While I won’t have time to write any blog posts during the Convention, I thought that I would share with you this following answer that I just posted to an important question that was posed to all presidential candidates in the Liberals Rebuilding Facebook group:
Campaign spending is an important question for delegates because spending is arguably the best way to distinguish establishment from non-establishment candidates. It’s a truism in politics that establishment money lurks in the background, never going to the candidates of real change. In this race, unfortunately, there are no spending limits and no transparency. That’s one of the many things I’m standing for President to change!
I can only give a ballpark estimate at this point, having been to busy over the past two months to keep close track, but probably spent on the order of $14,000 on the whole campaign, which in my case has stretched over 12 months (I declared last January, when the Convention was scheduled for June).
To put that into perspective, it’s less than the cost of a single, well-appointed hospitality suite for at the Westin Hotel, where the Convention is being held. A couple of the campaigns are hosting two big hospitality suites on two consecutive nights.
Fourteen thousand may seem a lot, but I’ve learned that it’s a shoestring budget for mounting a national campaign. I did the vast majority of my travel by car. Just over $7,000 came from modest donations by individual Liberals. The balance, necessarily, comes out of my own pocket. I neither solicited nor accepted corporate or quasi-corporate donations. By quasi-corporate, I’m referring to the deep-pocketed law firms which have had so much influence in our Party over the past decade.