Calgarians won’t know individual donors who contributed to the more than $2 million contributed to Third Party Advertisers in Calgary’s 2021 municipal election.

After a Freedom of Information and Privacy (FOIP) submission by LiveWire Calgary, that was delayed twice asking for extensions, the information was provided on donor amounts, but with names redacted.

Elections Calgary said, in a statement to LWC, that under the Local Authorities Election Act they don’t have the authority to provide routine public access to TPA disclosure statements.

Access to this requires a FOIP request, they said.

“The disclosure statements may contain personal information, including the personal information of another party such as a contributor,” read a city statement.

“The information access request process under FOIP ensures The City undertakes its due diligence when considering release of information contained in disclosure statements.”

The city’s FOIP office said they requested consent from TPAs to provide the information.

“The City was advised by the TPAs that their individual contributors were not advised their information could be publicly disclosed,” read a statement from the City’s Access and Privacy office.

“As such, third party, personal, and business information was redacted (as per sections 16 and 17 of the FOIP Act).”

LWC’s Aryn Toombs broke down the data further.

Contributions made to third party advertisers

The levels of contributions to Third Party Advertisers for the 2021 election ranged from a low of $625 to $1.7 million.

Calgarians for a Progressive Future and Calgary Tomorrow both took top spots for contributions made. The former taking the entirety of their contributions prior to the province’s Bill 29 changes to the Local Authorities Election Act, and Calgary Tomorrow after.

Fluoride Yes was the only Third Party Advertiser to solely focus on a municipal ballot issue as opposed to working towards electing individual candidates. Alberta Proud, which in addition to working to get mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas elected, also advertised for their position on the equalization ballot question.

All together there was $2,271,947 contributed to the eight TPAs. This was about half the amount of the total of $4,229,787 disclosed by candidates as contributions made to the mayoral and ward races in 2021.

Those donors are named in candidate campaign disclosures.

Ward by Ward campaign finance information – by LWC.