Liberals' weakness is Volpe's opportunity

The political parties have submitted their financial records for 2005, and they show the Communists in the black, the Tories in the red, and the Liberals -- in a pickel.

Or to put that in more precise terms, according to Elections Canada the Communist Party of Canada recorded a surplus last year of $27,478, on revenues of $42,045. The Conservative Party of Canada, despite revenues of nearly $18-million (not counting public subsidy), still managed to close the year with a deficit of $700,000. And the Liberals?

The good news is that the party posted a surplus, for the first time in a decade. The bad news is that it raised less than half as much money ($8-million) as the Conservatives, from fewer donors (24,000) than the NDP. And that was while it was still the government.

The conventional wisdom has it that the party is a victim of its own reforms: the near-total ban on corporate and union donations Jean Chretien decreed in the last days of his regime, perhaps to wash away the stain built up over the previous decade. And indeed this would account for much of the party’s abrupt decline from the days when it could shake down corporate Canada for a guaranteed several mil a year.

But look closer, and it’s clear the party has much deeper problems than that. If it were just a matter of the new rules, we should expect to see Liberal contributions clustering around the $5,000-plus-inflation limit imposed under the law. In fact, they averaged just $346 per donor last year, and are scraping $200 so far in 2006. The constraint, in other words, is not binding.

Figures released by the various campaigns in the current leadership race show much the same pattern. Most of the leading candidates are relying heavily on what are officially referred to as “loans,” from friends, family, even themselves, on terms that are far from arms-length.

But as for traditional, old-fashioned donations, these are rather thin on the ground. Michael Ignatieff -- the frontrunner -- reports a total of $17,200, nearly a third of which came from his lead fundraiser. Stephane Dion has raised a similar amount. It’s early days yet, I know, but my goodness.

Others are doing better: Maurizio Bevilacqua raised $100,000 at a recent event, while Gerard Kennedy’s campaign claims to have collected about $200,000. And then there’s Joe Volpe.

Mr. Volpe must live with the humiliation of having been caught taking cheques from minors -- specifically, the five under-age children of various executives of Apotex, the generic drug maker, who with the help of their families contributed a total of $108,000 to his campaign. But humiliation is all he appears to have suffered.

Though he “voluntarily” returned the $27,000 in kiddie cash, Mr. Volpe has obdurately held onto the remainder. Whatever the legal status of this apparently spontaneous decision by five Apotex executives, their wives and children to each contribute the legal maximum to Mr. Volpe’s campaign -- the Elections Act probhibits any “attempt to circumvent” the restrictions on corporate donations or to “act in collusion with another person or entity for that purpose” -- it has earned Mr. Volpe no rebuke from his party, or even from the other candidates, barring an oblique comment by Mr. Ignatieff.

And now we see why. If there is one area in which the Liberals are in weaker shape than fundraising, it is membership. Indeed, the party cannot even say for certain how many members it has. Still, at the end of the last leadership campaign, the party claimed upwards of 530,000 members. By the start of the current campaign, it could account for just 80,000.

The leadership race was expected to boost that total, and indeed it has -- by about 70,000. And of that number of new memberships, exactly half were turned in by the campaign of Joe Volpe. Or so they claim. Yes, they may all be concentrated in a few urban ridings, and no, there’s no way of holding these new members to their vote. But still -- anyone who doesn’t think Mr. Volpe will be a major, major player at the convention is kidding themselves.

It was looking grim enough for the Grits as it was. Their finances are in disarray, their organizational structure is a mess, and important party figures keep popping up with distressing regularity to repudiate key articles of Liberal faith: in recent weeks, we’ve heard confessions from John Manley that the Liberals were prime culprits in shouting down needed debate on health care reform, from Allan Rock that the UN is in need of root-and-branch reform, and from Frank McKenna that Canada should have signed onto ballistic missile defence, to say nothing of Stéphane Dion’s shocking admission that Canada would not be able to meet its Kyoto targets even if he were prime minister.

But to be delivered into the trembling hands of Joe Volpe: that is something not even their worst enemies would wish upon them.