On disclosures

While we await some definitive answers about the membership lists coming out of the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race, there's more definitive information available about the funding of the province's political parties. And while the party picture looks to be a positive one (with the NDP not only holding more of its total election-year funding than the Sask Party even while losing office, but substantially beating out the Sask Party in individual donations), a couple of details about the 2008 donation list (warning: PDF) may be worth looking at in conjunction with the financial information from the race.

For the most part, there looks to be relatively little change in circumstances from my previous post looking at the donations to date. But the disconnect between Dwain Lingenfelter's leadership donors and the party's base of support looks to be all the more striking now that we know who gave what last year. In particular, of his fairly lengthy list of corporate donors, not a single one donated a disclosed amount to the NDP in 2008.

And the candidates themselves? Both Higgins and Pedersen gave substantial contributions in 2008, which won't come as any great surprise given their positions as an MLA and party president respectively. But the other two candidates don't show up on the donation list - which is particularly striking for Lingenfelter, who was of course the only leadership candidate to have declared his candidacy for the leadership for the last few months of 2008.