HAMILTON — In 2014, Chris Erl ran to be a school-board trustee in Hamilton. He didn’t win, but the political geographer came away with an interest in campaign finance.
“The spending aspect was something that really weighed on me,” Erl says. He was an urban-planning student at the time, “didn’t have a lot of recourses,” and wasn’t sure how much to fundraise and what to spend it on. In the end, he says, the winner spent less than he and the other candidates did, leaving him interested in how money influences races — a focus he brought to his doctoral work and then to his current postdoctoral work at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“Every single time there is an election, the campaign financial documents can sometimes tell you more than any of the campaign materials, any of the candidate statements, even things that happened in the debates, because the money is actually where a lot of the connections can be drawn between different candidates,” Erl says. “I find that money is often one of the most fascinating aspects of a campaign.”
For a recent issue of his newsletter, Erl analyzed the financial records submitted by candidates for office in the 2022 Hamilton municipal election. TVO Today asked him to expand on what he learned about candidates’ connections, prominent donors, and — with the Toronto mayor byelection around the corner — what candidate-donor relationships can teach us about local politics more generally.
A chart showing the average expenses and per vote spending of candidates. (Chris Erl)
TVO Today: Of the 150 candidates who ran for office in Hamilton last year, you noted that 80 had listed donors, and there were something like 1,300 donors. How did you go about mapping this out and breaking it down?
Chris Erl: It’s a little bit tough. Some cities provide a lot of really good public and open data. The City of Toronto, for example, will offer downloadable spreadsheets. But the City of Hamilton just posts the PDF copies of candidate financial returns. What I needed to do was go into each of those and take the donor data from those pages. Sometimes it required literally typing it out because some of the candidates had filled out their forms by hand. But other times, it was a copy and paste from the PDF. When I took that, I was able to get a clear list of names, postal codes, and amounts donated. From there, it was pretty easy to run a few different analyses based on the donor list that I had.
TVO Today: Given that maybe half of candidates had listed donors, are we missing information, or is there stuff that we can’t know through an analysis like this because we don’t have all those figures?
Erl: There is a little bit missing. Some of the higher-profile names in the Hamilton election, like Bob Bratina and Max Francis and some of the other folks who ran and came quite close, just didn’t submit campaign financial documents. Sometimes if a candidate is worn out after a campaign or if they simply didn’t have the resources to have an audit done, they just won’t submit the campaign financial documents. This makes them ineligible to run in the next election.
With somebody like Bob Bratina, his not submitting any campaign financial documents is essentially his way of saying he retires from politics. But for some of the others, we are missing some really important data. It creates a little bit of a gap in our understanding, but enough candidates did submit paperwork where we do actually have about as clear a picture as we can hope to get.
A chart showing the portion of donations candidates sourced from people in different locations. (Chris Erl)
TVO Today: So one of the analyses you did was to look at the percentage of candidate donations that were sourced locally. Why did you want to do that, and what does that tell us?
Erl: In Hamilton, we have a very opinionated electorate when it comes to where a candidate lives and how connected they are to their community. Oftentimes, one of the biggest questions that candidates will get at the door is, “Do you live in this neighbourhood?” A lot of folks really care passionately about their communities, and they want to make sure that their elected representatives do so as well.
Taking a look at donations, when we look at where they come from, this can give us an indication as to how connected a candidate is to their community. When we look at somebody like Jeff Beattie or Alex Wilson or Maureen Wilson or Craig Cassar, they had a substantial number of donations come from within their own wards, which means they had clearly been doing a lot of work on the ground in the lead-up to the election to let people know who they were, to make sure that their connections to the community weren’t simply something that happened around election time. This was a reflection of a long-standing commitment to working within their communities.
This can give us a good idea as to a candidate’s motivations, a candidate’s strength when it comes to the campaign, and what they’ll be focusing on when they’re actually in office. A lot of times, a candidate can source donations from people in the development industry, construction and real estate — folks that might have a vested interest in what happens in the city but might not necessarily be their constituents. So this kind of gives us an idea as to whether a candidate is going to be specifically working for the people in their community or if they might have a more city-wide or potentially larger view of different issues in our community.
A bar chart showing the percentage of candidate donations from the real estate construction and development sector. (Chris Erl)
TVO Today: And you also tried to figure out, as you mentioned, what fields of work people were donating from. You looked particularly at the real-estate sector. Why was that an important one?
Erl: Real-estate interests tend to dominate municipal contests because it’s folks in the real-estate-development and construction industry that often have the most invested in a municipality and in the decisions of a city council. If a developer is looking to build a brand-new subdivision, they’re going to want a friendly council who can maybe expedite the process and maybe provide different sources of funding for them or maybe agree to a kind of development that may not necessarily be within the city’s official plan but can make a developer or somebody in the real-estate industry a lot of money.
Back when corporations could still donate to municipal candidates (the 2014 election was the last one where unions and corporations could donate), one of the things that a lot of city-hall watchers and people who are interested in municipal politics would do is go through and see the percentage of donations that a candidate received from the development industry, because that would give them a good idea as to who would maybe be friendly to arguments against urban sprawl, arguments for increased intensification, filling in the missing middle, better public transportation — those sorts of things.
When we take a look at how these donors are connected to these industries, just like with where the donors are coming from, this gives us a really good idea as to what a candidate’s priorities might be. When we take a look at somebody like Maria Pearson, who was on Hamilton city council for many years but lost re-election in 2022, she had over 50 per cent of her donors come from the real-estate-development and construction industry. And her ward (Lower Stoney Creek, Fruitland and Winona) has seen a significant amount of development over the time that she’s been a councillor.
The campaign financial documents can sometimes tell you more than any of the campaign materials, any of the candidate statements, even things that happened in the debates.
TVO Today: For this analysis, you were specifically looking at donors who’d given more than once. Why was that?
Erl: Everybody that had donated more than once was searched. All the names and then any prominent names that showed up, if they donated once, were also included. It’s simply the sheer number of donors and the time that I had, it was a little bit difficult. But what I’ve found is that a lot of folks in that industry, they don’t tend to donate once. They tend to spread donations around because they want the most favourable council possible.
If a local resident knows their neighbour who’s running for city council, they might give to them but not want to give to maybe a mayoral candidate or a school-board candidate or somebody else in a different ward. But somebody in the construction industry, they’re going to want a substantial block of councillors who are able to provide them with the most favourable conditions for their business to thrive. So that’s why we see a lot of folks, particularly connected to new home development and large real-estate-investment trusts, donating multiple times.
A visualization showing how donors connect candidates in the 2022 Hamilton municipal election. (Chris Erl/Kumu)
TVO Today: And this gets into this one interactive visualization you made of the different candidate connections. What did this tell you as you started to look at who was giving to whom?
Erl: It showed some very clear connections between what we consider the progressive bloc on council and the more conservative bloc on council. It was very rare for people to donate across those bloc boundaries, except when it came to the mayoral race, because then that’s where the connections came in: progressives and conservatives both saw things they liked in both the major mayoral candidates, Andrea Horwath and Keanin Loomis. Progressives saw Keanin Loomis’s commitment to urbanism as something that was great, but they also saw Andrea Horwath’s long-standing social-democratic policies as being something they liked. And then conservatives saw Andrea as being a well-respected figure in the city, somebody who could maintain the course, pretty much carry on the legacy of Fred Eisenberger. (It was notable that Fred Eisenberger’s wife donated to Andrea Horwath’s campaign.) But conservatives also saw Keanin Loomis’s business acumen, his connections to the Chamber of Commerce, and his connections to small business in the city as something that would be positive for them.
So what we saw is that there were two major blocs that formed that were sort of bridged by the mayoral candidates. But, generally speaking, when it came to people in the real-estate, construction, and development industries, they were all donating to that conservative bloc, which was really fascinating. Sometimes it was just very small connections — like, it could be one or two connections between a candidate that tied them together. But overall, it was rather clear that, in essence, there is what is very close to a two-party system on Hamilton city council.
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TVO Today: I also thought that was interesting, because it seemed that the progressive side and the conservative side both raised basically the same amount of money and spent the same.
Erl: Yeah, you usually think of the right wing as being able to generate more at the federal level. The Conservative party is always able to out-fundraise the New Democrats and the Liberals and the Greens. But when it comes to municipal candidates, in part because the spending limits are quite low for council candidates, it was interesting to see that they were able to do that. There were some progressive candidates that knocked it out of the park fundraising-wise in the last election. There were people who maxed out the amount of donations they could get, like Cameron Kroetsch and Alex Wilson and even some of the school-board candidates like Sabreina Dahab and Ahona Mehdi. They were able to do incredible work when it came to fundraising. That speaks to their connections to the community; they established themselves as well-respected and well-known progressives, people who could be relied upon to provide a progressive analysis. People responded to that and gave their money accordingly.
TVO Today: The visualization also shows a “lonely reef” featuring those with fewer connections. Who was on it?
Erl: Interestingly, there were some candidates that I certainly expected to be more connected. Jeff Beattie, who’s the new city councillor for Ward 10, and two very controversial school-board candidates, Catherine Kronas (who is connected to the New Blue Party of Ontario and is very opposed to so-called woke ideology) and Becky Buck (who had previously sat on the school board and but had found herself wrapped up in the scandal around the alleged racist attitudes of school trustees). I certainly expected her to have some more connections, and same thing with Catherine Kronas. She was getting a lot of donors from around Ontario, but I think it’s because her politics is quite new to a lot of people. And many of the other so-called anti-woke school-board-trustee candidates either self-funded their campaigns or didn’t submit financial paperwork. Many of the other unconnected candidates were sort of folks who were third or fourth or fifth in the count at the end — people that didn’t necessarily do very well.
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TVO Today: And you raise in your newsletter an interesting chicken-and-egg question about donations. Can you expand on that and how that colours our analysis?
Erl: This is something that we talk about a lot when we’re considering campaign donations within the academic literature. Have you identified a candidate that is similar to your values and you want to provide them with funding so that they do well? Or do you see a candidate that may be a little bit more tabula rasa and is sort of unknown, and you may want to push them in a particular direction?
One of the best examples of this is in 2003, when Terry Whitehead was elected to Hamilton city council. He became a rather controversial and very right-wing councillor at the end of his time in office, but when he was first running, he was a little-known political staffer who had worked for different parties. He was the kind of candidate that people might have simply looked at and said, “Well, he’s a leader in the community, but I don’t know exactly what his politics are. So maybe if I give him a bit of money, that’ll get me access.”
There are a lot of donors federally who will split their donations sometimes across all four major federal parties, and sometimes they’ll just split them between maybe the Liberals and the New Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, NDP and the Greens, etc. And the question is always: Are they simply trying to maximize their chances of having connections to power, or is this a way of them maybe demonstrating their financial power, their ideology? I think, honestly, when we look at the municipal context, it’s likely a little bit of both for a lot of people. It’s really hard to tell what an individual’s motivation is.
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TVO Today: You note some major takeaways at the end of your analysis. The fact that candidates need a lot of money, that they draw on a lot of different sources, and that there’s still some corporate influence when you break down the sectors from which people are donating. Was there anything that surprised you?
Erl: I think the most surprising thing in the mayoral contest was the fact that there was so much overlap and there were some really interesting connections. As I noted, there were candidates who received donations that I didn’t think would receive donations from the same people. For example, there’s Maria Felix Miller, who’s a very progressive school board trustee in the lower city. Some people who donated to her campaign were also donating to the campaign of John-Paul Danko, a mountain councillor who’s a little bit more on the right to centre-right sort of side. There were some folks who were donating, for example, to Andrea Horwath and also to some of these more conservative candidates, like Walter Furlan, who is a controversial kind of hard-right candidate in Ward 3 who was opposing the agenda of the incumbent councillor, Nrinder Nann.
It was really interesting to see how some people would split their money and give to some people who were considered more progressive and some people who were considered more conservative. And I think the folks that didn’t submit financial paperwork, again, that is a fascinating thing to me. Some very high-profile folks who might have gone very far in politics in the city had they stuck it out for a few more elections, the fact that they kind of gave up their chances by not submitting financial paperwork, that’s always surprising to me.
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TVO Today: With Toronto’s mayoral byelection coming up, I’m curious: If you were to do this sort of analysis for that, what would you be keen to find out?
Erl: I’d be really interested to see the partisan affiliations of some of the donors. This is the work that I’m doing for a manuscript I’m writing for McGill-Queen’s University Press that adapts my doctoral work. The idea is to take the municipal donors and then match them to federal donors. And you can see some clear patterns when you do that. One of the really interesting things to look at will be how the Conservative party (or its supporters, at least) is splitting its donations. And it’ll also be interesting to see where partisans from the Liberals and New Democrats are splitting their donations. It’ll also be interesting to see if any donors are again drawing on provincewide donors or if a lot of candidates are focusing on Toronto.
One of the really interesting things about, for example, the Ottawa mayoral race in 2022 was that a candidate like Catherine McKenney, they were very focused on Ottawa and received most of their donations from Ottawa. Will that be the same for somebody like Olivia Chow, who’s a very similar candidate? I think that’s something that’s going to be really interesting to look at. And, again, finding out the influence of developers. In Hamilton, it’s a big deal; in Toronto, it’ll be a bigger deal. The amount of development and change that’s happening in Toronto, that’ll be absolutely fascinating to see.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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