WINNIPEG — The head of the federal Conservative fundraising machine says the party will be debt-free and have cash in hand once $10 million in Elections Canada rebates are returned to the party following last month's election victory.

Irving Gerstein told delegates at the party's first national policy convention since 2005 that the Conservatives are leaving the opposition Liberals in the fundraising past.

"We are ready to fight the next election whenever it may come," Gerstein said Saturday morning in a speech at the Winnipeg Convention Centre.

The party's aggressive and sophisticated techniques for finding, contacting and cultivating partisan donors are perfectly suited to the Federal Accountability Act, said Gerstein, a reference to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's first major piece of legislation when the Tories came to office in 2006.

"We have created complex, leading-edge fundraising techniques such as data-mining, segmentation, targeted marketing and relationship management -- all in an effort to move our pool of identified supporters up the support pyramid from supporters to members to donors," said the fundraiser.

As a result, some 175,000 donations are coming into the party annually, with an average donation of $115.

But the Conservative data management system, known as CIMS, has raised both fundraising envy and privacy concerns.

Last March, federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said she was beginning a study into the way political parties use personal data.

At the time, Stoddart expressed concern over the "very sophisticated information machine" that powers U.S. politics and said she feared it is coming to Canada.

"It gives you a lot of profiling of individual voters that correlates their political affiliations with many other things," said Stoddart. "I think this would be regrettable if Canadians' political opinions then were individually tracked that way."

Stoddart's worry is Gerstein's motherlode.

"The key to the success of our fundraising business is the funds database and our ability to prospect new donors, to effectively use the (CIMS) database for both fundraising and political purposes, and being at the cutting edge of political fundraising techniques in North America," he told the Conservative convention.

Publicly posted returns from Elections Canada have long shown the Conservative party to be awash in cash compared to their political adversaries.

In the first nine months of 2008, the Tories raised $14.8 million compared to $3.6 million for the Liberals.

Gerstein noted that not only has the party been able to pay off all debts since its merger birth in 2003, all its suppliers are fully paid up and there have been investments in party infrastructure.

"We have supported aggressive pre-writ advertising campaigns," added Gerstein, "and I believe Mr. Dion has already commented on the effectiveness of that expenditure."

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion publicly complained when he announced his resignation last month that an unprecedented 18 months of Conservative ads attacking his leadership had permanently and unfairly "cemented" his reputation in the minds of Canadian voters.