I just noticed that Elections Canada has now published the spending limits for registered political parties running candidates in the four by-elections.

The limits are set according to an arithmetic formula, based on the number of electors on the list in each riding, the indexing factor in effect, and the number of candidates being endorsed by a given party across the 4 by-election ridings (see the Elections Canada fact-sheet for a detailed explanation).

We can figure out how much each riding contributes to the total limit, by doing some subtraction using the smaller parties who are only running in 1 or 2 ridings. The candidate preliminary spending limits were already announced earlier in the campaign.

	NWC, BC	'Chlag, QC	MIKR, QC	CCMV, NS
Electors on List	82,226	78,260	77,886	67,789
Regis. Party Limit ($)	$72,004.43	$68,847.53	$68,204.77	$59,362.83
Prelim. Cand. Limit ($)	$89,079.96	$86,734.83	$86,257.35	$86,242.26

This breaks down by party as follows (also shown in the top table on this database page):

	Lib, NDP, Grn, Cons	BQ	CHP	CPC-ML, neoRhino.ca
# of Candidates	4 ea.	2 (both QC)	1 (CCMV)	1 ea. ('Chlag)
Regis. Party Limit ($)	$268,419.56	$137,052.30	$59,362.83	$68,847.53
Prelim. Cand. Limit ($)	$348,314.40	$172,992.18	$86,242.26	$86,734.83

Parties report their by-election spending on Part 3a of their annual returns. Looking at the returns from 2007, for example, we see that, given a registered party spending limit of $171,997:

• the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party spent nothing centrally on the 3 Québec 2007 by-elections, while
  
• the Conservatives spent $158,146.65: largely in Roberval – Lac-Saint-Jean ($75,989.64) and Saint-Hyacinthe – Bagot ($81,789.05), with just $367.96 spent in Outremont
• the Liberals spent 78,832.03, mostly all in Outremont ($75,042.03), while
• the NDP spent $21,003.31, which was evenly split across the 3 ridings.

As this demonstrates, unlike candidates, the parties are under no obligation to distribute their spending across the by-election ridings equally, or to stay under the allotment based on a riding's population in their spending on that riding. In fact, a party might be at an advantage if it were only targetting certain of the by-election seats, and could focus all their central resources on them, as compared with a party that targets and therefore spends equally in each one. In the case of the 2007 Québec by-elections, the Conservatives picked up a seat for all their targetted spending, and nearly picked up another. On the other hand, central spending alone did not help keep Outremont in Liberal hands that time.

In other by-election news, Advanced Voting starts this Friday.

Labels: Election Expenses, Nov 9 2009 By-elections