The Next Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party as Chief Fundraiser
In Theresa’s work with the Ontario Liberal Party, she founded its digital fundraising program and helped create the Liberal Future Fund monthly donor program.
When the next Ontario Liberal Party Leader is chosen on December 2, they will have just 395 days to change the party’s fundraising culture and start building a multi-million-dollar election campaign fund. That’s because Ontario’s per-vote subsidy will expire on December 31, 2024. For the Ontario Liberals, this poses an existential threat.
The Coming Financial Crunch
The per-vote subsidy was introduced in 2017 to transition political parties away from corporate and union giving. Each party that achieves a certain threshold of votes in the previous campaign receives a quarterly allowance based on the total number of votes they received. In the year since the failed 2022 election, the Ontario Liberal Party has received over $2.8 million in taxpayer funded subsidies.
Ever since the banning of corporate and union donations in 2016, the party has struggled to find its financial footing. The winning campaigns of the McGuinty-Wynne years were largely financed through large-scale donations from corporations, unions, and wealthy Ontarians rather than everyday party members.
The now-defunct Ontario Liberal Fund spent two decades hosting the annual Heritage Dinner that was responsible for raising $2 million every year of a four-year election cycle. To put the value of that annual event into perspective, the Ford Conservatives spent $11 million on their winning campaign in 2022.
The only centrally organized effort to collect money from party members during much of this time was the maximum donor Red Trillium Club and the ABC monthly donor program (now known as the Liberal Future Fund). Digital fundraising was introduced in 2013 and brought in over $1 million during each of the 2014 and 2018 campaign periods (I can’t speak to what it delivered in the 2022 campaign).
Despite some successes with these individual giving programs, the fact remains that in the between 2014 and 2018, over 90% of all donations made to the Ontario Liberal Party were made in the final five months before Election Day. This boom-and-bust cycle, mixed with two devastating back-to-back defeats, has required the party’s leadership to cut expenses to the bone and direct the subsidy towards paying off campaign debts.
With nothing left to cut and the subsidy expiring, the party needs a complete overhaul of its fundraising culture in a way only the new leader can usher in.
What it Will Take to Build the Campaign Fund
The next campaign will likely cost at least $10 million to run. While a lot of that money will be contributed in the final six months before the election, it works out to about $2.5 million per year if raised equally over the four-year lead-up to the campaign. That’s just under $210,000 per month or around $52,000 per week, every week of a four-year cycle.
That might sound like a big challenge but it grows even larger when you consider the fact that there are annual contribution limits that, once maxed out, mean a reliable donor is tapped out and can’t give again until next year. This year that contribution limit is $3,350. Very few party members will end up giving the maximum amount in a single year. That means for every donor you convince to contribute, you’ll be able to count on between $5 to $3,350 for the year.
There are a few routes to raising $2.5 million per year. You could ask 500,000 Ontarians or about half the number of voters who supported the party in the last campaign to donate $5 per year. Or you could find 746 supporters willing to donate the maximum amount. The truth is that some mix of all levels of donors will be needed to hit this target.
Beyond the central campaign, ridings will also need help raising campaign funds. While some campaigns can get by on $40,000, many will need as much as $100,000 to win at the local level. Whether they need to raise $10,000 per year or $25,000 per year, they will need a plan and a leader whose personality and vision helps bring money in the door as they connect with voters.
Evaluating the Candidates
The leadership race can tell us a bit about who might be that type of leader by providing two ways OLP members can evaluate each of the leadership candidates on fundraising ahead of the vote in November.
One is by evaluating the fundraising related ideas they put forward as part of their leadership campaigns. None of the candidates have put forward any ideas on this front so far. The other is by reviewing each candidate’s fundraising hauls during this race.
As the official call of the leadership race only went out on July 8, not all of the candidates’ fundraising totals have been reported to Elections Ontario. But those that have are starting to paint a picture.
As reported to EO by July 14, Bonnie Crombie leads all the candidates in total dollars raised. She has a double-digit lead when it comes to receiving maximum contributions of $3,350. And she currently boasts the highest average donation amount (though this last number isn’t always seen as a good thing).
However, Ted Hsu has a double-digit lead when it comes to total number of donors contributing to his campaign. And Yasir Naqvi has the smallest average donation of any of the candidates, a marker often used as a shorthand for the kind of grassroots support needed to win elections. Adil Shamji’s totals were not in as of the time of writing this piece.
The one big caveat here is that donations under $100 are not reported on Elections Ontario’s website, which could mean more donations have been made to each of the candidates and their average donations may all be lower than they appear in the chart below.
While the personalities and policy positions of each of the candidates are important, they won’t get much of a chance to pitch them to the voters if they can’t first get the party on the right financial path. I look forward to seeing more data as it comes in and to hearing from each of the candidates on how they propose to build a $10 million campaign fund.
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.
