January 2005 - Page 3 of 6

Blogging: 1 year later

Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog. I just realized that today is the day so I wanted to mark it before it passed. I’ll be updating this post later with some highlights of the past year, including links to some of my favourite posts.

Political Contributions by type

Inspired by the last two posts, I decided to look at all of the raw data from 2003. I downloaded the total contributions per party into spreadsheet form, sorted the data by contributor type, summed each contributor type and then graphed each contributor type into pie-chart form (to view percentages).

It was suggested that the Liberals are “Corporate whores” by Mike Jones. Let’s take a look…

The Liberals rack up 16% contributions from corporations. Not too whore-ish, yet nothing to be too proud of. A full 50% of their contributions come from businesses (not “big business”).

Ok, let’s take a look at the Conservatives…

Wow, the Conservatives only take 2% of their total contributions from Corporations. Thus, corporate whores we are not! Even small-medium businesses do not make up as great of a percentage as this contributor type does on the Liberal chart (ie. 31% Conservative vs. 50% Liberal). The bulk, and I do mean bulk of contributions to the Conservatives in 2003 were made by individuals like you and me (63%). I would argue that this figure most accurately represents the ‘purity’ of a party as the Conservatives truly represent the electorate.

Let’s take a look at the NDP…

A whopping 62% of NDP contributions come from trade unions! “Union whores” perhaps? “Big Labour” and “Big Unions” are definately at the controls of the NDP! The only redeeming aspect is that the NDP has a greater proportion of contributions from individuals than the Liberals. However, the proportion of contributions from individuals is less than half of the parallel proportion of the Conservatives (31% NDP, 63% Conservatives).

The next time that someone tells you that the Conservatives are controlled by the corporations, show them these figures. Tell them to take a closer look.

That should settle the debate.

(Aside – the total amounts collected by party in 2003 were Liberal: $21,811,746.65, CA/PC (Conservative): $7,725,072.51, and NDP: $7,761,588.18)

Update: Ok, we’re corporate whores too (albeit less so), but check out the NDP!

Looks like I jumped the gun a little on displaying Mike Brock’s infographic as the truth, but in his defence, it was a result more of poor methodology than deceit. Mike took the numbers from 2003 and 2004 and put them together. The Conservative Party didn’t largely exist until 2004 and thus Mike should have added up the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative numbers. I’ve done that below. Further, bill C-24 limited individual and corporate contributions for 2004. So, I’ve done the numbers for 2003 and I’ve presented them below.

After my own research, these are the numbers that I came up with:

Liberal Party of Canada top donors.

$2,974,341.20 55555 Inc. (Paul Martin Leadership Fund)
$172,781.14 Canadian National Rail Company (Corporation)
$148,257.17 Bombardier (Corporation)
$135,889.00 Grant Forest Products (Corporation)
$111,750.50 Bell Canada (Corporation) (Including BCE and Bell Globemedia)
$106,055.65 Kruger Inc. (Corporation)
$105,892.00 EnCana Corporation (Corporation)
$104,726.70 SNC-Lavalin (Corporation)
$100,000.00 Donald Meehan (Individual)
$95,000.00 Power Corporation (Corporation)

Conservative Party of Canada top donors:

$91,703.9 Scotiabank (Corporation)
$70,976.64 Magna International (Corporation)
$45,000 Power Corporation (Corporation)
$41,015.34 Bank of Montreal (Corporation)
$59,655.79 Bell Canada (including BCE and Bell Globemedia) (Corporation)
$35,404.10 Telus Corporation (Corporation)
$28,359.02 McCarthy Tétrault (Corporation)
$25,000 CanWest Global Communications Corporation (Corporation)
$22,820.00 Canadian Alliance Lethbridge Constituency Association (Non-profit organization)
$20,000.00 George Weston (Individual)

and… holy crap, check out the NDP…

New Democratic Party top donors:

$909,775.00 CEP (Trade Union)
$775,919.60 UFCW Canada (Trade Union)
$823,289.60 CAW (Trade Union)
$374,789.68 CUPE (Trade Union)
$791,064.34 USWA (Trade Union)
$252,619.60 OPSEU (Trade Union)
$219,440.00 Canadian Labour Congress (Trade Union)
$205,900.00 IAM & AW (Trade Union)
$159,850.00 SEIU (Trade Union)
$105,246.40 Ontario Eng Catholic Teacher’s Association (Trade Union)

So, whenever somebody tells you that the Conservatives are influenced too much by “Big Business”, show them that the Liberals receive significantly more in cold cash contributions from corporations. Also, look at the NDP numbers. “Big Unions” have a significantly greater political influence on the NDP than “Big Business” ever had on the Liberals or Conservatives. A substantial problem is that as a union member, one doesn’t have much control over which political party to which their union dues are donated. As a corporate shareholder, however, one can always sell their shares.