Weekly Writ 2/5: Conservatives have money to burn in 2025
The Liberals and NDP ended last year with anemic fundraising.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
2024 feels like an eternity ago, but when it comes to raising money for the upcoming federal campaign, it wasn’t long ago enough — at least for the Liberals and New Democrats.
The fundraising figures for the fourth quarter of 2024 were posted by Elections Canada last week. They show the Conservatives continued to break all fundraising records by raising the most money any party ever has, not only in a single quarter but for an entire year.
The Conservatives raised $12.8 million in October, November and December last year. That beat their previous record set in the fourth quarter of 2023. (The fourth quarter is usually the best quarter for all parties, as they make a final push for donations and donors are the closest to receiving their tax credits.) To put these figures into context, the Conservatives raised more money in the last three months of the year than the New Democrats, Greens, Bloc Québécois and People’s Party did, combined, in all of 2024.
The Conservatives finished the year with $41.7 million in fundraising, an increase of 18% over 2023. That sets the Conservatives up well for this coming election year.
If there was any doubt that the Liberals were floundering ahead of Justin Trudeau’s resignation, the fundraising numbers confirm it. With $5 million raised during the quarter, the Liberals had their worst fourth quarter since 2021 (when donations plummeted after the haul of that year’s election campaign held in the third quarter) and their worst fourth quarter outside of an election year since 2013. For the year as a whole, the Liberals were down about $400,000 from 2023 and took in $15.2 million.
The NDP also struggled, raising just $2.4 million in the fourth quarter. That’s the party’s worst fourth quarter outside of an election year since 2018. The party’s fundraising for all of 2024 was down 9% from 2023. The NDP raised $6.3 million for the year.
This shows how both the Liberals and NDP headed into this election year in some difficulty. The good news for the Liberals, however, is that their ongoing leadership race will bring more money into party coffers, as well as give the Liberals some much-needed hope and optimism for the future. The NDP doesn’t have that going for them.
Unexpectedly, the Greens ended 2024 on a high. The party raised just over $1 million, their best fourth quarter since 2020. With $2.2 million raised throughout the year, this was was their best performance since 2021. The party’s fundraising was up 13% over 2023.
The Bloc also had a good end to the year with $993,000 raised, the party’s best fourth quarter ever. With just over $2 million raised for the year, 2024 was the Bloc’s second-best fundraising year on record.
Finally, the People’s Party appears to be fading away with just $581,000 raised in the fourth quarter, its worst Q4 since the party had to start filing quarterly in 2021. With $1.2 million raised for the year as a whole, this was the worst fundraising year for the PPC since 2020. Fundraising was down a whopping 26% from 2023.
If we take a step back and look at the longer-term trend, it’s clear that the Conservatives are doing something extraordinary. The chart below shows annual fundraising since 2005, with the dotted line indicating the four-year average. This is meant to flatten out the spikes in fundraising during election years.
The Conservatives have been increasing their four-year average pretty consistently over the last decade, with a spectacular spike since Pierre Poilievre became leader. The Liberals started closing the gap around the 2015 election, but haven’t been able to get their fundraising to the next level. Their four-year average has been pretty steady since 2016 — and has even been sliding. That’s a problem considering these numbers are not adjusted for inflation.
The NDP, too, has been unable to return to the fundraising levels it enjoyed while it was the official opposition. Its fundraising has been flat since 2019.
It means the New Democrats trail the Liberals by about as much now as they did in the last few elections. It also means that the gap between both parties and the Conservatives has been increasing as Conservative fundraising soars.
In 2010, the year before Stephen Harper led the Conservative Party to its one-and-only majority government, the Conservatives raised $10.8 million more than the Liberals.
Four years later, Harper’s Conservatives were losing their wide fundraising advantage. They raised only $4.4 million more than Trudeau’s Liberals did in 2014, the year before the Liberals’ majority victory.
In 2020, the year before the 2021 election, the Conservatives raised $5.6 million more than the Liberals. Still not a huge advantage.
But in 2024, the year before the 2025 campaign? The Conservatives have raised $26.5 million more than the Liberals. The Conservatives have enough money to run two separate national campaigns, let alone one.
Unfortunately, the fundraising figures for the first quarter of 2025 will only be published at the end of April. By then, we could be just days away from voting, so the fundraising numbers will be outdated. We will, however, get some fundraising numbers out of the Liberal leadership campaign in a couple of weeks. That will provide us with some clues as to the financial state of the Liberals heading into a general election.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the Liberal leadership race, the Quebec Liberal contest and the settling of the co-leadership model for the federal Greens.
Polls hint at a further narrowing of the Conservatives’ wide lead, show that Americans weren’t enamoured with Trump’s tariffs, spotlight an upcoming Quebec byelection and show how the ballot box issue in Ontario shifted a little over the weekend.
How provincial legislature across the country would look if the elections were held today.
How not to orchestrate a leadership takeover in the #EveryElectionProject.
IN THE NEWS
Liberal field shrinks as membership booms
And then there were five.
The list of Liberal leadership contestants has been winnowed down after the withdrawal of Nova Scotia MP Jaime Battiste, who pulled out before the second entry fee instalment of $50,000 was due. Battiste endorsed Mark Carney, further expanding the former Bank of Canada governor’s roster of caucus supporters.
The next date to circle on the calendar is this coming Friday, when another $125,000 will be due to the Liberal Party. By then, candidates will have paid out $225,000 apiece to party coffers, a serious chunk of change for some of the minor contestants in the running.
They are all trying to get the support of the nearly 400,000 people who have signed up as registered Liberals (for free). That isn’t a final number, as the party has to verify those registrations and weed out fakes. That number is higher than the 294,000 who registered in the 2013 Liberal leadership race, though well short of the 675,000 or so who were paid-up members to the Conservative Party in the 2022 contest won by Pierre Poilievre.
The final number of voting members is likely to be a fraction of the 400,000. Of the 294,000 who were eligible to vote in 2013, only about 130,000 went through the more onerous process to register to cast a ballot. Just 105,000 actually voted.
The last week on the campaign trail was dominated by Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs. Chrystia Freeland, in particular, was active on U.S. and Canadian media denouncing the tariffs and laying out Canada’s opposition to them. Carney spent some time in Atlantic Canada with stops in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, while Frank Baylis held a campaign launch in Montreal. On the policy front, Carney put out his plan to replace the carbon tax with a green incentive program.
With more than half the caucus already backing one candidate or another, few major endorsements were announced. Carney did get the support of one more cabinet minister (Élisabeth Brière), pushing his total caucus support to 59. Freeland remains at 27, unchanged from last week.
Carney enjoys a two-to-one or greater edge in caucus endorsements in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Atlantic Canada. Only in Manitoba, where Freeland has three endorsements to Carney’s none, is Freeland getting more caucus support.
The broader public appears to be going over to Carney as well, as Léger found Carney leading Freeland as the favourite to replace Justin Trudeau by a margin of 40 points among Liberal voters. His edge was only six points in mid-January.
The party has indicated that two debates will be held after February 17, the final deadline for the entry fee instalments. Perhaps they are hoping that the field will be winnowed down further by then. Both Karina Gould and Freeland have called for more, and earlier, debates — something that underdogs tend to want.
ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS
It’s still an open question whether former Montreal mayor Denis Coderre will qualify for the Quebec Liberal leadership. According to the PLQ’s website, only Pablo Rodriguez has been accepted as an official candidate, while Marc Bélanger and Charles Milliard have cleared the first hurdles.
The co-leadership model proposed by the Greens was approved by 91% of party members in an online vote, with 89% confirming Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault as co-leaders. The two had run on a joint leadership ticket in the 2022 leadership contest, but Pedneault had stepped aside last summer (temporarily as it turned out).
THIS WEEK’S POLLS
With the Ontario election now underway and the federal campaign about to follow, there is a lot of polling going on. The best way to keep on top of it is to follow the Poll Tracker that I’m running for the CBC and my weekly Projection Updates on Mondays (the last one was here).
For the Ontario election, I have my own projection hosted here on The Writ, and it’ll be updated every few days when enough new polls have been published. I’ll delve a little deeper into the individual polls in the Election Writ, which will come out on Tuesday mornings. (Here was yesterday’s.)
That doesn’t leave a whole lot to discuss in this section of the Weekly Writ, especially since it seems the pollsters have gone largely radio silent on anything but federal and Ontario politics. But if anything does pop up in the coming weeks, I’ll cover it here!
POLLING NEWS BRIEFS
The uptick in the federal Liberal polling numbers continues in the Nanos Research weekly tracker. The latest iteration has the Conservatives ahead by 16 points, 42% to 26%. The gap was 17 points last week. That’s not a significant shift by any stretch, particularly considering this is a four-week rolling poll, but the trend line is holding steady.
Abacus Data put out some interesting numbers on Americans’ views of Canada. The poll finds that Americans generally like Canada, think free trade with Canada has been good for their country and that Canadians don’t want to join the Union. It also finds, as have some American polls, that they don’t support tariffs on Canada.
The Quebec Conservatives leaked another internal poll showing they have a chance in Arthabaska, which will hold a provincial byelection to fill the vacancy that will be left by Éric Lefebvre’s resignation once the federal election kicks off (the MNA first elected with the CAQ will run for the federal Conservatives). The poll, done by Pallas Data, put the PCQ at 28% in the riding, three points back of the Parti Québécois.
In Ontario, Relay Strategies found that Trump’s threat of tariffs increased “dealing with Trump” as Ontarians’ top issue by eight points, to 27%, when compared to polling done just before the news came that the tariffs were coming (but before they were paused). Cost of living still ranked as the top issue at 52%, but that was down five points. Healthcare also made some space for Trump, dropping three points to 14%.
IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY
While the national and Ontario projections have shifted since last week, nothing has moved elsewhere as there have been no new polls published over the last few days.
The seat estimates for provincial legislatures are derived from a swing model that is based on trends in recent polls as well as minor tweaks and adjustments. Changes are compared to last week. Parties are ordered according to their finish in the previous election (with some exceptions for minor parties)
2025 ELECTORAL CALENDAR
March 9: Federal Liberal leadership
Official candidates: Frank Baylis, Mark Carney, Ruby Dhalla, Chrystia Freeland, Karina Gould
March 24: Return of Parliament
April 26: Manitoba Progressive Conservative leadership
Official candidates: Wally Daudrich, Obby Khan
May 5 or May 12: Possible date of the federal election
June 7: P.E.I. Green leadership
June 14: Quebec Liberal leadership
Declared candidates: Marc Bélanger, Denis Coderre, Charles Milliard, Pablo Rodriguez, Mario Roy
October 14: Newfoundland and Labrador provincial election
October 27: Nunavut territorial election
November 3: Yukon territorial election
Byelections yet to be scheduled
QC - Terrebonne (to call by March)
CA - Halifax (to call by March 2)
AB - Edmonton-Strathcona (to call by end of June)
MB - Transcona (to call by mid-July)
Party leadership dates yet to be set
P.E.I. Liberals (Sharon Cameron resigned on Apr. 6, 2023)
Manitoba Liberals (Dougald Lamont resigned on Oct. 3, 2023)
New Brunswick PCs (Blaine Higgs resigned on Oct. 28, 2024)
B.C. Greens (Sonia Furstenau resigned on January 28, 2025)
Future party leadership dates
November 21, 2026: Nova Scotia Liberals
ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
Smallwood finally goes
February 5, 1972
After seeing off a challenge within his party (and nearly tearing it apart in the process), Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood’s winning, domineering ways finally came to a halt in the October 1971 provincial election. Sort of.
His Liberals lost the election to the Progressive Conservatives under Frank Moores, but only by a hair. The PCs won 21 seats to the Liberals’ 20, the last seat in the House of Assembly held by Tom Burgess, the leader of the New Labrador Party. Moores didn’t have a majority, so Smallwood didn’t resign. He even mused that he didn’t need to recall the House until March when new funding would have to be voted on.
That didn’t go over very well with the PCs, who had won a clear majority of the vote in the election. It also didn’t go over very well within Liberal ranks among those who were hoping that the Smallwood days were finally coming to an end. Joey recognized that his time was up, but he wanted things to unfold on his schedule and to his party’s advantage. Rather than hand the reins of office over to the Tories, he would prefer to hand them over to a hand-picked Liberal successor. He announced a leadership convention would be held on February 5, 1972 to do just that.
Burgess was the key to keeping the Liberals in power long enough to make that happen. He was being wooed by Smallwood and Moores. If he decided to support the PCs, Moores would have an outright majority. If he decided to support the Liberals, the count would be 21 to 21 and the House would prove unworkable. Smallwood’s successor could then take the Liberals into the next election, never having given up the premier’s chair.
But Burgess was enjoying the attention and, in expectation of a cabinet seat, announced he’d support the PCs. Moores had his majority.
Or did he? The PCs’ victory margin in St. Barbe South had been razor thin and a recount was underway. It couldn’t be completed, though, once it emerged that a ballot box holding some 100 votes had been accidentally burned on election night. The courts would have to weigh-in on whether a byelection would need to be held or if the PCs’ win would be confirmed. That gave Joey some time to convince Tom Burgess he had made a big mistake.
Conveniently, a friend of the Liberal Party was able to cover the cost of a trip to Florida for Tom Burgess. Even more conveniently, Smallwood owned a condo nearby. Joey set to work on Burgess and the two came up with a plan. When Smallwood resigned the premiership, Burgess could run to replace him as Liberal leader — with Joey’s support.
While Smallwood was scheming in Clearwater, Ed Roberts was gathering support for his own leadership bid. The health minister in Smallwood’s government and “an ice-cold intellectual with a shock of unruly hair”, according to Lyndon Watkins of The Globe and Mail, Roberts was just 31 and one of the heir apparents in the Liberal Party.
Then the courts ruled to recognize the PC win in St. Barbe South, the PC majority was seemingly re-established (Burgess hadn’t yet announced his decision to renege on his support) and Roberts declared he would run for the leadership of the Liberals. With the Liberals apparently losing all avenues to stay in office, calls came from within the party for Smallwood to resign.
There was a brief moment of hope for Smallwood when Burgess announced he would back the Liberals and the House would be deadlocked at 21 to 21 again. But there was such a clamour against Burgess’s party-shopping that he quickly announced he would stick to his original promise to support the PCs. With that, Smallwood had no choice but to step down and hand the premiership over to Frank Moores.
Burgess wasn’t yet finished, however. When the PCs (understandably) balked at awarding Burgess that cabinet seat, the Labrador West MHA said he was done with the PCs and crossed the floor to the Liberals.
“No one was particularly surprised by Burgess’s move,” writes Richard Gwyn in Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, “nor by his subsequent announcement, since it came from one who had already demonstrated the worst sense of timing in Canadian politics, that he would contest the party leadership.”
But it wouldn’t be a real contest. By now, Burgess had burned whatever bridges he had left with the Liberal Party. Though there were two other contestants for the leadership (Roderick Moores was a university student unrelated to the new premier of the same name, and Vincent Spencer was a hotelier from Windsor), this had effectively become a one-horse race.
Roberts won the vote of the 663 delegates gathered in an old military drill hall in Pleasantville in a landslide, taking 85% on the first ballot. Burgess finished a distant second with just 12%.
Proclaiming that the Liberals would “rise and fight again and we’ll win” in his victory speech, the entire affair was little more than a formality and delegates went home shortly thereafter. Roberts “had lipstick on his cheek after receiving the congratulations of some of his supporters,” according to the Globe, “but the party mood did not last long. Ostensibly for time reasons, but probably to conserve flagging party funds for the next election, a planned victory reception did not take place.”
There would be little delay before that next election was called. Along with Burgess, a PC MHA had crossed the floor to the Liberals and the newly-installed PC government was awkwardly outnumbered by the opposition. On March 24, 1972, Newfoundlanders settled matters once and for all by handing Moores and the PCs a whopping majority. Roberts was returned to the House with an even bigger margin than he had in 1971, as voters in White Bay North were happy to back the new Liberal leader. Voters in Labrador West, however, had seen enough of Tom Burgess. Standing now as a Liberal, Burgess went down to defeat by a two-to-one margin to the PCs. His once promising political career was definitely over.
But Newfoundlanders hadn’t heard the last from Joey.
That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Numbers will be dropping on Thursday. The episode will land in your inbox on Friday but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. If you want to get access to the weekly mailbag and other special episodes, become a Patron here!