Here Today... Gone To Hell!

Tories top resting Liberals in filling coffers

JANE TABER

SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER

Stephen Harper's Tories raised $5.1-million in the quarter ended March 31, nearly 10 times more than St?phane Dion's Liberals.

And Jack Layton's New Democrats raised $1.2-million, about twice as much as the $588,841 that the Liberals were able to bring in between January and March, 2007.

While the NDP and the Conservatives gloated over their results, the Liberals were on the defensive, explaining that they relaxed their fundraising efforts in this quarter after raising $6.5-million in the period ended Dec. 31, 2006.

Much of that money was the result of delegate fees for the Montreal leadership convention.

But some Liberals were grumbling yesterday about "donor fatigue," and that the new leader, Mr. Dion, is not catching on.

"Dion is not exactly a big draw ...," a veteran Liberal said.

The Liberal Party president, Senator Marie Poulin, dismissed that notion, saying that the latest result "has nothing to do with the leadership." The Liberals were simply taking a breather from their earlier efforts.

There were only 4,365 Liberal contributors this quarter compared with 45,192 for the Conservatives and 14,782 for the NDP. The Grits had more than 17,000 in the previous quarter, but the Tories argued that those results were skewed because of the convention.

The Tories said the Grits will now have an even more difficult time attracting donations after Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, in a speech to a London, Ont., church group on the weekend, compared the Harper climate-change plan to a "grievance worse than Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis."

Ms. May and Mr. Dion recently entered into a non-competition pact in which the Liberals will not run a candidate against her in the federal election in the Central Nova riding, which is represented by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay.

"I guess it will be even harder for them to raise money after May's comments," party spokesman Ryan Sparrow said. "This is the worst quarterly filing for the Liberals since parties had to start filing these quarterly reports."

New fundraising laws severely limiting the amount of corporate, union and individual donations came into force in 2004; there have been nine quarterly reports since then.

Yesterday in Question Period, Mr. Harper threw back the May comment at Mr. Dion, who has been aggressively questioning the Prime Minister over the Afghan detainee controversy and whether he still has confidence in Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor.

But Mr. Harper, referring to a letter from Ed Morgan, the national president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, condemning the May remarks, said he lacks confidence in the Opposition Leader.

He said Ms. May has "diminished the Holocaust, used the Nazi analogy that is demagogic and inappropriate, while belittling Canadians of faith.

"The Leader of the Opposition has hitched his wagon to this individual. I hope he will distance himself from those kinds of remarks."

And Mr. Dion did just that after Question Period. He told reporters that he believes Ms. May should withdraw her comments.

"... I understand why the Jewish Congress is upset and I know that Madam May is using a line that is used by authors both in the academic and in political life about Chamberlain and climate change, Chamberlain and poverty and so on," he said.

"We should not use it for the very reason that, in the spectrum of horror, the Nazi regime is beyond any comparison. So I'm uncomfortable with the reference to Chamberlain about anything else than what happened in the Second World War."

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