Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney speaks at the Sustainable Finance conference on Nov. 28, 2024.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
After much grumbling and a little intrigue inside the Liberal Party, a key contractor and close friend of Justin Trudeau has stepped away from Mark Carney’s nascent leadership campaign before it has been officially launched and committed to remain neutral.
For days, supporters of Mr. Carney’s potential rivals had been whispering that the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor might have an inside track because of the support of Tom Pitfield, the founder and chief executive officer of Data Sciences Inc.
Data Sciences is contracted by the Liberal Party to manage its voter-relations software and membership data in a database called Liberalist – including a trove of details on existing party members.
Mr. Pitfield’s involvement with a group doing preliminary planning for Mr. Carney’s still-unofficial leadership bid had supporters suggesting there was a conflict with his company’s work for the party, and his access to closely held data.
But Liberal sources said that Mr. Pitfield said to party officials on Monday that he will stay neutral, and not work for any campaign.
“Data Sciences will stay neutral per the Party’s request,” Mr. Pitfield confirmed in an e-mail. “I’m not playing a role in any of the leadership campaigns and will remain focused on getting it ready for the next election.”
The same principle will be applied to across the board to others who do work for the party, who will now be required to commit to staying neutral in the leadership race, Liberal sources said.
The Globe and Mail is not naming the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Although Liberals who provide legal advice to the party must now stay neutral, it was Mr. Pitfield’s role – and the crucial importance to the race of the voter data his company manage – that brought the issue to the fore.
Modern political campaigns rely heavily on troves of information in voter databases. Mr. Pitfield’s work in the Liberals’ 2015 election campaign helped the party win a surprise majority government. And it helped the party win the most seats in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections despite trailing in the popular vote to the Conservatives.
In a leadership campaign where only registered Liberals vote, those kind of data can be even more powerful. That’s especially true in the current, rushed campaign where there will be little time to sign up new members, making details on existing Liberals particularly valuable.
Those details could, in theory, help a campaign craft a strategy or tailor its organization.
If the internal data suggest that registered Liberals remain stalwart supporters of the government’s consumer carbon tax, it might persuade a candidate not to propose a plan to scrap it during the leadership campaign. If the data include a list of lapsed former Liberals, those people might be targeted in an effort to sign up new supporters.
There has been no sign that any of that party data have been made available to any leadership campaign and there haven’t been public reports of registered Liberals being contacted en masse.
And given the tight timelines for the leadership race, it presumably will only be a matter of days before the campaigns of all the official leadership candidates are given access to lists of registered Liberals.
But the perception that Mr. Pitfield was on Team Carney had already caused extensive complaining in the party and concerns from some party officials.
The grumbling isn’t entirely new. Some Liberal stalwarts never liked the idea that voter information collected by Liberal volunteers was put into the hands of a private firm, Data Sciences, run by someone close to Mr. Trudeau.
Mr. Pitfield is a lifelong friend of the Prime Minister, the son of Michael Pitfield, who headed the federal civil service as the Clerk of the Privy Council during the premiership of Mr. Trudeau’s father, Pierre. And he is married to Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Westmount Liberal MP Anna Gainey, a former president of the Liberal Party.
He is also the data guru who argued for pushing the Liberal Party out of its analog-age structures and using data-mining techniques to target and test the effectiveness of the party’s messages.
And the fears that rival camps raised over his potential role in Mr. Carney’s campaign are testimony to the fact that in modern politics, a lot of power comes with command of the data.