How Many Riding Associations Does Each Party Have?
By the end of Friday May 29, each "registered association" of a party in a riding must file its annual financial statements for 2008 with Elections Canada in order to comply with s.403.35(4) of the Elections Act.
In preparation for these filings, I've been downloading the earlier filings in order to enter them into the Pundits' Guide database. As a first step, I compiled basic stats on the prevalence of organized riding associations by Party, across the previous reportable years.
A couple of observations:
In preparation for these filings, I've been downloading the earlier filings in order to enter them into the Pundits' Guide database. As a first step, I compiled basic stats on the prevalence of organized riding associations by Party, across the previous reportable years.
Prevalence of Registered Association (aka Riding Association) Returns, by Party, Province and Year, 2004-2007
| YT | NT | NU | BC | AB | SK | MB | ON | QC | NB | NS | PE | NL | All | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lib | 2007 2006 2005 2004 | 1 1 1 1 | 1 1 1 1 | 1 1 1 1 | 36 36 36 36 | 26 28 28 28 | 14 14 14 14 | 14 14 14 14 | 104 104 106 106 | 74 75 75 75 | 10 10 10 9 | 11 11 11 11 | 4 4 4 4 | 7 7 7 7 | 303 306 308 308 | |
| NDP | 2007 2006 2005 2004 | 1 1 1 1 | 1 1 1 1 | 36 36 36 36 | 28 28 28 28 | 14 14 14 14 | 14 14 14 14 | 106 106 105 106 | 73 69 58 43 | 10 10 8 7 | 11 11 11 11 | 4 4 4 4 | 7 7 7 7 | 306 301 287 272 | ||
| Grn | 2007 2006 2005 2004 | 1 | 1 1 1 | 22 19 18 17 | 14 8 2 1 | 5 1 | 6 5 1 1 | 79 75 72 59 | 26 15 10 4 | 4 1 1 | 11 1 | 2 1 1 | 1 | 172 125 106 84 | ||
| BQ | 2007 2006 2005 2004 | 58 56 55 48 | 58 56 55 48 | |||||||||||||
| Cons | 2007 2006 2005 2004 | 1 1 1 1 | 1 1 1 | 35 36 36 36 | 28 28 28 28 | 14 14 14 14 | 14 14 14 14 | 106 106 106 106 | 73 75 75 75 | 10 10 9 9 | 11 11 11 11 | 4 4 4 4 | 7 7 7 7 | 304 307 306 305 | ||
A couple of observations:
- The Liberals were the only party to have a registered riding association in Nunavut over the four years.
- The Liberals' missing Alberta ridings in 2007 were Edmonton East and Calgary East. Their missing Ontario ridings were Mississauga – Streetsville (both 2006 and 2007), which I assume may have had something to do with the floor-crossing and subsequent investigation and election spending charges against former Liberal M.P. Wajid Khan and their associated complications for the Liberal riding association; along with Willowdale in 2006 and Pickering – Scarborough East in 2007, for neither of which I have any guesses at possible explanations. Their missing Québec ridings were Alfred-Pellan (2004 to 2007), and Abitibi – Baie-James – Nunavik – Eeyou in 2007. Finally, Beauséjour, NB did not file a return in 2004.
- Outside of Québec and New Brunswick, the NDP has been able to maintain riding associations in virtually every riding except Nunavut, as mentioned above, and Nipissing – Timiskaming, ON which did not file a return in 2005.
- Meanwhile, since 2004, the number of NDP riding associations in New Brunswick and Québec has grown steadily to the point that New Brunswick is now fully covered, and only Gaspésie – Îles-de-la-Madeleine and Portneuf – Jacques-Cartier are missing from Québec in 2007.
- Indeed counterintuitively the NDP now has more riding associations from Québec registered with Elections Canada than does the Bloc. Same goes for both the Liberals and Conservatives.
- The number of Green Party associations (they call them Electoral District Associations, or EDAs for short) has more than doubled in the four years from 2004 to 2007 from 84 to 172, although they have some weaker areas of the country (the Atlantic provinces outside of Nova Scotia, and the Prairies), and still only cover about one-third of Québec ridings.
- The Bloc Québécois appears to targets its local riding association organizational efforts to the ridings it realistically has a chance ever to win, which appears to be why they show no more than 58 associations out of 75 ridings in Québec.
- The Conservative Party, which was only formed in late 2003 by means of a merger between the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, had the benefit of each founding partner's regional riding strengths, and as expected shows nearly perfect coverage across the country over the past 4 years, with the exceptions of Nunavut, as mentioned above, Madawaska – Restigouche, NB in the years 2004 and 2005 and the riding of Richmond, BC for some reason in 2007.
Labels: Party Finance, Riding Associations
posted by The Pundits' Guide at
9:42 PM
6 Comments:
It would appear that a few years back the NDP made a decision to make sure those last few dozen ridings have at least some kind of organization.
I've always valued working on riding organizations, but never been clear what the actual value is of making sure there is a registered EDA, even if there is no activity to it.
The other interesting sidenote is that except during elections and pre-election periods the federal NDP does not have its own organizers in the field [leaving that to the provincial sections]. So I am guessing that some time was taken during those periods to fill out the registered EDA list.
A modest commitment, but still interesting considering how the payoff for the election in question would be nil.
This will be an interesting series. I wonder what kind of generalised information about local organizations, and their impact can be derived from the financials, and raw data in these filings?
The work you do is excellent. I only wish that EC would enforce standardized reporting requirements, so as to make comparisons easier. I guess they did their job when they made the data public, but it sure is hard to run comparisons when every Financial agent can get creative in naming their accounts, and categorizing their spending.
I would think that comparisons will have to stick to things like net assets, and contributions.
Its not just the poor standardization of the spending categories- its also how differently the roles played by the EDAs. Some get lots of transfers, some get none.
One word of advice: don't be tempted to include "fundraising" in with contributions. I've seen too much funny business in EDAs around fundraising and fundraising expenses. As noted, the EDA can be used as a shell for someone else getting contributions, but at least there are controls on what is a contribution and how they can be procurred.
At the aggregate level, average of net assets of the parties EDAs is going to show something. As is the amount of contributions they get.
Even there I can think of a couple of anomalies that are going to skew things a lot.
In general, amount of contributions raised by EDAs is going to a good indicator of organizational strength. While spending can be somewhat more of an artifice of transfers in [and even of money moving out].
But there are two monkey wrenches for that. One is the practice, over how many years I do not know, of using the EDAs as a shell for the Quebec wing of the federal party to fudraise. The several million dollars involved is going to have a big impact on Liberal EDA contribution averages for paricular years, and for aggragting years.
To a lesser degree there are similar anomolays in the GPC. Central Nova has been used as a national fundraising machine for May's campaign that parallels and feeds off the national membership. And there are at least a couple other Green EDAs with unusual amounts of contributions that don't show up in conventional spending for a campaign or EDA.
The other issue is how many fewer GPC EDAs have any activity level. All the parties are on a continuum as to how many of their EDAs have anything more than trivial expenses- but this might be more of a problem for getting anything out of the data when it comes to the GPC.
Hello Ken, Are you saying that the payoff for organizing an EDA is nil, or just that doing so during an election period would have nil payoff for the organizer? I was a bit confused.
Obviously, we want to look at more data than just the count of registered EDAs, but assembling that information first was a precondition for me to collect the rest of the financial data.
BGB, I plan to track the data in:
* Part 2e ("Summary of Contributions, Loans and Transfers Received", similar to Part 2i of the old returns)
* Part 3a ("Statement of Transfers to a Registered Party, Another Registered Association, a Candidate, a Leadership Contestant or a Nomination Contestant"), and
* Part 4 ("Association's Financial Statements")
... but also to break down the number and amount of contributions by the size categories from Part 2a (<=$20, <=$200, and >$200).
Also, by knowing the ID of the return, I will be able to recreate a link to the original detailed return at the Elections Canada site, so people can look up more details for themselves. The structure of those returns looks pretty standard to me, so I'm not sure what you mean about creativity in naming accounts and spending categories, so could you enlighten me a bit more on what you meant?
Ken, as to your second point, I take your point about not lumping the "Contributions" line items together with the "Fundraising Activities" line item.
I plan on looking at the ridings' annual net worth (raw, and as a percent of the spending limit), and their number and amount of all contributions and those of $200 and less (both raw, and the latter as a percent of the spending limit) as three measures of how well they're doing. I'll also be looking at transfers in and out, but until I eyeball the raw data, I'm not sure how I'll summarize those figures into one or more metrics. It's going to be quite a lot of work to assemble all that data, however!
Thanks folks for reading and commenting.
I plan on looking at the ridings' annual net worth (raw, and as a percent of the spending limit), and their number and amount of all contributions and those of $200 and less (both raw, and the latter as a percent of the spending limit) as three measures of how well they're doing. I'll also be looking at transfers in and out, but until I eyeball the raw data, I'm not sure how I'll summarize those figures into one or more metrics. It's going to be quite a lot of work to assemble all that data, however!
Given the amount of work I would definitely do the thing with transfers last. Transfers [both in and out] get used in SO many ways, I don't know what the data would show.
I think the first two items you mentioned would aggregate data that is sufficiently standardised in its usage.
Having metrics for each EDA will be interesting.
If you want to aggregate the EDA metrics for comparing the parties, there will be that substantial anomolay of the Quebec wing of the LPC using the EDAs as a flow through for contributions.
Even if the 'net worth' of an EDA is a rather blunt metric, it should not be effected by as many artifices and anomalays, so might be better for making comparisons that aggregate the EDA metrics.
I explained my comment about the payoff of organizing EDAs to 'fill out' the list of 308 ditricts.
But the dog ate it, and there wasn't much to the comment, so I'm not going to write it again.
Apologies from the dog.
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