Top NDP donors are insiders

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This article was published 18/07/2011 (5547 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The NDP’s most generous donors are people whose jobs depend on the party staying in power.

According to a Free Press analysis of all political donations made between 2006 and 2010, most of the top 25 donors over that five-year period were MLAs or senior political operatives in the legislature.

That includes cabinet ministers such as Healthy Living Minister Jim Rondeau and Finance Minister Rosann Wowchuk and senior political advisers such as Michael Balagus, chief of staff to Premier Greg Selinger and to former premier Gary Doer before that.

The list of top donors to the Progressive Conservative party contains few surprises. It includes the city’s wealthiest families such as the Richardsons and the Rileys, as well as developers and party activists, with a few MLAs thrown in.

But NDP politicians and political staff were more generous that the cadre of wealthy elites who gave to the Tories.

The Tories’ most lucrative donors collectively brought in $251,000 over the last five years. The NDP’s top donors brought in $27,000 more.

Thanks to a new, more sophisticated method of direct-mail prospecting, the Tories have built a much bigger pool of donors in the last couple of years than the NDP. And the party rakes in more money than the New Democrats — nearly 75 per cent more last year to the central party. More of those donations are coming from small donors, many of whom have never made a political contribution.

All that, plus the reliance on party operatives for big-dollar donations, raises questions about the party’s grassroots reach on the eve of what’s expected to be the tightest provincial election in a decade.

“That’s not a good sign,” said Kelly Saunders, a political scientist at Brandon University. “Not only in terms of dollars but also in terms of voter appeal.”

New Democrats say they are proving their commitment to the party by having some “skin in the game” — the same phrase Conservatives used to suggest party operatives have less than altruistic motives for donating.

Nanci Morrison, NDP secretary, says the party is in fine financial shape going into the next election and the fact that the party’s top donors represent a fairly narrow slice of the voting public shouldn’t cause alarm.

“I can’t ask people to give unless I am willing to give to the maximum,” she said. “I expect those people give for the same reason I do. They believe in the party.”

Morrison said the NDP is always trying to expand its donor base.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca

 

TOP DONORS (cumulative totals, 2006-2010)

Progressive Conservative

 

Trevor Maguire $13,757

Wilf Taillieu (head of Taillieu Construction) $13,686

J. Derek Riley $12,265

Brian Hastings (senior vice-president of Qualico Developments) $12,000

Susan Glass (philanthropist, wife of developer Arni Thorsteinson) $11,250

Craig McIntosh (CEO, Acrylon Plastics) $11,051

Kathleen Richardson (philanthropist) $10,687

Kenneth Lee (party treasurer) $10,567

Richard Campbell $10,281

Brent Pooles (past party president) $10,125

Curtis Gray $9,630

J. Henry Borger (Ladco) $9,602

Randall Moffat (former chairman of Moffat Communications) $9,500

Larry Maguire (MLA) $9,442

James Morden $9,312

H. Sanford Riley (president and CEO of Richardson Financial) $9,142

Ron Schuler (MLA) $9,078

Deborah Riley (philanthropist, wife of Sanford Riley) $8,993

Cliff Cullen (MLA) $8,880

John Reimer $8,835

David Keam (president, Best Sleep Centre) $8,795

Mark Olson (real estate developer) $8,720

Bonnie Mitchelson (MLA) $8,707

Travis Penner $8,592

James Richardson $8,540

 

 

NDP

 

Michael Balagus (premier’s chief of staff) $13,488

Jim Rondeau (MLA and cabinet minister) $12,977

Kieran O’Keeffe $12,900

Kerri Irvin-Ross (MLA and cabinet minister) $12,864

Rosann Wowchuk (MLA and cabinet minister) $12,562

Gregory Dewar (MLA) $12,458

Anna Rothney (premier’s senior policy staffer) $12,107

Sonia Kowalewich (former party secretary) $12,037

Darlene Dziewit (former Manitoba Federation of Labour president) $11,752

Mary Johnson (longtime party activist) $11,575

Robert Dewar (MGEU director of operations) $11,519

Erna Braun (MLA) $11,280

Theresa Oswald (MLA and cabinet minister) $11,250

Robert Ziegler (UFCW president) $11,203

Stan Struthers (MLA and cabinet minister) $10,983

David Woodbury (Treasury Board associate secretary) $10,619

James Murphy $10,417

Angela Mathieson (head of cabinet’s powerful economic development committee) $10,356

Douglas Smith (writer) $10,032

Kathleen McCallum (project manager with cabinet’s economic development committee) $9,762

Lorraine Sigurdson (party president) $9,712

Esther Hiebert (minister’s assistant) $9,669

Andrew Swan (MLA and cabinet minister) $9,146

Sandra Oakley (CUPE Manitoba regional director) $9,013

Jennifer Howard (MLA and cabinet minister) $8,987

 

Liberal

 

Naomi Gerrard (artist, wife of Jon Gerrard) $11,813

Jon Gerrard (MLA and party leader) $11,113

Val Thompson (Frontier Toyota co-founder and Liberal activist) $8,392

Marina Plett-Lyle (Liberal activist) $7,317

Marcel Thompson (Frontier Toyota) $6,785

Paul Edmond $6,550

Otto Lang (former federal cabinet minister and former president and CEO of Centra Gas) $5,965

Gail Asper (Canwest and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights) $5,600

Mathen Mathen (physician) $5,400

Margaret von Lau (immigrant advocate, former Liberal candidate) $5,016

 

The Borger effect

 

There is no family more politically generous — or more astute at hedging its bets — in Manitoba than the Borgers.

Over a five-year period, the family donated nearly $120,000 to all three major political parties. The family, whose Ladco company built Royalwood and Southdale and is developing part of Waverley West, donated a few thousand more to the Conservatives than they did to the NDP. But, they donated to every leadership candidate who ran for the Tory leadership in 2006 and the NDP leadership in 2009.

In 2010, more than a dozen different members of the family donated to the NDP.