $770,000 and the Bloc Québécois $664,000).
The extra $2.6 million has probably improved the NDP’s cash reserves somewhat over their 2023 year-end, but the party also closed out last year still burdened by leftover debt from the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. The 2023 statements put the party’s various liabilities at $1.7 million, including $716,000 in outstanding bank loans.
The party was so financially unprepared for the snap 2021 election that it had to take out a $20 million loan that it has only now come close to paying off. At the party’s national convention in February, party officials said they only had $2 million left outstanding on the 2021 loan.
But in the meantime, debt servicing charges have repeatedly ranked as one of the party’s largest single expenses aside from salaries.
In 2022, the NDP spent $882,573 on “bank charges and interest” – more than 10 times what they spent on advertising for that year ($83,951). Last year, “bank charges and interest” topped out at $558,389, roughly on par with what the party spent on travel expenses ($476,181).
And the ragged state of the NDP’s finances is despite the fact that the party pursues an unusually strict system of seizing federal subsidies from its local ridings.
The Government of Canada subsidizes election expenses for parties that obtain more than 10 per cent of the vote in a riding. If that threshold is reached, Elections Canada cuts a cheque to the riding association for 60 per cent of their registered expenses.
According to a CBC profile on the practice in 2021, the Conservative Party and the Green Party allow their riding associations to keep 100 per cent of their Elections Canada rebates, while the Liberals had a policy of clawing back 60 per cent of local rebates.
The NDP – at least in 2021 – was the only party that pursued a policy of demanding that every dollar of rebate be sent to party HQ.
IN OTHER NEWS
A Sept. 24 poll from Mainstreet Research shows that the B.C. Conservatives are likely to win a majority in the upcoming Oct. 19 B.C. provincial election. If it comes to pass, it would be one of the more stunning turnarounds in a province that is no stranger to stunning turnarounds. In the last provincial election, in 2020, the B.C. NDP not only claimed their best result ever, but the B.C. Conservatives didn’t win a single seat.
Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.