Canada’s ruling Conservative party has been rocked by an unfolding corruption scandal that has threatened to derail its campaign before the 19 October general election.
But despite the bribery and expenses affair that has the main opposition parties calling for the heads of senior staff in the prime minister’s office, the Conservatives have maintained a campaign spending advantage that offers them a distinct electoral edge over their political rivals.
The prime minister, Stephen Harper, has amassed a campaign war chest which outstrips those of both his main rivals combined – the leftwing New Democrats and the centrist Liberals – which, added to his decision to call an election early, guarantees that the Conservative party will reap the benefits of a funding advantage.
The Conservatives called for the general election in early August, triggering an 11-week campaign – nearly double the 37-day minimum and the longest since the Victorian age.
But thanks to a change in election rules passed by Harper’s government in 2014, the 79-day campaign comes with an increased spending cap for registered parties. The national limit for each party this campaign is set at C$54.4m – more than double the C$21m limit of the last election in 2011.
While this campaign will be the most expensive in Canadian history, the money is a drop in the bucket compared to what is spent on US elections. The 2012 presidential race cost over $2.6bn, according the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, with additional millions spent by candidates and outside groups like Super Pacs. Spending on the 2016 race is estimated to be more than double that.
But this extended race will cost Canadian voters, since parties are reimbursed 50% of their campaign expenditures, with candidates getting 60% back on eligible expenses. In the last federal election, those reimbursements alone cost taxpayers C$60m, and they are expected to grow this year.
This has all led to accusations by Harper’s opponents that the Conservative leader has changed the election rules in his and his party’s favour.
Robert MacDermid, a political science professor at Toronto’s York University, agreed, but noted: “It’s not just the Conservatives. Every party that’s been in power has tweaked the campaign finance rules to their own benefit.”
In 2004, Canada banned corporate and union donations to federal political parties, limiting donating power to individuals. Canadians can give an annual maximum of C$1,500 to each registered party and an additional C$1,500 in total to a party’s local organisation (known as a riding association), nomination contestant or political candidate.
The 2004 regulation change gave the then newly formed Conservative party a fundraising head start over the established Liberals, who had relied heavily on corporations to fill party coffers.
The party already had a fundraising model adopted from their roots in the Reform party, a now-defunct rightwing populist party whose members were key in forming Canada’s modern Conservatives.
“It’s a culture of a grassroots party that couldn’t depend on corporate support,” said Tom Flanagan, who served as the Conservative campaign manager in 2004 election and as a former chief of staff to Harper.
The Conservatives built upon their ability to fundraise small sums from a large donor base by adding an aggressive voter identification outreach programme, allowing them to cultivate an expansive centralised list of potential party supporters.
“Their campaigning hasn’t always been that brilliant, but with this money to spend they’ve been able to recover from mistakes along the way,” said Flanagan.
That system gave the party a significant fundraising edge, allowing it to regularly bring in more than double the funds of other parties over the years.
Flanagan said the money has helped the Conservatives establish electoral dominance since they took power in 2006, giving them the ability both to develop and refine their fundraising machine and to hit rivals with television attack ads.
“They used it to run pre-writ advertising targeted against the Liberal leader, and they really drove down the numbers of both [former Liberal leaders] Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, who kind of limped into the [2008] election campaign. The Liberals didn’t have the money to fight back,” he said.
It is a tactic they have also deployed against the current Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, who has been labelled as “just not ready” to be prime minister in a series of political attacks.
The Liberals and the New Democrats have since narrowed the fundraising gap, but they have not surpassed the Conservatives’ efforts.
According to party financial returns, the Conservatives raised C$13.7m in the first six months of 2015, compared with the New Democrats’ C$6.8m and the Liberals’ C$8.2m.
The party’s fundraising prowess could help explain Harper’s decision to trigger an election just days before his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, was due to take the stand in an Ottawa courthouse to testify in Senator Mike Duffy’s trial.
Duffy, a once high-profile broadcaster whom Harper appointed to the Senate in 2009, has pleaded not guilty to 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery related to questionable expenses claims and a C$90,000 personal cheque from Wright to help him repay those expenses.
Wright is not facing any criminal charges.
The scandal and its ongoing fallout have dogged Harper on the campaign trail for days as reporters have continued to press the Conservative leader on how much he – and his current and former top aides – knew about the secretive deal to repay Duffy’s expenses.
MacDermid, the political science professor, suggests the desperate behind-the-scenes scramble by top aides to quash the Duffy scandal when it erupted in 2013 was linked in part to the prominent senator’s fundraising role for the party.
“This partly is the Duffy story – the party saw him as successful at fundraising events,” he said.
So far, polls suggest days of negative headlines and conflicting testimony from Harper’s inner circle at the Duffy trial may turn soft-Conservative voters away from the party.
Meanwhile, the New Democrats have maintained a slight lead in the polls with the Conservatives in a close second, putting both within reach of winning a minority government. The Liberals are currently in third place.
But less than halfway through the campaign, Flanagan noted that Harper, who has never been broadly popular among Canadians, has nonetheless cobbled together a working coalition of voters for nearly 10 years.
“How do they keep winning? This is part of the answer – better organization, better fundraising, better tactics,” he said. “It doesn’t guarantee victory, but they’ve had a run of three elections in a row.”
