Here’s an Ontario election result for you to ponder:  The NDP comes in first at 39%, the LIBs are second with 35% and the PCs come third with 22%.  No, not an actual election with actual votes but a pretty good surrogate.  In fact, the above percentages represent the shares of contributions and other income reported by central party organizations in their financial statements for calendar 2009, as posted by Elections Ontario at the end of June.  In dollar terms, the NDP raked in $4.4M, the LIBs $3.9M and the PCs $2.5M.  (In addition to the major party take which totalled $11.1M there was another $240K collected by the Green Party and $139K by eight fringe parties.) 

And don’t jump to the conclusion that the NDP’s showing last year was a fluke: the ‘third party’ had also come first in calendar 2007, at 41%, with the PCs at 39% and the LIBs at 19%; and in calendar 2008, when the LIBs finished strongly with 47%, the NDP was second at 26% and the PCs took 24%.

On the central party level, therefore, the three major parties are clearly competitive.  However, the fundraising potency recently demonstrated by the NDP is hard to square with its struggles to win enough seats to secure official party status at Queen’s Park.  The NDP’s ample supply of “the mother’s milk of politics” (as Calif. pol Jesse M. Unruh termed political donations a generation ago) ought to have sustained a strapping youth in rude health, not the sickly infant whose failure to thrive was demonstrated by falling below official party status in both the 1999 and 2003 contests.

Actually, the annual party reports go beyond the donations cited above. For Ontario election finances law requires parties to include the previous year’s surplus (or deficit), show the amount of surplus (or deficit) resulting from the party’s general and/or by-election campaigns (if applicable) and arrive at a bottom-line figure for all central party operations.

So like a World Cup referee refusing to count an England goal, we must revisit the initial party outcomes in this piece, including $6.6M in previous year deficits and $7.4M of by-election campaign income.  And the year-end surplus (deficit) utterly transforms the ‘election standings’ with which this item began: the  LIBs come in first with a $1.7M surplus, the PCs are in second place with a $0.9M deficit and the NDP trails in third place with a $2.9M deficit.

http://www.gpmurray-research.com/