Pundits' Guide

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Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff will be able to test his new approach and the majoritarian reach of his "big red tent" in up to four different by-election ridings this fall, but there could be one less vote for the long-gun registry on September 22.  Here's why.

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe has been patiently waiting for his largely absent M.P. from Haute-Gaspésie – La Mitis – Matane – Matapédia, QC, Jean-Yves Roy, to step down, in light of Roy's announcement last year that he wouldn't run in the next election, and the subsequent nomination of economics professor Jean-François Fortin to replace him as their local candidate.  And indeed Roy indicated earlier this spring that his health might not allow him to complete his term.

However, with summer drawing to a close, a by-election window about to close, and being pressed yet again on the question during a recent visit to Rimouski, Duceppe has taken the virtually unprecedented step of publicly calling on his own M.P. to make a decision on his future soon, or else start fulfilling his duties as an M.P. "with rigour and professionalism", according to a Radio-Canada story from yesterday that has yet to be picked up by the english-language media.  [Indeed, it only showed up in my own Google Alert two hours ago.]

The issue did not escape the notice of the Prime Minister's Communications Director, Dimitri Soudas, however, who tweeted the story out yesterday, saying that "Les gens de Haute-Gaspésie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapédia méritent mieux qu'un député qui parle à son chef par voie de communiqué !" (basically, the people of the riding deserve better than an M.P. who talks to his own leader via a news release).  The Conservatives may have recently approached the prefect of Haute-Gaspésie to run for them, and he was seen in the company of Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu in Ste-Anne-des-Monts several days ago, according to blogger "LeCartable".

But the party with the most to prove in any upcoming by-election in that riding is the Liberals, who surprisingly came within 616 votes of winning it in 2008, due partly perhaps to Roy's low profile, but also largely to the popularity of their local candidate Nancy Charest.  Charest was renominated early, but made national news for some injudicious remarks about leader Michael Ignatieff at a fall cocktail party fundraiser last year also attended by her mentor, the by-then-resigned Québec lieutenant Denis Coderre.  Charest subsequently clarified the remarks, but left no doubt as to her personal support for Coderre either, and according to one Twitter source, Coderre is visiting the riding again on September 13 himself.

Certainly Soudas' interest in the seat is quite clear on two fronts:

1. In the first place, Roy voted against Bill C-391 at second reading last fall, and a resignation the week of September 13 subtracts one more vote from the forces who support the motion to not further proceed with the bill.  The September 13 date is key, because Conservative M.P. Inky Mark has already indicated his intention to resign on September 15, and Duceppe presumably wants the chance to run his young new star candidate in a by-election, rather than contend with graver questions about his incumbent MP's attendance in a general election.  As we've pointed out before, the clock is running out on a fall by-election call for Winnipeg North, and thus the window to include Roy's riding in the set of by-elections is short.  And Duceppe has clearly been making Fortin's candidacy one of his top travel priorities over the past year and a half.
2. But in the second place, the Conservatives might believe they could improve on their standing there, as it's two seats over from Montmagny – L'Islet – Kamouraska – Rivière-du-Loup, QC which they snatched away from the Bloc in a surprise upset during last fall's by-elections.  More than one commenter pointed to weaker support for the long-gun registry in that riding as being one factor in the Conservative victory there, although their financial investment in upgrading the highway, along with a strong local candidate with municipal experience, are more often credited for the win.

So, the four by-election ridings (with an Election Day likely some time between November 1 and December 6, but I would guess most probably on Monday, November 8) are likely to be:

• Haute-Gaspésie – La Mitis – Matane – Matapédia, QC – a rural Québec riding, currently held by a Bloc M.P. who is being called on by his leader to do his job or step down soon, and who won by a margin of less than 2% over the Liberals in 2008, but where the Conservatives placed second in 2006 with nearly 30% of the vote.
• Vaughan, ON – a suburban seat north of Toronto being vacated by a long-standing Liberal M.P., but with a medium-term history of sending conservative and independent M.P.s to Ottawa (I'm thinking Tony Roman in the 1980s), and where the just-retired OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino is being heavily courted to run for the Conservatives in a seat where the Liberals have yet to organize a nomination meeting to replace retiring M.P. Maurizio Bevilacqua.
• Winnipeg North, MB – a core urban seat in western Canada, with typically the strongest or second-strongest NDP vote share in its caucus, where the party is running a first nations candidate, the Conservatives are running the same candidate who took them into second place last time, and the Liberals are running a popular area MLA in a bid to regain their standing there, and
• Dauphin – Swan River – Marquette, MB – a rural seat in Manitoba, the popularity of whose departing but independent-minded Conservative M.P. might obscure the contours of the forthcoming contest, although the Conservatives would have to be considered the strong frontrunners and are the only major party to have their candidate in place.

Two urban, two rural.  Two central canadian, two western canadian.  One french, three english.  One Bloc, one Liberal, one NDP, one Conservative.

Four seats, one big experiment.  Let's see how it plays out.

Veteran Conservative M.P. Inky Mark, who already announced last year that he would not run for re-election, has decided to step up his schedule and resign as a Member of Parliament effective September 15, 2010, in order to run for the mayor's job in Dauphin, Manitoba, the Winnipeg Sun reported earlier today.

[See below for update relating to other MPs.]

Assuming the Prime Minister knew this was a possibility, it certainly explains why we didn't have a by-election call before now in already-vacant seat of Winnipeg North.

• A resignation date of Wednesday, September 15, 2010 means that the earliest the Prime Minister could call a by-election  in Dauphin – Swan River – Marquette, MB would be 11 days later, on Sunday, September 26.  An election called on that date would fall on or after Monday, November 1.
• The last day to call the Winnipeg North, MB by-election (as we noted last week) is on Wednesday, October 27, which would put its Election Day on or after Monday, December 6.

So, assuming the Prime Minister believes it would be ideal to call the two Manitoba by-elections together, we could expect to see the call come sometime between the end of September and the end of October, for a date sometime in November, or perhaps early December.  The House of Commons is adjourned the week of Monday, November 8 for the Remembrance Day break, so that particular Monday is certainly one very likely possibility for Election Day.

The Conservatives acclaimed naturalist Robert Sopuck to run in Mark's place this past October, and the Green Party's Kate Storey has been in place since the March before that.  However, the only other parties to ever hold the seat (the Liberals for a term in 1993 against two conservative parties, and the NDP for a term in 1980) have yet to name their candidates for the forthcoming contest.

Interestingly, I just had an email the other week from a Dipper who argued that Inky Mark's popularity as an incumbent masked the fact that, but for his huge margins, the Dauphin seat would naturally have been the higher NDP priority over Selkirk – Interlake, MB which has shown some closer races in recent years.  My correspondent noted that the NDP holds 2 of the 4-and-a-bit provincial constituencies within its boundaries, including the Swan River seat represented by Deputy Premier Rosann Wowchuk.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's summer bus tour has already been through Manitoba, and is scheduled to do a swing through BC, followed by the Québec south shore, eastern townships, and rural Nova Scotia, on its way to the summer caucus retreat in Baddeck, NS.  The NDP's caucus retreat is scheduled for Regina, SK, which is a bit closer.  Both parties now have around a month to do some high-powered candidate search and tour plans for the Dauphin riding; and given that they've been running neck-and-neck with each other in opposition to Inky Mark over the years, it will no doubt fall to local organization, candidate strength, and historical voting patterns to determine who has the upper hand.  Certainly the NDP has been running second to Mark over the past three elections, but as little as 2.5 points ahead of the Liberals, and in spite of a poorly-funded effort under new candidate Ron Strynadka in 2008.

Now, would a double-barrel, urban-rural set of Manitoba by-elections constitute a proxy for the popularity of the country's currently longest-serving provincial NDP government and its new premier, or as a popularity contest for the federal Harper Conservative government, or would it simply reflect the typical urban-rural voting patterns that prevail across the prairie provinces?

Well, unless we see any more M.P.s step down and join their seats into a late fall set of by-elections, I guess we're going to find out soon enough.  Thanks to commenter TrueBloo in the previous post for bringing this clipping to our attention.

UPDATE: A Twitter follower is reminding me that Vaughan, ON Liberal M.P. Maurizio Bevilacqua is believed to be actively preparing a run for mayor of Vaughan.  That being the case, he has until 2 PM Friday, September 10 (municipal nomination day) to resign his seat for a municipal run, according to Ontario provincial legislation.  A resignation on that date would also dovetail with the timeline hypothesized above.

[Reprinted with kind permission of the Globe and Mail online.]

[UPDATE:  I inadvertantly transposed two rather significant words in the text.  Apologies to any readers who were rightfully confused by its original presentation.]

Expanding the Debate on Party Financing

A look at all four sources of revenue shows the Bloc Québécois is less dependent on public subsidies than many of its critics charge

Alice Funke
Special to The Globe and Mail

Many observers of Canadian political parties have relied on just two of the four sources of income, as Jeffrey Simpson did Wednesday when comparing a party’s revenue from central fundraising and from the public per-vote subsidy that has been paid since 2004.

However, using a dataset that includes all four revenue sources – riding association and candidate fundraising, as well as party fundraising and the public subsidy – paints a somewhat different picture, particularly in the case of the Bloc Québécois.

Party fundraising and the subsidy payments are relatively easy to compile from the Elections Canada website, and are reported quarterly. Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, they receive the greatest attention in the popular press. However riding association fundraising is only reported annually (and was not reported at all prior to 2004), and assessing its value requires a tabulation of over 1,000 returns each year. Similarly, candidate fundraising is reported once per election period, often as much as a year later in its final form. Sixteen hundred and one candidates ran in the 2008 general election.

In the hopes of expanding the debate on the financial health of political parties and the best public policy to pursue in regulating and reporting on their sources of income, PunditsGuide.ca has completed a full review of 2008 candidate fundraising and expenditures, along with an up-to-date tabulation of riding association fundraising for the period 2004-2009, for The Globe and Mail’s online readers.

The chart below shows the four sources of party revenue as a percentage of their total revenue, with the subsidy depicted as the solid part at the top of each bar, the central party fundraising at the bottom, followed by riding fundraising. Candidate fundraising appears as the checkered part of the bars in election years only (including by-elections).

[Click on image to open a full-sized version]

We see that in every year reported, fundraising by Bloc Québécois riding associations exceeded that by its party headquarters. Certainly the subsidy remained a significant portion of the party’s revenues, but not to the extent estimated by most observers to date (in the range of 53-70 per cent, rather than 76-87 per cent). Rather than raising $1 for every $3.5 in subsidy payments, the ratio becomes 1 to 2 in 2009, for example.

Moreover, as I’ve written elsewhere, the Bloc’s quarterly filings reveal the establishment of a monthly pre-authorized contribution program by party headquarters in late 2008, almost certainly designed to respond to and survive any attempt by the current government to reverse the subsidy in future, and whose impact can be seen in the return of their central party fundraising to 2004 levels.

The Conservative Party’s pattern of fundraising meanwhile is completely the reverse of the Bloc’s, wherein it obtains proportionately higher fundraising proceeds centrally than it does in the ridings.

The starting point for most of the recent debates about the subsidy’s role has been the proportion of registered parties’ revenue accounted for by public per-vote payments. This metric is invoked to argue that one party might be more dependent on the subsidy than another, that one party might be less deserving of a public subsidy than another by virtue of its raison d’être, or that one or more parties might be more likely to disappear (to the alleged benefit of other parties) were the subsidy to be eliminated.

But when we look at the combined effect of all four revenue sources, the picture that emerges is of one party (the Bloc Québécois) that is significantly less more dependent on the subsidy (if dependency can even be defined as the percentage of its revenues), one significantly more less reliant on the subsidy (the Conservative Party), and three for whom it represents a more-or-less significant minority share of its revenue (the Liberals, NDP and Greens). The subsidy represented 66.7 per cent of total Bloc revenues in 2009, 56.1 per cent of the Greens’ income, 49.8 per cent for the NDP, 36.7 per cent for the Liberals, and 31.4 per cent for the Conservatives. Those percentages variously represent the high or low watermarks for each party over the past six years.

The latest proposals to eliminate the subsidy and replace it with a different regime originated in June from various wings of the Liberal Party, in response partly to some recent work by Professor Tom Flanagan and his then-student David Coletto, but also to present an alternative to the proposed post-election coalition discussions. Championed by such Liberal bloggers as Jeff Jedras, Dan Arnold and others, the new regime would see the subsidy eliminated and replaced by higher contribution limits, and even a return of corporate contributions in some variants of the proposal.

We should be honest enough to say that those Liberals are proposing a regime that best fits their relative advantages and disadvantages in the fundraising realm. And why not, when the Conservatives clearly intend to eliminate the subsidy as a way of enhancing their own, opposite advantages. Or when, supported by the NDP, the Conservatives moved to reduce the contribution caps to $1,000 from $5,000 several years ago.

But if we go too far down the road of allowing the victor to create the rules, that’s the most anti-democratic outcome of all. Whatever one might believe about the merits of public funding of political parties, the fact remains that prime minister Jean Chrétien introduced it unilaterally, thus violating a longstanding convention that the parties in the House of Commons would collectively establish rules they could all agree on, a rule that was still in effect as late as the 2000 Elections Act amendments.

The second element I hope people will consider is the importance of establishing a principled basis for making those rules, rather than picking some solutions that appear to have a short-term benefit for their own party but might later be found to have altogether different consequences. No doubt Mr. Chrétien believed he was promoting greater democracy by “keeping big money out of politics”, but he did not perhaps fully anticipate the impact it would have on his own party.

A number of Liberals who now argue (quite brazenly in some cases) that eliminating the subsidy would eliminate the smaller parties who are currently their most pesky competition, ought to take a second to examine more closely how, if at all, their own dependency on the subsidy differs from that of other parties. Eyeballing it as a proportion of revenues, it does not seem significantly different from the NDP’s over the same period of time.

Moreover, revenue is not the only part of the equation. It might be worth asking whether the other political parties have the same cost structures as the Liberals, who operate separate national and provincial-territorial associations, or whether they in fact have lower overhead. Several have survived on shoestrings before, the New Democrats in particular surviving the loss of official party status for a four-year term. The NDP was able to survive and rebuild without the subsidy; the Liberals who advocate eliminating the subsidy now should ensure they would truly be able to do the same.

Meantime, others in the press who have recently argued that excising three-quarters of its revenue would remove the Bloc’s incentive for “laziness”, as was stated in a recent Sun Media editorial, cannot have closely studied its true financial situation.

The Bloc raises enough at the riding and candidate level each year alone to run fully funded campaigns after the candidate rebates, and yet it is able to win fully two-thirds of the province’s seats spending on average less than two-thirds of the limit in each constituency. Combining the riding-level surplus with its central fundraising would still allow that party to adequately finance its central campaign, after the central rebate is taken into account. We also know it costs significantly less to run a campaign across a single province in a single language than it does to run a national and bilingual one.

So to summarize, whether you are a libertarian who does not believe in any public funding of the political process or limits on money in politics, a radical federalist who believes we should not be subsidizing institutional separatism, or a devotee of the internationally-renowned Canadian philosopher C.B. Macpherson who argued that a democratic polity is the best counterbalance to an undemocratic economy and requires party financing rules that ensure the widest possible participation in our democratic process, carry on the debate.

But, now you can do so with the benefit of a more complete dataset. And please try to take a longer and principled view.

Alice Funke is a database specialist and computer-assisted reporting consultant who runs PunditsGuide.ca

Party Revenue, by Source, by Year 2004-2009

NOTE: These data are as collected up to August 11, 2010. A few riding association returns have yet to either be filed or appear on the Elections Canada website. Here is the count of riding returns included in the dataset above:

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The window has closed for the Prime Minister to call a by-election for the vacant seat of Winnipeg North, MB in time for the scheduled return of the House of Commons.

Federal elections must be held either on a Monday, or on the Tuesday following a statuatory holiday, and must last at least 36 days.  The last date to call a by-election for Monday, September 13 was Sunday, August 8.  The Commons returns from its summer adjournment on Monday, September 20.

Prime Minister Harper has until October 27 to call the by-election, which became necessary after the Friday, April 30 resignation of long-time NDP M.P. Judy Wasylycia-Leis in order to run for Mayor of Winnipeg.

But that municipal election, which is also slated to occur on October 27 after a five-week campaign, is imposing some extra scheduling constraints on the by-election.  The closer to September 20 Mr. Harper gets in calling the by-election, the more overlap there will be between the minimum five-week by-election campaign and the municipal election.

While concurrent elections are not completely unprecedented, in this case there's an additional factor for the Conservative Party.  All four major political parties have had their candidates in place since the end of June, but the daughter of Conservative candidate Ray Larkin, the party's national councillor for Manitoba Marni Larkin, is also managing the mayoralty campaign of Wasylycia-Leis' opponent, incumbent mayor Sam Katz.  Assuming Ms. Larkin would want to play any significant role in her father's federal campaign, she would likely not be available full-time until the municipal campaign concluded.

If Mr. Harper decides to wait until the end of his 180 day window and calls the by-election on October 27, Election Day would fall no earlier than Monday, December 6, although it could certainly be set for later than that.

It is surprising that the by-election was not called before now, given that its scheduling would then have resulted in the least overlap with the Parliamentary session and Winnipeg  municipal campaign.  Any by-election call coming between now and October 27 will result in at least some overlap with the municipal campaign.  And a call on October 27 will leave the opposition benches one MP short during the fall sitting of the House of Commons.

Besides Ray Larkin, the other nominated by-election candidates are (in order of their nomination) John Harvie for the Green Party, Kevin Chief for the NDP, and Inkster MLA Kevin Lamoureux for the Liberals.

While most bad headlines did not appear to harm the Conservative Party's overall fundraising effort amongst its larger donors in the second quarter of 2010, a last minute drop of 35% and 45% in the final two weeks of the quarter from the prevous 4-week average followed the appearance of the "Fake Lake" story about the media centre at the G20 Toronto Summit and subsequent stories about government G8 spending in Parry Sound – Muskoka, ON.

The four weeks from May 23, 2010 to June 19, 2010 saw an average of $119,611 raised from contributors giving more than $200 during the quarter, but the week of June 20 saw just $75,680 raised, and the following week's take dropped again to $63,985, a new Pundits' Guide analysis of weekly contributions by large donors has shown.

The G20 Summit and associated protests occurred on the weekend of June 26-28, however the news story about the $2 million dollar "Fake Lake" by Greg Weston, then of the SunMedia chain, first appeared on June 6.  It followed a story pegging security spending at $1 billion for the G20 summit in late May, and led to another series of stories starting on June 17 about allegedly unnecessary G8-related spending in the Muskoka-area riding of Industry Minister Tony Clement, which dominated much of the media coverage from Ottawa at the end of the end of the last Parliamentary session, along with stories about MPs rebuffing the Auditor-General's proposal to audit the operations of the House of Commons, and their expenses.  The House of Commons adjourned on Wednesday, June 23.

As we earlier noted, the government's late February budget coincided with a first-quarter spike in fundraising from the same category of contributors.  Meanwhile Liberal fundraising from large donors spiked at the end of every month, as their preauthorized monthly contributions were deposited, and also showed a large spike just after the dates of their annual Montréal and Toronto fundraising dinners on May 13 and 17 in the second quarter.  NDP donations from large contributors appear to have pulled back in the second quarter during that party's "Local Victories Challenge", which provided financial incentives for riding associations to raise large amounts of pre-election funds.

[Click on image to open a full-size version]

While it might be hypothesized that the June drop represented a typical slowdown leading into the summer, that was not always the pattern for the Conservative Party in previous years.  Indeed, outside of election campaign periods, and times of serious election scares, the party has been raising at or near 6-year weekly highs throughout most of 2010, dropping to a four-year weekly low during the last week of June.

Still, past experience would suggest that when an election beckons, the party's well-heeled supporters don't hesitate to step up to the plate.  The chart below shows Conservative fundraising by week, from large contributors only (the dates of small contributions are not reported), and uses the data from previous years' quarterly reports in order to be comparable against the first two quarters of 2010.  Weekly fundraising of $100K equates to approximately $5 million annually.

[Click on image to open a full-size version]

Turning to the cumulative distribution of contributions by size for the first half of the year, and comparing against the same analysis from this time last year, we see that while the Liberals are down in most size categories from last year, they are particularly down in the largest donation sizes.

As commenters to the last post stressed, the Liberal leadership convention was held in May of 2009, however they also held a number of fundraising dinners in the first two quarters of 2009, and of course Laurier Club members (those who contribute the annual maximum) are eligible to attend the convention for free.  Many donations representing the individual contribution limit were solicited in the first two quarters of 2009, meaning that those donors were effectively "tapped out" for the remainder of the year.  And indeed the final two quarters of 2009 did not represent any significant increase for that party over its performance in 2008.

On the other hand, the Liberals have been able to improve their take from small contributors in 2009 and 2010 over the levels regularly attained up to 2008.  That amount is down year-over-year for the first half of 2010 versus 2009, but still some 50% higher than in previous years.

The NDP meanwhile is up across all donation sizes from this time last year, although that shouldn't have been too hard, since it withdrew from fundraising solicitations during the first five months of 2009 in favour of their provincial cousins in BC and Nova Scotia.  Nonetheless, as mentioned above, this year's central fundraising was run concurrently with heavier riding fundraising than usual amongst NDP riding associations, a practice the party wants to encourage going forward.

For the Conservatives' part, they posted slight declines in most of the smaller and medium-sized categories over this time last year, but showed big gains in the amount raised from those giving the maximum.  Overall, they posted the best second quarter since 2006 this year, but in combination with a weaker first quarter, and the final two-week slide in large contributions at the end of June, they are still running at about par with this time last year (46% of their 2009 total raised), but are running behind their record year of 2008.

Cumulative distribution of donations and contributors by total donation, by party, first two quarters of 2010 (quarterly reports)

* <=$200 count includes counts reported to Elections Canada for both the categories “<=$200″ and “<=$20″ in each of the first three quarters; other counts calculated by totalling contributions for each donor (i.e., for each unique combination of firstname + middlename + lastname), and then counting by total contribution size for each donor.

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Last year's big push to catch up with the Conservatives' money-raising machine has fizzled out for the Liberals, as 2010 second quarter contributions increased slightly over the levels achieved under former leader Stéphane Dion in 2008, but fell to half of last year's thrice-announced second quarter total, after Leader Michael Ignatieff appointed Rocco Rossi the party's National Director and chief fundraiser.  Rossi left the position last November to run for Mayor of Toronto.

The party reported $1.6M in contributions from April to June of 2010, down from $3.9M in the same period in 2009.  Although there was a slight increase in the number of donors of $200 and less (up from 14,781 in 2009-Q2 to 15,030 in 2010-Q2), the majority of the drop came in the number of large donors (down from 4,397 to just 2,034).

Their reported take from small donors was down, however, from $791K to $683K, while the haul from donors over $200 was responsible for most of the drop, down $3.1M to $926K.

On the other hand, the party does find itself about a million dollars ahead of where it was at the mid-year point of both 2007 and 2008.  Still, until I fully examine the details behind last year's accounting discrepancies between their quarterly and annual returns, we have to take these numbers as estimates that could be out by as much as $800K per quarter.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party increased its fundraising totals year over year, from just under $4M in the second quarter of 2009 to just over $4.1M in the same quarter in 2010.  However, they experienced another slip in the number and amount of small donations (down from 32,401 and $2.70M in 2009-Q2, to 31,374 and $2.68M in 2010-Q2), much as they did in the first quarter year over year comparisons, along with a corresponding hike in the number of larger donors (up from 2,813 and $1.25M in 2009-Q2, to 3,057 and $1.44M in 2010-Q2).

The Conservatives' fundraising performance over the first half of each calendar year has been on a slight decline, from hovering just below $10M in 2006 to just above $8M four years later.

The Green Party is doing better than its internal critics allege, continuing to show a steady increase in mid-year fundraising totals, after raising just under a quarter of a million dollars in 2010-Q2.

We'll take a more in depth look at the distribution of second quarter numbers later tonight.

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NDP Leader Jack Layton says "Canadians want a fall election" (video courtesy TheMarkNews.com).  But are the parties ready for one financially?  The 2nd quarter donor reports were due today, and we already have the numbers from Layton's party as well as the Bloc Québécois.

At $712K, the NDP matched and slightly beat their 2nd quarter of 2009, even though as they point out they booked about a third of their 2009 convention revenue in Q2 last year.  Still, the party also withdrew from direct fundraising appeals for the first five months of 2009, only resuming on June 10, as party national director Brad Lavigne told the Hill Times last year [UPDATE: Link updated, thanks to a reader].  He said in the same story that the money came pouring in afterwards, so this was likely the result of convention revenue from the early-bird fees.

On the other hand, this year's Q2 result comes atop a very strong first quarter for the NDP in 2010, putting Layton's party ahead of where it was in 2009, although slightly behind their mid-year results in 2007-08.  And their donor counts are roughly the same by category as last year's Q2, save for the 200 anonymous donor count then (of an average donation of $1.75 each).

[Click on image to open up the NDP Finances page.]

Meanwhile, the Bloc Québécois is falling back a tiny bit from their 2009 showing, but still well ahead of their 2007-2008 performance.  They reported just under $72K in contributions, up slightly from 2009, but on top of a slightly weaker Q1.  I'm interpreting this to mean that their new monthly contribution program is now firmly in place, but not expanding significantly over last year.

[Click on image to open up the BQ Finances page.]

The Elections Canada financial returns website has been having periodic problems today, and is currently back down again.  However you can at least get the numbers at the Pundits' Guide Finances module here for now.  [RAPID UPDATE: It's back up again, again.]

The Conservative, Liberal and Green Party returns were not yet available at time of publication, but we'll cover them when they surface.

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The much-anticipated retirement announcements of Speaker Peter Milliken and Government House Leader Jay Hill now raise another interesting question: who could be next? A number of MPs with long service or other issues on their plate have also been tagged for potential retirement announcements. Here's my list of who else we could see retiring before the next election:

• Maurizio Bevilacqua, Liberal, Vaughan, ON – First elected in the 1988 general election, that was later declared void in his then-riding of York North, Bevilacqua had to be reelected in a special 1990 by-election in order to take his seat.  He is strongly rumoured to be running for Mayor of Vaughan and has a new website under development that doesn't feature the Liberal Party logo.  Retiring OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino is rumoured to be considering a run in Bevilacqua's riding north of Toronto, although for which party is not clear notwithstanding that the speculation has been leaning towards the government side.
• Louis Plamondon, Bloc Québécois, Bas-Richelieu – Nicolet – Bécancour, QC – The Dean of the House of Commons, he was first elected as a Conservative M.P. in 1984, but crossed the floor to be one of the founding caucus members of the Bloc Québécois.  They celebrated the 25th anniversary of his election in Richelieu last year, and I speculated at the time on whether that was a signal he might be ready to call it quits.  Particularly in light of the Conservatives' victory in nearby Montmagny – L'Islet – Kamouraska – Rivière-du-Loup, QC several months later, it could be a seat the Bloc will be in a fight to keep without him.
• Francine Lalonde, Bloc Québécois, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC – Many good wishes have been sent her way in her fight against cancer.  Arriving in Ottawa as part of the first elected Bloc Québécois caucus in 1993, she was a former ministerial aide from the first PQ government and activist in the Québec labour movement.
• Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON – First elected in 1993, we reported last summer that while he was prepared to run in a Fall 2009 election, any campaign occurring later than that would see him "rethink his priorities".  However, he remains amongst the top most-prolific speakers in the House.
• Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough – Rouge River, ON – First elected in 1988, he has already signed on as the legal counsel to a law firm.  However, both he and Szabo did attend Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's bus tour event in Cobourg last week, and Lee also ranks in the top third of talkers in the Commons.
• Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville – Eastern Shore, NS – The popular host of the annual All-Party Party on Parliament Hill, Stoffer is rumoured to be interested in running for Mayor in the next Halifax municipal election, slated for the Fall of 2011.  Interestingly, the current Mayor of Halifax Peter Kelly was being poll-tested as a possible federal candidate in Halifax West riding (against NDP MP Megan Leslie, so either they got the riding name wrong or the incumbent's), and was later touted as a potential Conservative candidate in a Stephen Maher story in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald.  Meanwhile, Stoffer maintains that any future municipal run would have to wait, as he's planning to run in the next federal election.
• Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK – The former mayor of Moose Jaw, he took over as Conservative candidate on fairly short notice after the untimely death of former Conservative M.P. Dave Batters.  Since then, he has been rumoured not to be enjoying the job (albeit not by disinterested observers) and to be thinking of not running again.  Boughen is the second-oldest M.P. in the Chamber.
• Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB – He has been the target of both retirement rumours, and potential challenges to his nomination in the past.  But in fact it was his complaints amongst others which led to the Conservative Party's decision to hold a referendum amongst members to see which incumbents they would like to see fight for their renomination.  In spite of now having that nomination secured, he has been the fifth-quietest M.P., although his attendance record for votes is very good. (h/t the wonderful HowdTheyVote.ca for the talking and voting statistics).

Although I have no evidence on any of the following names, I would rate it as reasonably likely that we will see at least a few of the following MPs from the Class of 1993 step down as well:

• Garry Breitkruez, Conservative, Yorkton – Melville, SK
• Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary – Nose Hill, AB
• John Cummins, Conservative, Delta – Richmond East, BC
• John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC
• Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo – Prince George, BC

Another member of the Reform Party Class of 1993, Chuck Strahl from Abbotsford, BC, was diagnosed with mesothelioma (a lung cancer associated with exposure to asbestos) before the last election.  However, he is a very active distance runner, and appears outwardly to remain in very good health.  If he were to step down it would be for other reasons, although I don't see any evidence he's inclined that way.  In fact, he would make for an experienced replacement for Jay Hill as Government House Leader if he wanted the job, having served in that role in Opposition in the past. I would also add Leon Benoit, but he fought for his nomination during that referendum process, and won a contested nomination during the 2008 election, and seems interested in continuing.

The five oldest MPs in the House of Commons (in order) are:

• The oldest M.P. in the House of Commons is in fact Christian Ouellet (76), the Bloc Québécois member from Brome – Missisquoi, QC (not Jean-Yves Roy from Haute Gaspésie, as I erroneously reported earlier).  However, he was first elected in 2006, and last I read was intending to run again, although he has not yet been renominated.
• Ray Boughen (73), Conservative from Palliser, SK as mentioned above
• Gordon O'Connor (71), Conservative from Carleton – Mississippi Mills, ON
• Irwin Cotler (70), Liberal from Mount Royal, QC
• Yvon Lévésque (70), Bloc Québécois, from Abitibi – Baie-James – Nunavik – Eeyou, QC, who has been rumoured to be the target of a nomination challenge from the local FTQ organizer since last summer

Of the fifty-two Reform M.P.s who swept into Ottawa in the 1993 general election, just 11 were returned in the 2008 election (one as a Liberal).  Two of those 11 have now announced their retirements, as Government House Leader and Prince George – Peace River M.P. Jay Hill today joined Jim Abbott in stepping away from elected office.

As first reported by John Ivison last February when Abbott announced his retirement, Hill confirmed today that he would not be a candidate in the next election, saying "..the time to go is when things are still going well…".

This also makes him the seventh M.P. elected in the 2008 general election to announce their departure at the next election, and steps up speculation that an election may be coming sooner rather than later.  Hill's news release is now posted in full at CBC.ca, courtesy of Kady O'Malley.

There has been some speculation in British Columbia, though it's by no means universal, that former B.C. Liberal-turned-Independent MLA Blair Lekstrom would seek to replace Hill.  We earlier ran down the history here.

Of the seven MPs who've announced their retirement, and the four MPs who've already retired, four were from the Class of 1988:

• Dawn Black, from New Westminster – Coquitlam, BC
• Bill Casey, from Cumberland – Colchester – Musquodoboit Valley, NS
• Peter Milliken, from Kingston and the Islands, ON
• Greg Thompson, from New Brunswick Southwest, NB

four were from the Class of 1993

• Jim Abbott, from Kootenay – Columbia, BC
• Paul Crete, from Montmagny – L'Islet – Kamouraska – Rivière-du-Loup, QC
• Jay Hill, from Prince George – Peace River, BC
• Real Menard, from Hochelaga, QC

two are from the Class of 1997

• Rick Casson, from Lethbridge, AB
• Inky Mark, from Dauphin – Swan River – Marquette, MB

and the other from the Class of 2000 is currently the oldest MP in the House:

• Jean-Yves Roy, from Haute-Gaspésie – La Mitis – Matane – Matapédia, QC

Given the central role that Mr. Hill has played in the government as House Leader, his retirement is more likely to raise speculation of an imminent election call from the government side than others might be.

[Welcome National Newswatch readers!]

Fifteen of the wealthiest Conservative riding associations reported net assets over $150,000 in 2009, a new Pundits' Guide analysis of Electoral District Association financial returns has found.  The amounts range from 153% of their spending limit in the last election, to 293% of the limit.  Of course EDAs (also known as "riding associations") don't simply raise money for election campaigns: they can also spend money between elections or transfer it to other EDAs or party headquarters for example.

The single wealthiest riding association in the country at the end of 2009 belonged to Jason Kenney, long-time Conservative M.P. from Calgary Southeast, AB, who was able to win 74% of the vote in the last election without having to spend more than 41% of the maximum allowed.  His riding association was able to raise a further $110K this past year (equivalent to 105% of their spending limit), reaching $283,700 in net assets at the end of December.

Conservative associations dominate the list of wealthy EDAs, whether ranked by total net assets or by net assets as a percent of the spending limit for each riding.  Only two Liberal riding associations appear in the top 30: Halifax West, NS at $113K (139.5% of the limit there), and Haldimand – Norfolk, ON at $118K (138.7% of its limit).  The top NDP riding association was Ottawa Centre, ON at $109K or 118.5%, which ranked #32 by total net assets.

As reported by Tim Naumetz in a feature for the Hill Times last March, Conservative associations flush with cash, including Kenney's, Rob Anders' and the Prime Minister's, transferred surplus funds to less wealthy riding associations in 2007 and 2008.  Those same three ridings all appear in the 2009 top 30 wealthiest ridings list, as you can see below.

Note that the Conservative and Liberal riding associations in Haldimand – Norfolk, ON are both found in the Top 30, which should make for a vigourous fight next time between three-term Conservative M.P. Diane Finley and Bob Speller, the Liberal M.P. she defeated in 2004.  It also seems clear that the Conservatives have targeted the riding of Vancouver Quadra, BC again (home to the University of British Columbia, noted users of long-form census data … ahem).

Financial returns for the ridings of 76 Members of Parliament are still not posted on the Elections Canada website, but overall parties' bank balances have nearly returned to 2007 pre-election levels at the local level, and are at or ahead of where they were at an equivalent point in the election cycle (i.e., around the end of 2006).

As expected, the riding associations of incumbent MPs have a higher average net worth (expressed as the percent of their spending limit) than ones in non-incumbent ridings.  And of the latter group, ridings whose vote-share exceeded the minimum level required to qualify for an election expense rebate (currently 10% of the vote) report higher balances than the ridings whose vote-share fell below 10%.

[Click on chart to open full-sized version.]

The Electoral District Association financial returns were due at the end of May, and while the lion's share have now been submitted and posted to the Elections Canada website, some parties are further ahead than others.  Here are the latest figures (we last looked at them here):

• NDP :: 265 riding financial returns on file / 307 registered riding associations (86.3%)
• BQ :: 45 / 54 (83.3% complete)
• Cons :: 248 / 307 (80.8% complete)
• Grn :: 177 / 234 (75.6% complete)
• Lib :: 206 / 305  (67.5% complete)

Finally, the values for Average EDA Net Worth, Average EDA Net Worth as a Percent of the Riding Spending Limit, and the Number of EDA Returns Filed are all shown below, grouped by year, incumbency status at year-end, and candidate rebate eligibility for the last electoral event in each riding as at year-end.

It's interesting to note that the Bloc Québécois apparently has a policy of not maintaining registered electoral district associations in ridings where it did not obtain the rebatable threshold of the vote in the previous election.  We also see the impact of the Green Party's revenue-sharing agreement, whereby funds from the central subsidy payment were distributed to ridings: more than two-thirds of the Green Party riding associations raised less money locally than they received from the party transfer.  I'm not aware of any other party that hands over part of the subsidy to the ridings as a right, although my understanding is that Green Party headquarters was recently trying to halt the practice until their election debt was paid off.

Average EDA Net Worth as a Percent of the Riding Spending Limit and Number of Returns Filed, by year, incumbency status, and candidate rebate eligibility, 2004-2009 (last update July 18, 2010)