Liberal leadership race: Follow the money

Mark Carney's campaign has a lot of it.

Just a quick note on the Liberal leadership race after the publication of the second interim campaign returns on the Elections Canada’s website. It’s the last bit of data we’ll have before the results of the contest are announced on Sunday.

The returns include donations up to February 26, so they leave out a little over a week of late-campaign fundraising. But the numbers suggest that Mark Carney has a huge, towering advantage over his rivals.

The returns show that Carney raised $3,497,000 up to February 26, compared to just $363,000 for Karina Gould, $361,000 for Chrystia Freeland and $350,000 for Frank Baylis. But, as was the case with the first interim return, Freeland’s second interim return is frustratingly incomplete.

For some reason, her returns do not report any donations between January 30 and February 11. This makes it very difficult to compare apples-to-apples. Nevertheless, in the chart below you can find each campaign’s fundraising with the January 30 to February 11 period excluded. Even doing that, Freeland’s fundraising is only a small fraction of Carney’s.

Of all money raised from the start of the race to February 26 (but excluding January 30 to February 11), Carney has raised 73% of it. Freeland trails with just 14%, while Gould and Baylis bring up the rear at 7% and 6%, respectively. Don’t be surprised if Carney wins on Sunday by a similar margin, because it would be highly unusual for a candidate who is so dominant in fundraising to not put up similarly dominant vote numbers.

Carney has also dominated in number of contributions at nearly 22,000, compared to 2,400 for Gould, 1,200 in Freeland’s incomplete returns and about 500 for Baylis.

It’s hard to see a competitive race in these numbers. Freeland’s campaign had claimed after the publication of the first interim returns that it had raised $600,000, which implies there is at least $240,000 missing from these numbers. Even if we bump Freeland’s fundraising to $600,000, Carney’s campaign has still raised nearly six times as much.

The contestants’ (but primarily Carney’s) fundraising prowess will certainly help the party’s bottom line. Altogether they raised $4.6 million up to February 26 and undoubtedly have added to that tally since then (and we are also missing two weeks of fundraising for Freeland). To put that into context, the Liberals’ best first-quarter fundraising on record was $4,031,000. That was in 2016 at the height of Justin Trudeau’s honeymoon after his 2015 election victory. These candidates have shattered that record.

We’ll see how the vote breaks down on Sunday. The points system awards an equal number of points per riding regardless of how many voting members it contains, so the results will depend partly on which campaigns have more effectively worked this system. But it would be remarkable for Carney to fail to win — and win easily — when his campaign his been such an effective fundraising machine.

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