On a balmy night last June, campaign teams and supporters gathered nervously at their respective election parties as they watched the votes slowly drift in for the Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection.
In a hotly contested battle between Liberal candidate Leslie Church and Conservative challenger Don Stewart, the race remained neck-in-neck for most of the evening. As the counting stretched late into the night, most watch party guests eventually gave up and headed home to bed.
In the early hours of the morning the race was finally called in favour of Stewart. Only 633 votes ultimately pulled him ahead of Church.
Party staffers and political analysts considered the seat to be one of the safest Liberal strongholds across the country, a riding the Grits had held since 1993. The seat was most recently held by former cabinet minister Carolyn Bennett. In the wake of the byelection loss, several Liberal MPs publicly encouraged the prime minister to step down — a call that Trudeau, at the time, dismissed.
Now, newly disclosed campaign returns from the byelection reveal the Liberals’ hold on Toronto-St. Paul’s was even more tenuous than many assumed. During the byelection, the Conservatives raised more money yet spent less on their campaign than the Liberals, according to the recently filed financial statements analyzed by the IJF.
“It does surprise me that the Liberals outspent them because there's lots of literature that shows that the more money you spend, the greater number of votes you end up getting,” said Alex Marland, a professor of politics at Acadia University. “And because the Liberals ended up losing, this tells me that things in that byelection were even worse than most of us realized.”
“It would be easier for the Liberals to explain away if they said they didn't try hard, but if they put a lot of money into it, then they were trying,” said Marland.
With a federal election due later this year, the returns suggest the real possibility that backlash for the Liberals could result in both significantly fewer votes and fewer fundraising dollars.
The Conservatives raised more than double what the Liberals pulled in from the riding, according to the IJF’s analysis of the returns disclosed with Elections Canada.
Despite winning, the Conservatives also spent less overall on the campaign compared to the Liberals.
In fact, Church’s Liberal campaign walked away nearly $58,000 in debt, with around $15,000 owed to the constituency association and almost $43,000 to the central party.
Breakdowns provided in the returns also shed light on how the different campaigns distributed their dollars. The Liberals spent around seven times more on campaign manager and campaign workers’ pay than the Conservatives. The Church campaign also splashed out $15,000 on pre-election polling.
On the other hand, the Conservatives spent more than the Liberals on advertising and campaign events. Advertising for the Stewart campaign cost around $58,000 compared to $42,000 for the Church campaign.
Nearly a third of Stewart’s advertising budget is recorded as falling within the vaguely named “Other” subcategory, which includes social media ads.
Ad spending data published by Meta reveals that between $9,200 and $11,026 was spent by the Don Stewart campaign on Facebook and Instagram ads in the weeks leading up to the byelection. The Church campaign, on the other hand, spent less than $3,000 on Meta ads.
It wasn’t surprising the Conservatives outraised the Liberals in the riding, a former core volunteer with the Stewart campaign told the IJF. We agreed to protect his identity as he fears workplace retaliation for speaking openly to the media without prior approval.
The campaign volunteer said the Conservatives have generally had a good track record of raising money in downtown Toronto ridings which tend to be wealthier than suburban ones, a trend supported by previous reporting done by the IJF in partnership with the Local News Data Hub.
The campaign’s fundraising efforts also match trends observed about the broader party: the Conservative Party’s central fund has outraised the Liberal Party’s every year since the former was founded in 2003.
However, there are other reasons the Conservatives were able to raise so much cash in the riding, said the campaign volunteer. He said while canvassing for Stewart he encountered lots of anger towards the government among former Liberal voters, especially its approach to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Many residents also expressed affinity for their former MP but not necessarily the Liberal Party itself — with Bennett having resigned, they were open to switching their votes, according to the volunteer.
Neither Stewart nor Church responded to the IJF’s requests for comment.
Marland said that while the Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection on its own doesn’t necessarily mean much, “when you combine it with what happened in Montreal and with what happened in Vancouver, now you've got a worrying trend for the Liberals.
“Those are all urban areas that the Liberals should be holding and doing strong in, and certainly [we] don't expect the Conservatives to,” added Marland. “We see a very anti-government vote emerging in those places.”
2025-01-24T15:00:20Z