I’m trying to confirm this number from a few other sources, but from what I’ve heard so far, the Ontario Election tonight cost us $94M all-told. They had budgeted for about $60M, but the final cost soared. They’ve already started using $90M as the budget for the next election. The website for the referendum question, YourBigDecision.ca, cost $620,000 alone.
To give you a sense of that amount, that’s 4% of the province’s surplus for 2006-2007. Nice. Couldn’t that buy some schoolbooks or something?
Can you believe we paid that to re-elect the same guy? 
I almost wish the Green Party got in just so we’d get our money’s worth 
UPDATE 10:56pm: I finally found a document confirming this. Here’s the “Projected Costs for the 2007 Provincial General Election and Referendum” (pdf) (Google cache) from the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer. It estimates the cost of the election at $92,944,000. Woah. I was hoping I wasn’t right
UPDATE 10:24am: Sounds like they might have gone over their budget, up to $140M! Keeps getting better
The reports seem to suggest that a significant portion of the province wasn’t even informed on the mmp system. Did we spend enough?
Nice research. I am shocked it cost $620,000 for a website – even though it is very slick.
@sean: It might not be whether we spent enough, but whether we spent it in the right places. Remember these costs don’t even include the 100+ people that spent a year “researching” this.
@WTL: Those are about agency prices I guess. But wouldn’t a one-pager with the question on it have sufficed?
I am astonished at the cost of 93M$ for this election. I hope it is gonna be worth it!!!!
[...] So it’s back to the polls in Canada, after we just had another expensive election in Ontario. digg_url = ‘http://www.keebler.net/blog/2007/10/17/dion-calls-motion-of-non-confidence-in-canada/’; [...]