P a t r i c k    C a i n ' s

Ontario Election Finance Page

...at its new home @snappingturtle.net.

Updated February 5, 2003

 

The purpose of this page is to distribute Ontario election contribution information in a form that's easier to use than the form in which it is published on the Commission on Election Finance's Web page.

It has two main parts:

  • On the download page, you can download one or more of four tab-delimited text files, one each for the Liberals and NDP, and two for the PCs. Between them, they document 133,385 political donations over $100 - about $47 million - to the three major parties in the four years between 1995 and 2000: who gave them, to what party or what part of what party, and the size of the cheque.

  • On the FAQ page, you can learn about election finance in Ontario, how we can make sense of contributions - how much they're for, and exactly where they go - and how the spreadsheets are organized.

    I'd recommend reading the FAQ first.

    I recently wound up my freelance research practice, and no longer have time to regularly update this site. A guide to where I left off is here. For more recent Ontario contribution information, you may find what you are looking for here.

    New!

    2001
    May 31: Brought the files on the site up to date. They now include all data for 1999, and donations to central party funds in the 2000 by-election near Hamilton. General updates to the site, such as removal of dead links, will follow.

    2000

    April 8: Added donation information for the Liberal central fund for the 1999 general election. Also included a quick guide to what 1999 donation information has been uploaded to this site.

    April 4: Added riding donation information for 1998 to the Tories' file, bringing it fully up to date to the end of 1998. This completes all files to the end of 1998.

    March 1: Added riding donation information for 1998 to the Liberals' file, bringing it fully up to date to the end of 1998.

    February 27: Added riding donation information for 1998 to the NDP's file, bringing it fully up to date to the end of 1998.

    February 6: Added a link to the HTML-based version of Election Canada's new Compendium of Election Administration in Canada, a useful study of how laws on campaign finance, donor disclosure and other aspects of elections differ across the country.

    January 15: Added new records of about 20,000 donations from 1998 and the 1999 general election. Split the file for the PCs between the 1995-7 and 1998-9 periods. Converted all files to tab-delimited text format to save space.

    January 15: added a link to Industry Canada's registry of federal lobbyists. One promising place to cross-reference donors.

    January 12 - Reorganized the pre-1996 ridings page, and added links to riding-by-riding results for the 1995 provincial election and by-elections in the 1995-8 period.

    January 5 - Added a link (in the U.S. section of the links page) to information on the recently published book The Buying of the President 2000.

    1999

    December 20 - I've completed what I visualized as Part Two of this project when I started it in 1998: cross-referencing the 100,000 Ontario political donations in the database with another database of 45,000 items of provincial government spending. Click here for details.

    November 3 - On the post-1996 federal/provincial ridings page, linked to the results of the June 3 election for each of Ontario's 103 ridings.

    October 28 - On the download page: some party finance data for 1998.

    July 6 - an updated alert about Bill C-2 (formerly Bill C-83), which could result in a 35 per cent reduction of the number of federal donations that end up on the public record.




    [download page]   [FAQ page]   [links]   [main page]  
    [pre-1996 provincial ridings]   [post-1996 federal/provincial ridings]  
    [E-mail me]