Thursday, August 14, 2008

Visual Proof of North Pole Donations

With my post yesterday regarding fraudulent and incorrect data submitted to Elections Canada by the Liberal Party, a few commenters asked for a link to the data in question, which showed 8 individuals from 3 provinces donating to the Liberals with Santa Claus's postal code. Here are the screenshots captured from Elections Canada's web page regarding the donations in question:


These records can be found at the Elections Canada online database by searching under the quarterly reports for December 2006.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Liberal Elections Canada Filings Make Mockery of Elections Canada with Santa Claus Filings

Do Santa and his elves support the Liberal Party of Canada? Apparently they do, according to data submitted by the Liberal Party to Elections Canada. In the December 2006 quarterly report, eight individuals from three different provinces gave money to the Liberals; the problem is that all of them were submitted with a postal code of H0H 0H0, the postal code Canada Post has assigned for letters to Santa Claus.

This chart shows the information which the Liberals passed on to Elections Canada:
The difference in treatment offered by Elections Canada to the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party continues to be obvious. It seems that, in the eyes of Elections Canada and Chief Electoral Officer the Liberals can do no wrong. This has reached the point were the Liberals have submitted laughable and erroneous information to the agency, with no apparent castigation or punishment.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

More on Missing Liberal Donations - Anti-Ignatieff Bias??

Last week, I wrote about $105,793.80 in donations which the Liberal Party had received in donations targeted on behalf of former leadership contestants which, for whatever reason, were not transferred to the individual in question. Today, I decided to look into who exactly was missing the most money, and it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Michael Ignatieff.

According to the relevant Elections Canada database, Ignatieff's campaign received 508 transferred donations in the amount of $190,011.50; however the Liberal Party also collected another 124 donations totaling $96,223 which were not directed on to him. That works out to over 33% of the money collected on his behalf not be transferred to him. His missing funds account for over 90% of the untransferred funds.

In contrast, Dion was only missing less than 3% of the money owed to him. Gerrard Kennedy and Hedy Fry were each missing less than 2% and Ken Dryden was missing less than 1%.

Is this any indication of a bias within the Liberal Party against Michael Ignatieff and his former leadership campaign? Why has such a disproportionate number of his donations not been passed on while other former candidates received their full amount of close to it?

Perhaps for another possible instance of anti-Ignatieff bias in these numbers concerns the donations made by Liberal MP Ken Boshcoff (recently in the news for admitting that Dion's Carbon tax was designed to "transfer wealth from the oil patch to the rest of the country"). On June 16 and June 20, he donated money to Dion, Scott Brison, Martha Hall Findlay, Dryden, Ignatieff, and Kennedy. Of the 6 donations, 5 were transferred in full to the campaigns, but not a penny was transferred on to Ignatieff's campaign.

Why is the Liberal Party not sending over a third of the money they collected on his behalf? Does anyone have any theories??

Friday, August 1, 2008

Missing Liberal Donations??

With the recent posting of the quarterly financial reports from Elections Canada, there is a lot of interesting information just waiting to be uncovered. One such item relates to $105,793.80 in missing Liberal funding. Apparently, the Liberal Party raised $792,739.70 on behalf of their leadership candidates, yet only $686,945.90 was actually transferred on to the former contenders.

I have a screen capture from the Elections Canada database showing this (I cut out the individual entries between the header and the totals in order to show them together properly).

So what happened to the other $105,793.80?

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: It was suggested by a commenter that the missing funds could be accounted for by the Liberal Party skimming a certain percentage of these donations into their own fund. However, this is not the case. The vast majority of donations are passed on to the candidate in full, while in other cases, zero dollars are passed on. The amounts of donations in question range from miniscule amounts under $50 up to the maximum allowable of $1100. All other donations in these exact same amounts were passed on in full.

95% of the Bloc Quebecois's Funding Comes From the Canadian Government

For a political party that espouses separation from Canada, the Bloc Quebecois seems to have no qualms against accepting money from the Canadian government. In the first quarter of 2008, they managed to raise only $36,850.78 in donations; at the same time, they accepted $758,350.39 in funds based on the number of votes they received in the last federal election.

95% of their money comes from Canadian taxpayers; only 5% is raised on their own initiative from individuals seeking to support Bloc policies.

Parties which receive at least 2% of the vote in elections receive quarterly payments of $0.4375 per valid vote. Apparently the Bloc is content to receive this cheque four times a year, since it seems they don't feel the need to augment it with any serious fundraising campaigns of their own. They only took in 607 individual donations, with only 33 people making a significant donation (more than $200). In contrast, the Conservative Party took in donations of $3,525,352.31 from 33,833 contributors.

If the Bloc Quebecois is truly serious about separating from Canada, should they not also turn down these Canadian election allowances?