How the Leadership Candidates Helped Create a Debt-Free Ontario Liberal Party
Today the Ontario Liberal Party announced in an email from Interim Leader John Fraser that the party is now debt-free after paying down its $3 million campaign debt. The email went on to say that “This is the fastest we’ve paid off our debt from a general election campaign in decades”.
Some History
I couldn’t be happier about this announcement but not just for the same reasons as other party members. During the 2020 leadership election that crowned Steven Del Duca party leader, it became clear that the party would be able to clear the 2018 campaign debt within weeks. The question for the party became whether to announce this good news during the leadership race or wait until after it had concluded.
Fundraising reporting and publication lags between the party and Elections Ontario meant that the news could be kept under wraps until there was a new leader installed. Choose to delay and you could leave the announcement to the leader as a momentum-building tool to kick-start their term. Choose to go ahead with the announcement and you could paint the good news as a sign of a party on the rise to which every dollar donated would go directly to winning the next election.
As the person doing the fundraising, I argued the latter point. But in the end — despite coming close — I couldn’t sway the decision-makers. The Interim Leader believed it was his duty to hand the new leader a win rather than taking the win himself. It was an admirable decision but one I disagreed with on strategic grounds given no one wants to give up their hard-earned money to pay off debt from a historic loss. That’s one of the most undesirable calls-to-action one can make in political fundraising. But it’s what we were left with in order to set up the next leader well.
Within ten days of that leadership convention, the entire province shut down as people entered lockdown over the emerging Covid-19 pandemic. Flare ups would occur over the next two years, making traditional fundraising events difficult and putting even more pressure on the party’s email fundraising program (known as ‘esols’ or e-solicitations). The big leg up we had intended to give the new leader quickly evaporated.
Flash forward three and a half years later and a different choice has been made. This time Interim Leader John Fraser has announced the retirement of the campaign debt just under six weeks before the new leader is announced, giving the party six extra weeks of fundraising time while it still has the attention of the media and the public. He also stated that OLP has out-fundraised both the PC’s and NDP this quarter and that the final membership tally includes over 100,000 Ontarians. The announcement is already making waves online as a clear sign that OLP has turned the corner and is now the clear alternative to Doug Ford.
The Leadership Tithe
While Interim Leader John Fraser, Party President Kathryn McGarry, Past President Brian Johns, and Executive Director Mandy Moore all deserve enormous credit for slaying this debt, it’s important to understand the role each leadership candidate has played in it, too. Not just to congratulate them but also to understand what the party’s fundraising climate will look like going forward. To do that, we have to look at something called the ‘leadership tithe’.
In addition to the party’s constitution, the leadership race is governed by something called The Rules of Procedure for Leadership. While the constitution lays out rules applicable to every leadership race the party holds, the rules of procedure spells out rules applicable to this specific leadership race. One of those rules is the tithe. Its workings are spelled out as followed in the document:
CONTRIBUTIONS TITHE — Leadership Candidates shall, on a biweekly basis, on dates determined by the Chief Returning Officer, transfer to the Ontario Liberal Party 25% of all contributions received. No tithe shall apply to contributions corresponding to the supplementary registration fees described in section 2.1. While no tithe shall apply to contributions corresponding to the deposit payments described in section 2.2, the tithe upon such deposit funds shall be deducted from the payment referred to in section 2.2(c).
While Elections Ontario excludes donations below $200, has a 15 day reporting delay from candidates, and a 2 day posting delay to the website, we can still get a decent sense of how much each candidate has contributed to this news from the party.
Each of the candidates remaining in this race have obliterated the fundraising totals of every candidate who ran in 2020 except for Steven Del Duca. Bonnie Crombie has nearly doubled his 2020 total. Whether or not the candidates are raising so much money because they feel they need to in order to win the race, a side benefit is that they have collectively raised over half a million dollars in tithed money for the party. And that’s not even including donations under $200 that don’t appear on the Elections Ontario website.
Some Caution
While all of this is good news, we also have to consider a few things. First, these huge sums are made possible because there is an active leadership race taking place. Leaderships and general elections are the source of almost every fundraising dollar political parties raise. As I’ve said previously, over 90% of OLP’s fundraising dollars between 2014–2018 (a period with no leadership races) came in the final five months before the election. The current fundraising boom will quiet down as soon as a leader is declared.
Second, the other thing that was keeping the party afloat before the leadership race kicked off was the per-vote subsidy. This subsidy is set to expire on December 31, 2024. Which means the new leader — regardless who wins — only has a year to get the party’s fundraising machine firing on all cylinders without the help of a leadership race or looming election. It’s a tall order but — based on these numbers — they might just be up to it.
Other Content: To learn how the voting process works, watch my four-minute explainer video here. To follow along with complete policy updates from the race, get the highlights by visiting my leadership policy cheat sheet here and the full picture by visiting my leadership policy commitment tracker here. To follow along with media engagement and recordings of the candidate debates, check out my leadership communications tracker here.
Theresa has served as the Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party, the VP Communications for the Ontario Women’s Liberal Commission, the Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, and an election-speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. As a member of ‘Team Neutral’, she helped manage the 2013 and 2020 OLP Leadership races.
