Money talks Ω and the Liberals are listening

Cash-for-access is back. Justin Trudeau is set to resume the highpriced fundraising events that proved so controversial for the Liberals when it emerged the party was raising millions of dollars through elite fundraisers attended by the prime minster in private homes.

The Liberals put the events on hold until it took steps to bring in new guidelines to make the events more transparent and accessible.

“An evening with Justin Trudeau” in Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts Thursday will kick off a series of national fundraisers, followed by an event at the Vancouver Hotel on May 18. Tickets for the Montreal event top out at $250, while attendees can “enjoy appetisers, drinks and conversation with fellow Liberals” for the bargain price of $500.

Braeden Caley, the Liberal Party’s director of communications, said all events will now be publicly accessible, posted at least three days in advance. Within 45 days, a list of guests will be made available on the party’s website. “We challenge other parties to match the same standards — this is the expectation Canadians have for federal parties,” he said.

The expected influx of cash from events featuring the prime minister and other cabinet minister could not be more timely for the Liberals.

In politics, money matters. Michael Ignatieff, then leader of the cash-strapped Liberal Party, recalled the effect of Conservative attack ads in his political memoir, Fire and Ashes.

“I couldn’t watch the SuperBowl without being told I’m just visiting … The effect of their attack was immediate. Our poll numbers began to slide,” he wrote.

Perhaps it was memories of those unhappy days that prompted the increasingly desperate sounding emails coming from the Liberal Party last week.

Christina Topp, the party’s senior director of fundraising, sent an email to supporters last Saturday, urging them to donate.

“Any moment now, we could find out that the Conservatives outraised us in Q1 (January-March, 2017),” she wrote.

On Tuesday, Elections Canada revealed that not only had the Conservatives raised more money from donors in the first three months of this year, they nearly doubled the Liberal effort.

The Tories raised $5.3 million from 42,473 donors — an average of $125 per donation.

That number did not include the $4 million raised by Conservative leadership candidates in the first three months of this year.

The equivalent numbers for the Liberals were $2.8 million from 31,812 donors, for an average of $88.10 per person.

The NDP lagged far behind, raising just $908,892 from 13,404 donors — an average of $67.80.

The Liberals haven’t raised this little in a quarter since before Justin Trudeau became leader in April, 2013. The fourth quarter is traditionally a stronger time to raise money but even that doesn’t explain the drop in donations from Q4 of 2016, when the Liberals raised twice as much as they did in Q1 of 2017.

The most immediate explanation was the temporary hiatus of major fundraising events.

But there also seems to be an element of disenchantment among the party’s base.

Only 18 bills have passed though Parliament since the Liberals took power — a legislative dribble compared to the Harper government’s productivity.

The Grits have become bogged down in procedural fights in the House that donors don’t care about.

If you’re a Liberal there’s been nothing much to get excited about — the Grits have reversed themselves on key promises like electoral reform and there has been slow progress on marijuana legislation. A cynic might suggest the new bill was introduced in its current, embryonic form just to keep the base from mutiny.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have plenty of reasons to be cheerful. There was a fear that donations to the federal party would dry up, as money poured into the leadership race. This was the case with the provincial Ontario Progressive Conservatives, which saw its donation levels halved during the race that elected leader Patrick Brown. But that hasn’t happened.

The party blew past estimates of new members thanks to the leadership race — the party said 259,010 were eligible to vote by the March 28 cut-off date.

It suggests whoever becomes leader is going to have a healthy war-chest going into the next election. Stephen Harper built a coalition that was able to win election victories but his most enduring legacy could yet prove to be the ability of the Conservative Party to survive defeats.

It remains to be seen if the very public Liberal fundraising events will have the same appeal to well-heeled donors that the cozy private affairs had. The governing party had best hope so because its options to match the Tories are limited.

The Liberals could reintroduce the per-vote subsidy killed by the Harper government but that would throw a lifeline to an NDP that is in big trouble. The New Democrats pulled in less than half the amount of donations, from fewer than half the number of donors, than they did two years ago. In the recent Markham-Thornhill byelection, the party won just 3.5 per cent of the vote.

Reviving the per-vote subsidy would also breathe new life into the Bloc Québécois, which is on life support because of its inability to raise funds.

The Liberals overtook the Conservatives in donor numbers last year, claiming the mantle of the grassroots party of Canadian politics.

But, unless the revamped public fundraisers are a success, those bragging rights will prove to be temporary.