TPC Update (en francais)

I've just finished going through all the public reports available, covering the years from 1998 to 2003. I pulled the name of every company that I could find in each report. Total number of companies is 111. By no means do I think that this is a complete list, but at least it will give us a picutre of what is going on with this program - and what a picture it is.

For each company, I'm running a donation search covering the years 1996 to 2004. This is the time frame that TPC has been running. I'm searching across all categories and all political parties so as not to miss anything.

One very interesting thing has popped up. In 1999 the TPC program had to be virtually shut down due to a WTO ruling. The program was suspended and retooled to conform to the WTO ruling. Amazingly, donations in 1999 totalled a whopping $2000.00 . That's right - 2 thousand dollars. Seems like when the government taps went dry, so did the companies political donations. But don't worry, looks like the Liberals made them pay for it in 2000. So far donations for 2000 are running at more than double the rate of other years. VERY interesting stuff.

BTW, a very big thank-you again to Andrew at Bound by Gravity for his rocking Donation Research tool. Without it, I don't think I would be able to slog through this.