OTTAWA — The federal Conservative party appears to have about 35,000 reasons not to be overly concerned about investment anger on Bay Street.

That's the number of contributors who donated something less than $200 to the Conservatives in the latest quarter, stuffing party coffers with cash and insulating Stephen Harper's minority government from the wrath of spurned investors upset by this week's dramatic income-trust turnaround.

The latest party financing figures from Elections Canada show that 94 per cent of the Conservative party's third-quarter, $3.7-million haul came from a broad base of small donors.

The Tory contributions dwarfed third-quarter Liberal fundraising of just over $900,000.

To date this year, the Conservatives have raised $13.3 million, according to the publicly posted figures. That compares with $4.1 million for the Liberals and $2.8 million for New Democrats.

It's a continuing trend that shows no sign of abating and puts particular pressure on the Liberal party to change its fundraising practices.

"There's a medium-term trend, that the Liberal party has just not been able to adapt to the new rules as effectively as it should have," said Leslie Seidle, an expert in political financing with the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal.

Those rules currently limit party donations from individuals to $5,000 annually. Under proposed Conservative legislation, the limits could soon fall to $1,000 for contributions to national parties and another $1,000 for party candidates.

When Liberal Senators recently floated the idea of amending the proposed accountability act to double national party donation limits to $2,000, the Conservative government reacted with outrage.

"The Liberals have got to kick their addiction to big money," thundered Treasury Board President John Baird.

His partisan jab might actually be taken as friendly advice.

The Conservatives continue to benefit from their Reform party roots, with its grassroots, populist funding base. But the Liberal problem isn't just one of party culture, said Seidle.

The Liberal Party of Canada is a decentralized structure in which separate provincial wings mount their own fundraising drives. There's still no national party membership list, making national campaigns difficult. Seidle calls it a problem of "organizational coherence"

The latest figures show 148 individuals contributed the $5,000 maximum to the Liberals, principally to the campaigns of leadership candidates. Only a small portion of that came back to the central party coffers.

Another 652 Liberal donors gave the party $1,000 or more. That compares with 170 such donations for the Conservatives -- all of exactly $1,000.

But the real separation comes from the small fry of the donor pool.

In all, the Tories had 37,453 contributors in the third quarter, including 35,310 who gave less than $200.

The Liberals had only 7,269 contributors, including 6,362 -- or 87 per cent -- who gave less than $200.

The NDP had 13,137 contributors.

Private fundraising isn't the only source of party financing. Starting in 2004, taxpayers began kicking in an inflation-adjusted $1.75 per vote for each federal party, taking the pressure off individual donations.

That leaves the Bloc Quebecois relatively comfortable despite a paltry $15,000 in third-quarter donations from only 192 supporters, a figure Seidle likens to "a couple of good bake sales."

The seatless Green party, by contrast, earned $85,000 from 1,410 individual contributors.