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— Zane Schwartz

1 — Corporate donors to the Communist Party of Canada

In 2001, Tera International Consultants Inc., a Montreal-based firm, donated $300 to the Communist Party of Canada. The contribution appears to be the only political donation made by the company, which was incorporated in 1987 but dissolved three times thereafter — in 2009, 2013 and 2017 (most recently, after failing to file annual income statements). The company was registered as a non-distributing corporation with fewer than 50 shareholders. No other information about its consulting offerings, or any rationale for a donation to an anti-capitalist organization, is publicly available.

— Jesse Snyder

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

$275,000 — CIBC’s orange crush

Canada’s banks often weight their donations evenly between centre-right political parties. Royal Bank of Canada has donated repeatedly to Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party. TD Bank contributed to the right-leaning B.C. Liberals in both 2015 and 2016. And in the last by-election, Bank of Nova Scotia gave almost $20,000 to the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario. Doing business with the left is another story: In 2016, the CIBC gave $275,000 to the NDP in Saskatchewan — as a loan.

— Stuart Thomson

$1.6 million — Donations from beyond the grave

Until recently, there was one simple trick to get around federal donation limits: You could die. Several of the largest donations in this database are from estates, almost exclusively bequests to the NDP. “This is one area of fundraising, the law allows it, and we started a legacy campaign to use that,” an NDP MP told Postmedia in 2014. The biggest contributions come from the estates of Peter Kirk Sinclair (totaling $1 million in 2014 and $600,000 in 2013), William Giesbrecht ($296,164 in 2012), Ruth Millicent Hass ($210,858 in 2010) and Jack Layton ($50,000 in 2012). The B.C. NDP also racked up huge estate donations during this period. None of the other parties come even close to such bequests, and the Conservative government closed this loophole in 2014 as part of the Fair Elections Act. In at least one case, donations from the great beyond have also led to litigation: Sinclair’s daughter filed a lawsuit arguing he was mentally unfit when he essentially cut her out of his will to give to the NDP. (She eventually settled out of court.)