Technician Chris Leslie steams the tip of the Canadian flag's maple leaf as members of Canada's Liberal Party gather to choose a successor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, on March 9.Blair Gable/Reuters
After the Liberal Party boasted in January of signing up nearly 400,000 registered Liberals, only about 38 per cent of them made it through the verification process and turned out to vote in the race that elected Mark Carney as the party’s new leader and Canada’s next prime minister.
The party said 163,836 people successfully went through the authentication process. Of those, 151,899 voted in the race, or 93 per cent, which is the percentage the party is using for turnout.
But the party has not publicly explained why such a low proportion of registered Liberals voted. It has also not said how many registered Liberals were unable to be verified using its authentication process, which relied on a tool managed by Canada Post, or how many were disqualified because they did not meet the eligibility requirements. The party has also declined to provide a breakdown of how many members each campaign signed up.
Liberal MPs praised the turnout, pointing out that the number of voters was up significantly from the more than 104,000 who voted in the 2013 race that elected Justin Trudeau as party leader.
Former Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla, however, claimed Tuesday that her campaign had signed up 100,000 supporters before the party ousted her from the race. Her figure could not be independently verified.
“Imagine the outcome if the remaining 250,000 registered Liberals had voted,” she said in a news release.
The Liberal Party disqualified Ms. Dhalla’s candidacy last month just before the French and English leadership debates, citing various campaign-finance irregularities.
One Liberal party official dismissed Ms. Dhalla’s figures, saying the party has only identified about 200 registered Liberals as Dhalla supporters, though they did not explain how they reached that figure. The official said the fact that not all registered Liberals voted can be attributed to several factors, including tighter eligibility criteria, a short leadership campaign that meant less time for campaigns to organize their supporters and the general turnout patterns for all types of elections.
The Globe agreed not to identify the official, who was not authorized to discuss internal party matters.
The Liberals used a ranked ballot to elect their new leader, and a points system that allocated each riding in the country 100 points. The winning percentages were based on the number of points each candidate received.
Mr. Carney won 85.9 per cent of the vote, followed by 8 per cent for Chrystia Freeland, 3.2 per cent for Karina Gould and 3 per cent for Frank Baylis.
This was the party’s first leadership race since the 2013 contest that elected Mr. Trudeau. He went on to win a majority government in 2015 and then two minority governments, before announcing on Jan. 6 of this year that he would be proroguing Parliament until March 24 to allow time for the Liberal Party to select a new leader.
In the party’s 2013 race, around 300,000 people took the initial step to sign up as registered Liberals. Of them, 130,774 successfully registered to vote and 104,552 voted.
Prior to that race, the Liberal Party ended the practice of requiring paid memberships to vote. Instead, people could register as Liberal supporters at no cost.
Dalhousie University political science professor Lori Turnbull said that type of change can create problems because the membership base is so fluid.
“That strikes me as a very low number,” she said of the percentage of people who ultimately voted. She said large numbers of people are signed up at the last minute during leadership races.
“They have no particular loyalty to the party,” she said. “Now the approach to party membership is very transactional, and in the case of the Liberals, they don’t even charge a fee.”
Liberal MPs were on Parliament Hill Monday for a caucus meeting after Sunday night’s results. On their way into the meeting, several of them highlighted the increase in votes from 2013.
Ms. Gould said “it’s not abnormal” that a significant number of registered Liberals did not vote.
“I was thrilled to see the number of people who took out memberships, the number of people who participated and the number of people who voted,” she said.
Liberal MP Ben Carr said the party will need to do a postmortem to pin down the main reasons why some registered Liberals didn’t vote.
“It could be that there were some technical issues. People gave up,” he said. “It’s normal, just like in elections, to have a lower turnout than what the actual available voting population is.”
For the first time, the Liberal Party relied heavily on Canada Post to confirm the voters’ identities.
Before being allowed to cast a ballot, registered Liberals had to verify their identity through an in-person visit to a participating Canada Post Office or by using Canada Post’s Identity+ mobile app.
The focus on confirming voter identity was driven in part by scrutiny about the vulnerability of political parties to foreign interference in their electoral processes.
Justine McIntyre, a spokesperson for the Baylis campaign, said they were receiving messages right up until Sunday from supporters who said they were unable to vote.
Liberal MP Kody Blois said he’s proud of the fact that the party took extra steps to confirm the identity of voters.
“We know every single person who voted was legitimate, that there was no issue around foreign interference. I know there were some technical issues. We’re going to be following up with some members today. It wasn’t a perfect process, but I do think it was legitimate,” he said.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre won his party’s leadership in 2022 with 295,283, or 70.7 per cent, of the 417,635 votes cast. The Conservative Party had said 675,000 members were eligible to vote, meaning 62 per cent of them actually voted.
Around 65 per cent of 270,000 party members voted in the 2020 Conservative Party leadership race that elected Erin O’Toole. Turnout in the 2017 Conservative leadership race was about 55 per cent and it was about 37 per cent for the party’s 2004 race.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh won his party’s 2017 leadership race with 35,266 of the 65,782 votes cast. The NDP had boasted before the vote that its membership had tripled to more than 124,000, which works out to slightly over half of the party members casting ballots in that race.
Voter turnout in federal election campaigns has been below 70 per cent from 1993 onward. Turnout in September, 2021, the most recent election campaign, was 62.6 per cent.
With reports from Stephanie Levitz and Stephanie Chambers