Follow the money

And timing is everything

ABOVE THE FOLD

As JAY-Z once said, numbers don’t lie. And at Queen’s Park, that adage runs true — fundraising is still one of the clearest gauges for a party’s political muscle, organizational health and donor confidence.

So, I crunched the numbers for 2025, and they offer a reality check on who’s building an arsenal and who’s lagging behind.

Couple caveats before we dig in: The tally uses real-time disclosures from Elections Ontario for the annual period, which wouldn’t necessarily capture all contributions from the February campaign (more on that momentarily). There’s a lag in posting, too, so some year-end donations may not have shown up yet.

Also: Elections Ontario doesn’t readily disclose donations under $200, so parties’ internal counts will likely be higher than what’s posted publicly — that impacts the NDP in particular, which tends to be the party of smaller donors. Now that that’s out of the way…

Here’s how the parties stacked up last year:

The PCs raked in an eye-popping $8,…