Guelph Citizen Digs Into Campaign Expenses

Doing their due diligence on the money front from last fall's Municipal Election, Andy Best at the Guelph Citizen posted a breakdown of how much the current members of council spent in order to win their seats. For council candidates, the spending limit is between $16 to $18,000 depending on the ward they're running in, while there's a $82,000 limit for mayor. For the most part, the candidates didn't get near their spending limits, but the numbers, as pointed out by the Citizen, do show some interesting trends.

You can check out all the paper work for yourself here, but below you can look at what may be the most pertinent number: the amount of money each candidate raised. This does not mean that this is the amount that they spent, because in some cases the candidate put some of their own money into the race which doesn't count as fundraising.

As for the trends, you will note that the winning incumbent candidates spent less than first-term councillors that won. Ward 4 candidate Rob Dunn-Dufault wins as the council candidate that did the least fundraising with barely $300 in the coffers, while Ward 3's Craig Chamberlain, who lost a seat by a mere five votes, raised the most money with nearly $7,800.

Check out the rest of the numbers below

Ward 1

• Dan Gibson: $5,873.93
• Bob Bell: $2,196.70
• Karolyne Pickett: $5,755.34
• Terry O’Connor: $2,405.43
• Maria Pezzano: $4,005

Ward 2

• Andy Van Hellemond: $2,012.04
• James Gordon: $5,450.18
• Ray Ferraro: $1,800
• Martin Collier: $3,650
• Sian Matwey: N/A
• Chris Keleher Sr.: $270.13

Ward 3

• Phil Allt: $6,319.97
• June Hofland: $3,580.09
• Craig Chamberlain: $7,766
• Maggie Laidlaw: $1,325
• Bob Moore: $4,705.83
• Jason Dodge: $2,359.42

Ward 4

• Christine Billings: $5,604.15
• Mike Salisbury: $3,526.67
• Laurie Garbutt: $1,825
• Scott Tracey: $1,549.15
• Gary Walton: $2,350
• Greg Roffey: $2,400
• Greg Schirk: N/A
• Rob Dunn-Dufault: $306.92
• Mark Briestensky: No contributions

Ward 5

• Leanne Piper $4,194.71
• Cathy Downer: $6,153.20
• Scott R. Butler: $4,251.02
• Bob Senechal: $2,795
• Dimitrios Jim Galatianos: N/A
• Alex Green: $1,637.59

Ward 6

• Mark MacKinnon: $3,149.15
• Karl Wettstein: $2,527.70
• Todd J. Dennis: $2,580
• Glen Tolhurst: $2,993.32
• Keith Poore: $1,703.86

In the Mayor's race, you'll note that the money raised by Cam Guthrie exceeded the spending limit by about $7,000, but his expenses came to about $10,000 under the spending limit. Now you may think, does that mean the Mayor is walking around with an $20,000 in his pocket? Of course not. Actually, there are expenses that don't count towards the spending limit but one still needs money to pay for, things like auditing, the costs of fundraising activities, and office charges incurred after Election Day. Here's the breakdown for the mayoral candidates.

• Cam Guthrie: $89,230.21
• Karen Farbridge: $80,136.50
• Jason Blokhuis: $6,767.14
• Andrew Donovan: $966.21
• John Legere: $200.27
• Joseph St. Denis: $6,192.70
• Nicholas Ross: N/A

There's a lot of different things that can be discussed if you go more deeply into the numbers, and it seems that Best is going to keep digging over at the Citizen. Stay tuned.