Forum Research implemented a quantitative surveyfootnote 1 that was available to financial agents by telephone as well as online. This survey is the first of two waves to gauge the public opinion of the financial agents of registered third parties. The questionnaire was created by Elections Canada and programmed and tested by Forum Research. It was fielded in both official languages, English and French.
The qualitative questions were analyzed through a process of manual review and coding. The quantitative questions were analyzed through traditional statistical descriptive methods.footnote 2
Throughout the report, where applicable, some questions include a "Top 2" and "Bottom 2" score. Top 2 (TOP2) and Bottom 2 (BTM2) reference the collected top two positive and bottom two negative responses. For example, a TOP2 grouping referred to as "likely" may be the combined result of "very likely" and "somewhat likely," whereas a BTM2 grouping of "unlikely" may be the combined result of "very unlikely" and "somewhat unlikely."
The survey was active from December 6, 2019, to February 10, 2020. Data collection was paused from December 20, 2019, to January 5, 2020, for the holiday season.
The target population was the 2019 financial agents of registered third parties. Financial agents were responsible for administering the third party's financial transactions related to regulated activities during the pre-election and election period and for reporting those transactions to Elections Canada, as required by the Canada Elections Act. As such, these individuals were well situated to answer questions that relate to the third-party political financing regime.
Elections Canada provided Forum Research with contact phone numbers for all financial agents, as well as email addresses where available. The sample was dialled during business hours, periodically throughout the weeks. Respondents reached by phone were offered the option to switch to a web-based survey if they preferred. To increase reach and response rate, an online invitationfootnote 3 was sent via email on January 24, 2020, to all financial agents for whom email addresses were available. While participant responses were anonymous, each survey contained a unique, personalized URL for participants to complete the online survey. The purpose of this unique URL was to track whether participants had completed the survey. Two waves of reminder emailsfootnote 4 were sent to participants who had not yet completed the survey at the time of each reminder.
A total of 55 responses were received, with an average completion time of 16 minutes via telephone and 11 minutes online. These responses are equivalent to a 37% response rate.footnote 5 There were:
Most respondents participated online:
One respondent indicated they did not want to be contacted for the second wave of the study. All other participants either provided their contact information voluntarily for Wave 2 or, if they participated online, were informed at the end of the survey that they would be contacted by email with an invitation to participate in Wave 2 at a future date.
Note that due to the small sample size of this study, figures throughout this report are stated as frequencies and proportions as opposed to percentages.
Back to the note 1 A print version of the survey can be found in Appendix A.
Back to the note 2 Due to the small sample size, only frequencies were conducted.
Back to the note 3 The email invitation can be found in Appendix B.
Back to the note 4 The reminder email can be found in Appendix B.
Back to the note 5 Response rate was calculated by dividing the total amount of responses to the survey (55) by the total population who could have participated (147).