For every election since our inception, the CCFR has been an active, registered 3rd party political advertiser. You may remember some of our previous election activities like the 2019 #IntegrityTour, when Rod and Tracey wrapped a 34 foot long RV and headed out across the country, embarrasing the Liberals.

Or the #TruthTour during the 2021 election. While Rod was enduring treatment for cancer, he produced an election brochure and companion website. Tracey loaded a van with almost 300,000 copies of the “Meet Your Liberal Team” brochure and put them in the hands of Canadian voters across vulnerable ridings to expose the Liberals corruption and failure. This was done with the help of hundreds of volunteers.

The CCFR has done some big things when it comes to elections, but this time we focused on a less wild, but more targeted project.

We launched the largest, most comprehensive and complex National Advertising Ad Campaign in firearms organization history. While we didn’t get the overall result we were working for, we made some huge progress. It’s all detailed below.

In fact, it all started well before the writ dropped for the election with “Operation Pitchfork”. We designed and printed thousands of awareness posters, outlining the unrelenting attack on our community by the Liberal Party of Canada under Justin Trudeau. It’s clear to anyone paying attention that the attack wouldn’t stop so we needed to engage and motivate our entire community. We made these unbranded posters and sent them unsolicited to every retailer, gun shop, club or range we could find a mailing address for, at our cost.

This project was accompanied by a full website with resources. You can find it HERE.

We spent about $51,000 on this initiative, which was all prior to the writ drop and therefore didn’t have to be filed or audited under the 3rd party political advertising rules, but the CCFR doesn’t sit around and wait for an election to get to work. Now let’s lookat what we did during election 2015.

Here are some quick facts and outcomes from the CCFR’s National Ad Campaign during the 2025 Federal Election.

Let’s start with our 2 phase approach to the election advertising. We wanted to accomplish two things:

1. remind voters what they can expect from the Liberal Party and influence people to vote for a friendlier party.
2. encourage our community to get out and vote, and bring as many people with them as possible.

With these 2 missions in mind, we launched both a “GOTV” (get out the vote) ad campaign AND a series of “attack ads” against the Liberals. These two sets of ads aired on national TV and on multiple social media platforms.

The GOTV ads featured Rod Giltaca and spoke straight to the casual firearms owners and hunters, an audience that may not be as politically engaged as the rest of us. They represent a large voting block and have influence over friends, family and colleagues, potentially over 2.4M people. We aired these on both Wild TV and Sportsman Channel Canada, 24 hours a day, during every episode of every show on both networks for over 3 weeks straight before the election.

SEE THE ADS

Let’s move on to the “attack ad” campaign, this is where it gets good …

Though we did not get the outcome we had hoped for, it’s important to recognize that none of our efforts as a community were even possible, without YOUR support that comes to us via memberships, donations, club insurance and other supports.

CCFR Participation Outcomes

Thanks to your support, the CCFR was able to effectively execute a nationwide political ad campaign (including TV, digital and online targeted advertising) as a registered Third Party Advertiser with Elections Canada.

The CCFR currently sits as Canada’s 6th largest political advertiser in the country. After filing our next (and last) required report with Elections Canada, we’ll be in the top 4. There is no question, the CCFR showed up for the Canadian firearms community.

You can view the entire list of spenders here:

Identifying Vulnerable Ridings

Using multiple polling agency reports, including aggregated data supplied by 338Canada, we identified 79 of the 443 ridings that were especially vulnerable, and would contribute greatly to the final election outcome.

You can see which ridings we targeted (including outcomes) in this document here:

Targeted Ads

The CCFR created 10 powerful attack ads, distributing them into the homes of millions of Canadians across the country with the help of Canada’s 3 largest broadcasters (Rogers, Bell Media and Corus Entertainment).

Our Ads were aimed at specific age demographics, in very Liberal areas of the country, and spread out via TV, digital streaming and social media networks.

New technology allowed us to target ads right down to a postal code, in some cases.

Ads ran repeatedly throughout the day/evening during popular TV and news programs.

We even ran ads during the Stanley Cup Playoffs on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+, our biggest ad running during Game 3 of the Montreal Canadiens series with the Washington Capitals. It was there first home game with a sellout crowd and a large audience watching online, and on TV.

In short, our ads were seen 23 million times, more than half of Canada’s population.

You can watch all 10 of the CCFR election ads here:

CCFR Third Party National Ad Campaign 2025

Election Outcomes

Though we didn’t see the final election outcome we worked hard to make happen, we did see some major success in terms of how our ad campaign impacted the federal election.

Some highlights:

• Of the 79 ridings we targeted, 53 achieved the desired outcome.
• We helped flip 9 liberal/NDP stronghold ridings to the Conservative Party of Canada. Some ridings hadn’t gone conservative in nearly 60 years.
• We helped increase the total vote count for the CPC in nearly every riding, and nationwide by an extra 2.3 million votes (almost the entire firearms owning community by numbers).
• We helped secure 24 vulnerable Conservative ridings, including Raquel Dancho’s Kildonan-St. Paul riding.
• We helped unseat several anti-gun NDP MPs including Jagmeet Singh, Alistair MacGregor and Niki Ashton.

In short, we had many election successes despite the final outcome.

Influencer Videos to GET OUT THE VOTE!!

In the waning days of the election campaign, we reached out to several “social media influencers” in our community and asked them to make short videos encouraging other firearms owners to get out and make sure they voted. Here are just some of those:

“9mm Melly” IPSC Champion & CCFR Gunnie Girl, Melody Phillistin

CCFR lobbyist Tracey Wilson

IPSC star and CCFR field officer Nicole Necsefor

IPSC Champion Tuna Cory Laurenson

Canadian hunting legend, Jim Shockey

Thank you

Again, thank you to every member, donor and supporter who helped us with this massive undertaking. As a team, we worked hard every minute of every day leading up to the election for each and every one of you.

All told, we spent over $450,000 over two months. We’ll update this story with the exact number once the final election audit and report have been filed, in accordance with Election Canada laws.

With your continued support we’ll be ready to do this again, and even bigger and better, come next election!

-TeamCCFR

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