Kudos go to Abbas Rana of the Hill Times. This week he asks the question most Liberals seem to have avoided: why, exactly, do they suck so bad at fundraising?

As it turns out, the federal Liberals, unlike other national parties, didn’t have a nation-wide membership list accessible at the federal level of the party until fairly recently. And, when asked why they couldn’t compile one from their provincial membership lists, the response is that the people responsible for keeping said lists don’t like to share their information.

“For all the Chrétien years and the Martin years, part of the challenge for fundraisers was they never had access to all the information that would have made them more effective. Everyone was sensitive about their lists—bagmen didn’t want to share their lists, the fundraisers didn’t want to share their lists with non-fundraisers and non-fundraisers therefore didn’t want to share their membership lists. If you’re not updating your data on a regular basis, you’re using old data and when you’re raising funds, you’re sending letters to people who are deceased, people who have moved, multiple letters in some cases because you haven’t merged the information,” said the Liberal.

The source said the key reason why the provincial wings don’t share their lists with party headquarters is because they were afraid the party headquarters would compete with them to raise funds.

“Instead of looking at it as a disadvantage, let’s call it a bigger pie for everyone. The reason the Tories have been successful is they created a bigger pie. Instead of arguing about who is going to get what share of this pie, why not make the pie bigger and therefore everyone can have a bigger share? So, everyone benefits. The problem is everyone looks at it from a negative context, how they’re about to lose something rather than looking at it how we’re gaining something. That’s the problem with the Liberal mindset. The reason they’ve had difficulties fundraising is it looked at everything from a negative approach, ‘Oh, Chrétien changed the rules, oh, it’s so hard to raise money.’ They should stop complaining. The rules are the same for every party,” said the Liberal.

This sensitivity about lists is pretty much a reflection of that typical Liberal trait: the desire to exercise power. The people responsible for their lists consequently have a degree of power over the people on those lists, and if that knowledge is shared, some power is inevitably lost.

The Liberal Party president, Doug Ferguson, says they finally have a national membership list. I’d be curious to see the December 2008 quarterly financial returns from Elections Canada, to determine if the list actually made a difference.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 07:57 and is filed under Libranos, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.