Calgary residents donated more than $250K US to convoy protests
CBC
People living in the Calgary area donated about $251,580 US to a campaign intended to benefit the convoy protest through the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, shows leaked data posted online.
The data was hacked illegally and released publicly on Feb. 13.
CBC News analyzed the data and built a tally of the donations from those who listed a postal code with forward sortation areas (FSAs) from within the city of Calgary.
Along with postal codes, donation figures and names, the leaked data also includes email addresses.
CBC News emailed all Calgary donors who contributed more than $1,000 US, but many did not reply to the request for comment and only one was willing to go on record. Those who did not want to go on record have not been identified.
The figures listed in this article should be taken as approximate given the way the website GiveSendGo treated its data validation.
Some of the names are clearly placeholders — for example, one donor listed their first and last name as Freedom Lover — while a limited number of Calgary postal codes are paired with United States country codes.
GiveSendGo also did not require its users to verify the postal codes that they listed, meaning those users could have entered fake information. A large portion of the donations listed as being from Canada did give a true postal code and some additional Calgary donations may not be included.
With those caveats in mind, here's what the data reveals in Calgary, by the numbers:
With a total of $251,580 US, Calgary outpaced what was given in the province of Manitoba, at $145,000 US, and about about $50,000 US more than Saskatchewan residents, who kicked in nearly $200,000 US.
Calgary's donations represent nearly six per cent of the total amount donated in Canada, listed at $4.3 million US, but Calgary makes up just 3.5 per cent of Canada's population.
Similar city-based tallies have not been fully completed so far by CBC News, so a direct city-to-city comparison is not yet possible.
Lori Williams, a political science professor at Mount Royal University, said the high numbers emerging out of Calgary are not particularly surprising.
"Just out of voter behaviour and public opinion, there is a slightly higher percentage of people [in Alberta] who would sympathize with some of the causes that are represented by this convoy," she said.
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