Locals donated thousands to convoy fundraiser

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/02/2022 (1494 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon residents collectively donated US$3,215 to a fundraiser supporting the occupation in downtown Ottawa and blockades at many Canadian border crossings.

A leaked document containing data shows 36 donations to the fundraiser came from Brandon-area postal codes and 1,279 donations from Manitobans amounting to US$145,172.

Searching the names listed in the data reveals that local donors include a post-secondary instructor, a chiropractor, the co-owner of a local contracting company, workers for government departments and Crown corporations and two executives for a local financial institution, among others.

On Sunday, American crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked and its web pages were replaced with a video showing footage of the song “Let It Go” from Disney’s animated musical “Frozen” and a list of top donors to a fundraiser benefiting the protests.

The fundraiser was originally on GoFundMe, but that site closed the initiative after it determined that the use of the collected funds violated its terms of service. GiveSendGo, which bills itself as a Christian crowdfunding site, has since become the campaign’s new venue.

Below that video was a file containing a list detailing every transaction relating to the fundraiser, including names, email addresses, donation amounts, countries of origin and postal or ZIP codes. The Sun has not independently verified the hack or the leak.

The compromised page was since removed and replaced with a placeholder stating that GiveSendGo is offline for “maintenance and server upgrades.” As of Tuesday, the full website had been restored.

The Sun was able to obtain a copy of the leaked document before the link was taken down.

Analyzing the entries in the leaked data shows that a total of US$8,421,806.50 was donated to the campaign in 92,844 transactions.

However, that doesn’t mean there were that many donors, as some people donated multiple times.

Because the country of origin is listed for each transaction, it can be ascertained that US$3,626,223.50 of the donated money came from the United States in 51,666 transactions.

When it comes to countries outside of the U.S. and Canada, US$484,296 was donated in 4,976 transactions.

That leaves the total amount donated by Canadians as US$4,311,287 over 36,202 transactions.

While Canadians donated the most money, Americans made more individual donations to the fundraiser.

To determine how many people donated how much money in each province or territory, the data was filtered to show only entries featuring each province’s unique letter that all of its postal codes start with.

Because some countries have similar postal codes to Canada’s, the data was also filtered to only show entries where the country was listed as Canada.

Here’s a list of donations by province or territory:

• Yukon Territory: 72 donations worth US$10,290

• Northwest Territories and Nunavut: 48 donations worth US$5,735

• British Columbia: 7,343 donations worth US$915,782

• Alberta: 6,675 donations worth US$867,551

• Saskatchewan: 1,335 donations worth US$203,063

• Manitoba: 1,199 donations worth US$145,172

• Ontario: 14,124 donations worth US$1,627,711

• Quebec: 3,850 donations worth US$321,283

• New Brunswick: 563 donations worth US$122,754

• Prince Edward Island: 116 donations worth US$11,914

• Nova Scotia: 640 donations worth US$57,413

• Newfoundland and Labrador: 194 donations worth US$19,613

For the effort of processing the payments, GiveSendGo’s proceeds from the fundraiser totals US$572,747.94.

With the fundraiser and website coming back online Tuesday, the total amount fundraised has arrived at US$9,348,588, with a second fundraiser titled “Adopt A Trucker” having generated US$741,211.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark