The party is so broke they’d struggle just to cover the travel expenses of the leader
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As the Trudeau government continues to stave off an election despite ever-plummeting public support, one clue as to how may be that the parties keeping them in power are too broke to afford a campaign.
This is the exact opposite of the Conservatives, who are sitting on more money than they could ever legally spend in a campaign. Their cash reserves at the end of 2023 stood at $16,197,685.
In a full-scale federal election campaign, $289,808 would barely be enough to cover the travel expenses of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, much less afford the resources needed to coordinate 343 candidates across six time zones.
In fact, it’s not much more than what Singh bills the taxpayer each month for his normal duties as a parliamentarian.
The quarterly expenses included $143,382.54 just to run his Burnaby South constituency office, another $294,286 expensed in his capacity as leader of the “Other Opposition Party,” and $238,275.61 to run the NDP’s National Caucus Research Office.
The Conservatives are also running up a high tab in parliamentary expenses each month. In that same quarter, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre expensed $987,014.17 just in his capacity as Leader of the Official Opposition.
But in sharp contrast to the NDP, the Conservatives have more than enough in their coffers to keep up that level of spending in a campaign.
The extra $2.6 million has probably improved the NDP’s cash reserves somewhat over their 2023 year-end, but the party also closed out last year still burdened by leftover debt from the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. The 2023 statements put the party’s various liabilities at $1.7 million, including $716,000 in outstanding bank loans.
The party was so financially unprepared for the snap 2021 election that it had to take out a $20 million loan that it has only now come close to paying off. At the party’s national convention in February, party officials said they only had $2 million left outstanding on the 2021 loan.
But in the meantime, debt servicing charges have repeatedly ranked as one of the party’s largest single expenses aside from salaries.
In 2022, the NDP spent $882,573 on “bank charges and interest” – more than 10 times what they spent on advertising for that year ($83,951). Last year, “bank charges and interest” topped out at $558,389, roughly on par with what the party spent on travel expenses ($476,181).
And the ragged state of the NDP’s finances is despite the fact that the party pursues an unusually strict system of seizing federal subsidies from its local ridings.
The Government of Canada subsidizes election expenses for parties that obtain more than 10 per cent of the vote in a riding. If that threshold is reached, Elections Canada cuts a cheque to the riding association for 60 per cent of their registered expenses.
According to a CBC profile on the practice in 2021, the Conservative Party and the Green Party allow their riding associations to keep 100 per cent of their Elections Canada rebates, while the Liberals had a policy of clawing back 60 per cent of local rebates.
The NDP – at least in 2021 – was the only party that pursued a policy of demanding that every dollar of rebate be sent to party HQ.
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