Campaign officials for Liberal MP and leadership candidate Joyce Murray (Vancouver-Quadra, B.C.) and former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay have provided The Hill Times with numbers that suggest the Trudeau campaign managed to convert only a fraction of the 150,000 Liberal Party supporters his legion of volunteers had signed up prior to the original March 14 deadline into registered voters eligible to cast ballots in the election to take place between April 7 and April 14.
In background conversations, officials with the two campaigns, each of which claim to have signed up and registered tens of thousands of supporters, also suggested they believe the Trudeau campaign purposefully waited until the last minute to begin registration of their supporters, with one post on the Trudeau campaign dated March 5 saying it was time to begin what the party has called step two of the five-month race—voter registration.
Ms. Murray did not comment on the numbers battle and allegations of manipulation over the registration process that began shortly before the original March 14 registration deadline, and which heated up after Liberal MP Marc Garneau (Westmount-Ville Marie, Que.) dropped out of the race last week and released a contentious survey of Liberal Party members and supporters that suggested Mr. Trudeau had an insurmountable lead and that Ms. Murray and Ms. Hall-Findlay, the only candidates included in the survey other than Mr. Garneau and Mr. Trudeau, were well behind second-place Mr. Garneau.
But Ms. Murray told The Hill Times that, with four weeks to go before the final voting day on April 14, she believes the backing she has received since launching her campaign last October, numbering what she described as in the “tens of thousands” and the support she expects to pick up will make what even former prime minister Jean Chrétien inadvertently suggested was a done deal into a contest.
Ms. Murray is the only candidate to have proposed what is likely the most divisive position, at least in the upper ranks of the party and among longstanding Liberals – cooperation with other opposition parties in order to defeat the Conservatives and Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) in the next federal election and go on to reform Canada’s electoral system with proportional representation.
“We’re in a campaign and every candidate decides what their priorities are and what their positioning will be on certain issues; that’s just the reality of a campaign,” Ms. Murray told The Hill Times.
“I’m in this campaign because I wanted to offer a vision of a sustainable society and I was clear in my mind that in order to actually be able to deliver on that vision we need to defeat Stephen Harper and change our electoral system that has delivered a majority government with under a under a quarter of eligible voters supporting the Conservatives,” Ms. Murray said, noting that a Forum Research poll in February found 53 per cent of Liberal Party members and supporters backed proportional representation over Canada’s current first-past-the-post electoral formula.
In an interview with Global Television over the weekend, Mr. Chrétien, after refusing in an interview broadcast Saturday on CBC Radio’s The House, slipped by indicating he has little doubt Mr. Trudeau will win the leadership.
"You know [Trudeau] will be fiscally responsible and he will be socially preoccupied like a Liberal is, and he will want Canada to be what we were in the world under [Lester B.] Pearson, under his father [Pierre Trudeau] and under myself, that’s big change, only that,” as he shrugged off criticism that Mr. Trudeau has not taken substantial policy positions.
An official with Ms. Hall Findlay’s campaign said number crunching has shown that, with only 105,000 of 294,002 supporters and party members registered to vote by the March 14 deadline, that it is likely Mr. Trudeau’s campaign had registered only 30,000 supporters as eligible voters, once supporters of other campaigns and supporters who signed up through the Liberal party were taken into account.
“Everybody knows that a week is a lifetime in politics, and as seen by the significantly low number of registered voters to supporters achieved by the Justin Trudeau campaign , the numbers don’t suggest anything other than a race, and we’re looking forward to doing as much as we can over the next four weeks to persuade the voters in this campaign,” Ms. Hall Findlay said in an interview.
“The point that I continue to say is the media is all over the number that’s put out be a campaign, 150,000 supporters, but there is a need also compare it to the other campaigns and the significant number of non-aligned members and supporters, where there was a very high turnover of supporters into registered voters,” Ms. Hall-Findlay said.
“The one campaign [Mr. Trudeau’s] has very low turnover of supporters to registered voters, and in the end, it will be the registered voters who decide, and I remind everybody that every riding is worth 100 points, it will be not just the numbers, it’s the math,” she said.
“There are some ridings in this country where there are thousands of voters and there are ridings in this country that have fewer than 50 registered voters,” Ms. Hall Findlay said.
A spokesperson for Mr. Trudeau’s campaign denied suggestions that it would have delayed the registrations or purposefully excluded email addresses for supporters, to prevent opposing campaigns from getting access with five weeks to go in the race.
“I believe our ratio of registered/non-registered is similar to the rest of the supporters,” said spokesperson Kate Monfette.
“We are not the only campaign having trouble with registrations [and] our registration numbers is similar to party numbers. We have to understand here that people who were signing up to be supporters had the option to provide an email address or a mailing address, or both,” Ms. Monfette said.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Party mass-emailed 18 letters between Jan. 22 and the March 14 registration deadline urging supporters and party members to register, including letters under the name of party leader Bob Rae, former leader John Turner, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynn and Prince Edward Island Premier Robert Ghiz.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: Tim Naumetz
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