In the last seven days, the BC Liberals have spent $200 491 on Facebook Ads and $34 764 on ads for Wilkinson's page. Looking at the last 30 days, they are outspending the NDP by $240 993.

It's not abnormal for parties to ramp up spending close to the election. It is abnormal for the provincial parties to spend this much. Facebook has stats for all political ads bought from June 2019-today. The BC Liberals are the 12th biggest spender in Canada.

They've spent more than the Government of British Columbia, the Ontario Government, and Canada's NDP. Erin O'Toole, for example, spent $133 239 in his federal leadership race. Here's the chart for June 2019 - present.

To put this in perspective, both of the federal parties spent approximately 1M in the 2019 federal election on Facebook Ads. The BC Liberals have spent $503 873 in the last month (Liberal page + Wilkinson page), NDP are at $262 880 (NDP page + Horgan page).

For their spending during the campaign, 50 per cent of election spending is reimbursed. Of course, same thing applies to the NDP's spend of $262 880 in the last 30 days.

The Liberals are spending a lot on ads for Wilkinsons page. I checked with Elections BC, and they can legally do this as long as the ad is bought by the party. Since Sept 17, they spent $110 722 on Wilkinson's FB page. NDP spent $16 200 on Horgan's page -- same time frame.

Let's take a look at what these ads entail. Most of the Liberals spending is on ads like this about their main platform points. Last week, they spent 20-25k on this.

A lot of their ads seem to be highly targeted because they don't have a big potential reach and have a low spend. Earlier on in the campaign period, they ran a set of 44 of the same attack ads titled "Radical NDP." I did a random sample of a few of those. They target men.

Here is the demographic breakdown for all 44 ads. Some of this is just algorithmic, but you don't usually get 0 women looking at an ad unless someone on the back end puts in that setting.

These ads target NDP candidates Jaedan Dela Torre, Grace Lore, and Laura Parent. Here are some more charts -- another set of these ones just started running today.

The other ad they spent a lot on was a 25k-30k small business ad from Oct. 14.

Now, the NDP. I sincerely looked through their trove of ads. I found attack ads directed at Wilkinson, speculation tax, their record on health care. No ads specifically targetting any individual candidates. And again, some gender stuff here but not as blatant.

This is a bit more of a geeky thing, but the parties' strategies are completely different. The Liberals grouped ads together, so there are things like 44 ads with the same look but targetted differently, but the NDP put out a bunch of different ads. No massive spends on 1 ad.

the NDP could make this whole thread irrelevant if they ramp up their spending a lot this week. But FB's data changes every day so I wanted to screen capture this moment.

TL;DR the real winner of the B.C. election is Zuckerburg.

**sorry last thing I promise** I said it looks like the Liberals are highly targetting their ads. The NDP are definitely doing this, too -- they've got a bucket of ads at low spend, low reach, at specific ridings, etc. The main difference is in the $$!