Further to my blogpost of the other week, "Measures of Election Readiness", John Ivison of the National Post asked me to crunch some numbers for him, some of which appear in his latest column.

Here is the full set of calculations:

Central party finance --

Please see here for my overview of the party balance sheets from 2000-2007, along with links to each original return at EC: http://www.punditsguide.ca/prty_balsheets.php. The new ones aren't due out until the end of June.

Party net worth as at the end of 2007:

Lib - $2,826,315
NDP - $4,732,990
Grn - $ 275,321
BQ - $ 478,885
Cons - $4,878,406

Total raised: Total raised 2008 + raised Q1-2009 + 6 quarterly subsidies rcvd*

Lib - $ 5,900,511.89 + $1,831,843.33 + $12,615,205 = $20,347,560.22
NDP - $ 5,466,434.84 + $ 595,611.16 + $ 7,495,557 = $13,557,603.00
Grn - $ 1,631,293.79 + $ 211,268.53 + $ 2,064,999 = $ 3,907,561.32
BQ - $ 713,415.22 + $ 122,842.03 + $ 4,432,913 = $ 5,269,170.25
Cons - $21,190,928.22 + $4,361,540.04 + $15,549,922 = $41,102,390.26

* - 3 Jan 2008 to 1 Apr 2009; next one due on July 1, 2009

Spent: Net spent 2008 campaign (spent less 50% rebate) + est. 2008 natl spending (based on 2007 spending):

Lib - $7,265,926.5 + $14,459,099 = $21,725,025.5
NDP - $8,406,945 + $ 7,652,812 = $16,059,757
Grn - $1,397,900 + $ 2,085,198 = $ 3,483,098
BQ - $2,439,802 + $ 1,322,315 = $ 3,762,117
Cons - $9,709,290 + $27,710,664 = $37,419,954

Estimated net worth = (2007 Net worth + Total raised - Spent)

Lib - $1,448,849.72
NDP - $2,230,836.00
Grn - $ 699,784.32
BQ - $1,985,938.25
Cons - $8,560,842.26

Riding Level Finance --

Average Riding Association Net Worth by Party, end of 2008, partial data

Lib - $8,615.46 (105 EDAs reporting so far)
NDP - $2,859.11 (135 EDAs reporting so far)
Grn - $1,212.19 (106 EDAs reporting so far)
BQ - $8,040.10 (36 EDAs reporting so far)
Cons - $21,532.02 (142 EDAs reporting so far)

Candidate Finance --

Estimated number of rebates issued out of candidate returns filed, 2008

Lib - 4/289 filed (307 candidates)
NDP - 47/299 filed (308 candidates)
Grn - 45/284 filed (303 candidates)
BQ - 23/75 filed (75 candidates)
Cons - 84/301 filed (307 candidates)

Don't forget that candidates apparently eligible for a rebate get 30% of their estimated rebate paid to them right away, then after they file their papers and the papers are reviewed, then they get the other 70%. See s.464 of the Act (here: http://tinyurl.com/o7hvbo).

Labels: Election Readiness, Party Finance

With Tuesday's second reading vote on Bill C-280, and forthcoming votes on the estimates and opposition day motions raising the temperature on end-of-session election scares, maybe it's a good time to think about indexes of election readiness and what we can glean from the available data.

Plenty of bloggers (e.g., Far and Wide, Calgary Grit, and ThreeHundredEight.com) already regularly read the entrails of public opinion surveys, and so I would not presume to cover that well-worn territory again here. But what other boots-on-the-ground indicators can we generate from Elections Canada and other data sources?

1. Nominations progress - This is one contribution my site can definitely make, since the parties themselves don't like to release candidate lists until nominations close during the campaign period and the Elections Canada database doesn't contain appointments or other candidate selection methods that did not entail a nomination meeting. The network of Pundits' Guide readers coupled with my set of Google news alerts, web surveys and blog browsing has proven to yield a fairly reliable set of data on party nominations.
   
   I've been tracking overall numbers of nominations, counts by gender, and nominations according to how that party placed in the last election (i.e., how many candidates have been nominated in seats the party came 2nd in last time, etc., see the "Search the Database" page, 2nd query under "Nominations Progress"). Another way I could report those data is to show the number of incumbent vs. non-incumbent nominations, and I may add that to the front page, as well as in a new Nominations Progress query on the Search page. And this time I'll also be able to track them according to the date the candidate was confirmed as well.
   
   
2. Central party finance - There has been a lot of interest in the relative fundraising capacities of the various parties and the strength of their balance sheets. Thus far I've just been covering that in the website blog, but I have been collecting the raw data and getting it ready to properly model in the relational Pundits' Guide database for reporting and querying here ... I only need a nice long uninterrupted stretch of time to finish off that work. We won't have the parties' 2008 financial statements until the end of June, so best guesses now would entail looking at the 2007 balance sheets for net current assets, adding the 2008 quarterly fundraising numbers, subtracting actual 2008 campaign expenses from the election returns filed a few months ago plus some kind of estimate for 2008 expenditures, and then repeating the same for the first two quarters of 2009.
   
   I'm told that the Conservatives are closely tracking their fundraising performance to identify any effects of either the recession or partisan disaffection with the government's spending plans. The Liberals have been actively spinning their fundraising efforts; for example they released their first quarter fundraising results before their convention last month. And the NDP engaged in a bit of pre-warning spin themselves in this week's Hill Times, given that their decision to withdraw from fundraising in favour of its provincial cousins engaged in leadership contests and election campaigns is now expected to negatively impact the second quarter of 2009 as well.
   
   I've been thinking that expressing a party's most recent net worth as a percentage of the national spending limit would be a good indicator of how ready it is in this department, but taking a look at the debt-to-equity ratio might also give us a good indication of how able they are to raise financing if required.
   
   
3. Riding level finance - Registered party electoral district associations (aka "EDAs" or "riding associations") must also file annual returns with Elections Canada, and the 2008 ones were due at the end of May. I've been tracking their entry into the Elections Canada database, and so far am counting entered returns as follows 66-Liberal, 112-NDP, 77-Green, 30-Bloc, 90-Conservative.
   
   I'm going to be looking at the ridings' net worth as a percentage of their last riding spending limit as an indicator of their financial strength, and the amount of money they raise from individuals in contributions of $200 or less as an indicator of their organizational prowess. Looking at the average net worths of the ridings, they are considerably down from 2007 but that's hardly surprising when an election was held in the last six weeks of the fiscal year (see chart below). Perhaps the better comparison year is 2005 when the fiscal year-end fell in the middle of the 2006 election campaign period.
   
   
4. Candidate finance - Long-time Liberal backroomer John Mraz raised another important point in a recent column for the National Post's Full Comment blog, namely that many candidates have not yet received their riding rebates from Elections Canada as yet. Candidate returns were due in the middle of February, and I've got a pretty good dataset of them so far although that needs another pass-through to finish. For indicators, I will be looking at the campaigns' net deficit/surplus including rebates, but excluding transfers to and from the riding association, and adding that to the riding level finance indicators for that fiscal year.
   
   
5. Party Preparations - Has the central campaign booked a plane, hired an ad agency, completed its platform development work, etc. We won't really know, except based on journalists' reports such as the story in yesterday's Hill Times on the state of Conservative pre-election preparations, stories that are usually planted by the parties as part of the election scare war dance. So, while I'll anecdotally note those in the blog, there's not much to measure in that regard.
   

So, what do readers think of these indicators? Are there others you could think of that could be tracked and calculated based on publicly available data?

As a further update to the situation with Liberal incumbent nominations, the Hill Times reported on Monday that 3-4 incumbents may not have met the membership and fundraising criteria in order to be unopposed when they are nominated. However, the Liberal party did not issue any news release as to their status, and is not planning to publicly confirm whether a Liberal incumbent is entitled to run unopposed or not, leading some to wonder how they would know whether they could challenge an incumbent or not. Another Liberal quoted in the story suspects the 3-4 members who missed the deadline in fact may not be planning to run again, in which case the other speculation is beside the point.

Here is the raw data on Average EDA Net Worth by Party and Year. Note that while it's been widely assumed based on the central party financial statements that the Bloc Québécois is highly-dependent on the public subsidy funding, in fact they had quite well-endowed riding associations in 2006 and 2007.

UPDATE: One reader reported being unable to see any colour in this graphic. Is anyone else having similar difficulty? Please let me know if so, and I'll replace it with another file format.

Labels: Data Analysis, Election Readiness