Real Time Disclosure

Unfortunately, the government can pass legislation to help a company or harm it. The Party in power certainly wouldn't want to hurt a company that provides major donations to it, or whose owners or managers do. Conversely, they could harm a company that makes significant donations to the opposition party. For many years the legislation requires political parties to report the names and addresses of everyone who donates more than $100 in a calendar year (or during an election campaign) to Elections Ontario in the Annual Financial Return (or Campaign Return). More recently (2007?) the government passed legislation requiring this information to be provided within ten business days such donations are received. This is "Real Time Disclosure."

So, for example, a person who donates $25 each month must be reported within 10 days of the fifth donation as having donated $25 recently and $125 total for the year. The next month, report another $25 donation for a total of $150, and so on until the last month of the year when the total donated is $300. Accordingly it is necessary to submit a new file at least every two weeks.

The process is substantially automated with an RTD Donations Report in CRM that extracts all donation records for the year (or campaign period) and an RTD Template spreadsheet that takes the this data and accumulates the donations by donor. Elections Ontario issues specification for the format of the file required to be submitted. The format was modified in 2017, which required revisions to both the extract procedure and the spreadsheet.