B.C. NDP strapped for cash early this year
B.C. party missed fundraising targets, but ‘things have turned around’
B.C.’s New Democrats say they’re ready for the 2017 provincial election, but internal documents show the party started the year in such serious financial trouble that it had to cut back on election preparation.
NDP president Craig Keating confirmed the financial struggles, outlined in documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun, but insisted the NDP has recently turned around its financial fortunes and is meeting it fundraising goals.
The internal NDP documents are from February, following an NDP provincial council meeting, and outline how the party missed fundraising targets, sacrificed preelection planning and was unable to pay its debt to its own constituencies.
“Those things have turned around,” Keating said in an interview. “Right now we’re seeing money pouring in because people are making the connection that Christy Clark is not doing anything to make their lives better and taking a lot of actions to make their lives worse.”
The NDP’s struggles to build a campaign war chest contrast with the governing B.C. Liberals, who say they’re enjoying a financial windfall under Premier Christy Clark. The NDP’s financial situation could put it at a disadvantage in the run-up to the May 2017 election, when parties typically spend money to organize ridings, recruit candidates, prepare campaign tours, poll ridings and test public messaging.
Keating said the party is not only meeting its current fundraising targets, “we’re exceeding them in a lot of categories.”
But the NDP documents paint a different picture.
A Feb. 23 email from Keating to NDP provincial council colleagues said the B.C. NDP’s fundraising took a hit during the Oct. 19, 2015, federal election and “this loss of a provincial fundraising window and the general malaise of our donor base meant that we scaled back our pre-election efforts at provincial office — we ended the year with a lower than planned deficit, at the expense of early and necessary 2017 pre-election organizing.”
Keating’s note said the NDP only raised “1/3 of what was expected based on the equivalent year of the electoral cycle” in 2015. The party also sold its Burnaby headquarters for $2.15 million.
A subsequent letter from NDP treasurer Amber Hockin noted the NDP ended 2015 with a deficit of $152,449, because unnamed constituencies missed fundraising targets by $335,400. The party ended its first quarter, March 31, 2016, “with $369,757 towards our readiness budget unfulfilled,” read Hockin’s letter.
The NDP provincial office is unable to repay the $588,371 it owes its local constituencies in pre-2015 donations — part of a system where money raised goes to the provincial party before it’s remitted back to the ridings.
“Given constituency fundraising performance up to now, combined with the results of the final quarter of 2015, we cannot consider repayment of pre-2015 debt until after the 2017 election,” Hockin wrote.
“While there are some constituencies that are consistently hitting their target fundraising goals, many more, including incumbent ridings, are not.”
The NDP’s provincial director, Michael Gardiner, quit in June. But Keating said the party now has more staff and better organization than before the 2013 election. “We are ahead of the curve on where we were on the last cycle,” he said.
The 2013 election was a high mark in NDP fundraising, when the party raised $9.3 million ($1 million more than the victorious B.C. Liberals). The NDP recorded $2.1 million from normally hostile corporations — 10 times what businesses contributed to the party in 2009.
Meanwhile, B.C. Liberal campaign co-chair Rich Coleman said his party is in better shape than the last election. The Liberals raised more than $10 million in 2015, records show. “Financially we’re in as good a shape as we’ve ever been,” said Coleman.
The NDP has called for a ban on corporate and union donations to political parties, but the Liberal government has refused.