Donations to the "Freedom Convoy" a statistical overview

Who gave and why

I was able to obtain, on Twitter a copy of the leaked donations log of GiveSendGo, for the “Freedom Convoy” of Canada. The data was shared by the journalist collective DDoSecrets. It was intended to be shared only with researchers and journalists, and I suppose I qualify as a researcher.

I will not share the source, as the data contains a great deal of personal information. While I obviously have political differences with the Freedom Convoy & its donors I do not think they all deserve to be doxed. This data is now very easy to obtain and has been splashed everywhere on Twitter, so unfortunately I doubt my objection to doxing will matter very much, as plenty of others are willing to.

I cannot verify the accuracy of the data, but given the scale, fabricating it would be beyond just about anyone’s capabilities.

Here are the statistics I was able to draw out:

There were a total of 91,845 donations.

The total amount donated was $8,421,807

This gives a mean donation of 92 dollars. The median donation was 50 dollars.

I haven’t done a full analysis of the names by apparent gender yet, but if you put a gun to my head I’d say it’s about 60% men, 40% women.

56% of donations were from the United States, 39% of donations were from Canada. Despite Americans constituting 56% of donors, I was surprised to discover they only contributed 43% of funds or $3626224. Canadians contributed $4311287, scraping in at over half of donated money, though only barely.

A representative sample of comments included with the donations (checked for personal identifying information and picked at random) is:

“Let’s go Brandeau”

“We will fund you until the job is fully done.”

“love from kansas”

“Freedom isn’t free! Donated to help the brave truckers and Canadian people fighting for all of our lives! Thank you & bless you. Hold the line!”

“God Bless.”

“Keep on trucking”

“Way to go everyone. Very proud of everyone involved. Lets get our freedom back! To God be all the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

“Let The Lord Use this for his good.”

“God bless you”

“Go Oh Canada!”

“Thank you for doing the hard work of liberty.  I hope this contribution makes a difference in your lives and the lives of those you are trying to help.  Human liberty is the only value that matters, because liberty exposes genius to opportunity.  Keep on truckin’, my friends.”

“I am triple vaccinated.  However, your rights of dissent are the most important issue that we, as Canadians, face today. The way that you have been described by the major media and our PM is a travesty. Good luck to you.”

“Thank you all.”

“Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau contributed to writing our Charter of Rights and Freedoms,  in contradiction his Son, Justin Trudeau and the present ruling class across our land have imposed authoritarian mandates suppressing many of our rights and freedoms in violation of Canada’s most cherished historic document. Johns Hopkins study proves Mandates didn’t work & contributed to greater harm”

“God bless all of you.”

“Live by the Spirit and in truth”

“We love you all.  Keep on Truckin. You're doing the right thing and we support you.”

Content analysis

I read through far more than the sample above. It’s fair to say that the two most prominent themes are God and freedom. Freedom was unsurprising, but I was surprised by just how common religious sentiments were. In hindsight, this makes sense, as GiveSendGo styles itself as a Christian Website.

Explicitly far-right sentiments were relatively rare, although one person I spotted referred to the “save the children” QANON conspiracy theory. A search for “1488” in comments revealed nothing. A search for “HH” revealed one commenter who had commented “HH” and nothing else. A search for QANON revealed nothing.

References to police in the comments were split. Most were negative, a number were positive, and a few were ambiguous, calling on police to choose the “right” side. Quite a few comments were from people claiming to be police officers, or retired police officers, including one from a fellow claiming to be an Ottawan police officer.

Another theme was people pissed off that Go Fund Me had frozen their donations, and determined not to let that stop them from giving to the cause.

Summary

In essence, this database suggests a heavily religious movement that believes itself to be anti-authoritarian. It has more American funders than Canadian, although a slim majority of the money did come from Canada. The donors who donated via this website were mostly small donors, both in terms of headcount, and in the sense that most of the money came from small donations. However, it’s very possible that large donors chose other ways to give money. We should bear in mind that this dataset may not reflect the movement as a whole, or even funders as a whole, as it is from an explicitly religious website.