Mind you, all that advertising would have to be dropped to run a no debt central campaign. [Taking account of the rebate effect: $2m less spending to not have the $1m debt that was accrued last time.]

Or who would say, publicly, that they think the priority must be the central campaign [and May's campaign]?

But its been several months since we had the discussion about the LPC- and as much as they have invested in it, to date there has been no change in their smaller donation capability, and I’d say the indications are they are at least still many months away.

They have improved their event based Iggy talking large donor scooping- enough that they are back up to breakeven. But they say themselves that the hanges they require are in the smaller donation capability.

You may be right about whether the current leadership will even have the option of adding to the long term debt. I wouldn’t be so sure it requires Jack Harris’s touch… but this is a cae of where it may be shoe on the other foot: me underestimating how difficult it is to keep expanding the number of people privately loaning tens to hundreds of thousands to the GPC. I would certainly agree that I don’t expect the banks would be willing to ADD another million to GPC loans.

That’s not neccesarily in the cards, but it could happen at any time. Ditto for the Liberals, and Dippers.

As far as oversight, council will be asking questions, and there is debate about spending, borrowing, and campaign budgets. If the money isn’t there, then I cannot imagine big loans being available to the next Federal Campaign, because Banks will limit their exposure, and Jim Harris will not be producing his magic rolodex to go out and raise private loans as he did in the 2008 elections. The current debt load is temporary, but fortunately it looks to me like it will difficult for the GPC to incurr any form of long term debt, so the next leadership will have a chance to start improvements pretty quickly. Even the current leadership might decide to hit the reset button when confronted with serious spending constraints. Why not? It’s not that hard to read the statements and come to the obvious conclusions.

But as to the question of how much financial strength there is or might be, and what internal pressures that puts into play….

The basic central expenses of the parties are remarkably stable over time when you consider how much the revenues and everything else changes so much and so quickly. The GPC is no exception, and from what we do know its unlikely that the May crew will have substantively decreased that this year. [Like me, you may have expected that it would have increased over 2008- which it has not... although the evidence would suggest that means at least some degree of shift away from spending on organizers in the field and more towards people working for and around the Leader.]

At any rate, the expense levels you see from 2007 and 2008 [not counting the election and pre-election] are pretty certainly still there.

I agree that “Fundraising is partly a function of skill, and systems which could be dramatically improved over time.” But I think you are pretty sanguine about how short that time can be, when we are talking about a diffuse national organization.

The Liberals are testimony to that. They have been putting a huge priority on ramping up smaller donations, since before Iggy was Leader and with more focus since. But for all their recent success in sucking up every large donation that can be found, capacity building in smaller donations is a systems thing, and thats slower in coming: zero results on that for the LPC yet.

Similarly, the NDP had a much more straightforward path to ramping up findraising 5 years ago: none of the complications the LPC has, a Leader with savvy and top notch new hires that the GPC does not have… and even with that, it was well over a year before you could measure improvements in dollars.

Given what is going on in Ottawa for the GPC, the chances of systematically improved fundraising over as short a term as we are talking here, seem just about zero.

If I were in your position I also would not worry about whether the inner sanctum has enough money to run a good central campaign and pour into the Leaders seat from now till there is an election. Since you don’t have much confidence in their ability to spend effectively, why bother worrying about whether they have enough?

Problem is they have every incentive to spend regardless of the debt they saddle all of you you with. So if they added a million in debt last go around, and if it is true there is little chance the $1.3million debt will go down much or at all before there is an election…..

Bringing this back to Concil and the election at hand:

These are just the kind of questions you want Councillors to be asking, and to have some confidence who you vote for is willing and able to push for real answers.

First Quarter GPC fundraising was the same as the last couple years. In two weeks you’ll have the Q2 results- expect those to be the same [at best].

Questions that follow from that are not rocket science- and you SHOULD be able to count on a healthy collective process that gets them asked. [IE, no one person needs to know now exactly what questions they would ask.] But if you don’t get enough Councillors willing and able to have a productive discussion, no one will ever have any idea- as is the case now.