Ads shown to take up bulk of election spending

Federal Conservatives outspent Liberals last fall

OTTAWA— Campaign ads on social media and digital media websites are coming close to rivalling television in spending on election advertising by some of Canada’s major political parties, new reports show.

Elections Canada published the first expense reports from the 2019 federal election this week, listing what the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Marxist-Leninist Party spent during the campaign last fall. Other parties will have their reports published soon.

The ones already online give a glimpse at where parties prioritized their efforts last fall, including a first real look at how much they depended on the internet to get their message out to Canadians.

The Conservative campaign cost the most overall, with total spending on everything from advertising and polling to leaders’ tours and fundraising coming in at $28.9 million. It was just shy of the $29.1-million limit Elections Canada established for the campaign.

The Liberals’ expenses totalled $26.2 million, while the NDP, which has struggled with fundraising in recent years, spent only one-third of what they could have, at $10.3 million.

The Liberals spent the most in both 2011 and 2015.

For both the Liberals and Conservatives, more than half their bills came from advertising, at 55 per cent for the Tories and 53 per cent for the Liberals. The NDP dedicated 38 per cent of their campaign spending to advertising.

Television advertising still gobbled up the most money from all three campaigns, but online advertising was clearly the second choice. That would include buying ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as well as ads to run on digital media websites.