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| Justin Trudeau - realpolitiek practitioner |
John Ibbitson in the Globe &
Mail comments
on the plans of the Trudeau team to use the changed constitution of the
Liberal Party of Canada to enhance the chances of Trudeau not only winning the
leadership contest, but of replacing
Stephen Harper's tired Conservative government come 2015.
The Trudeau team understands that
the political contours of Canadian politics has been forever
changed by the bold
experiment of the Liberals to allow non-members to have a say in electing
the new leader:
But earlier this year, the Liberals created a new class of affiliates, called “supporters.” No fee or party membership is required for supporters to cast a ballot for leader. All they need do is sign up.
Team Trudeau aims to create supporter-recruitment machines in all 308 ridings (just as Obama for America did in all 50 states). They will employ every tool, from old-fashioned door knocking to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Many of these new supporters will be young, female and/or minorities – the same base that rallied behind Obama for America.
The riding campaigns will feed the names of these new supporters to campaign central, which will combine the information in a database that will, if it succeeds, contain hundreds of thousands of entries, each a mini profile of a Justin Trudeau supporter.
Assuming Mr. Trudeau wins the leadership, that new base of support will grow and deepen between the leadership vote next April and the general election in October, 2015.
The use of such an enlarged voter
base in a primary system has
had benefits in Britain, where the Cameron Conservatives have used it for
choosing candidates to run as MPs, something the LPC did not agree to at its
last convention. Hopefully, the next policy convention in 2014 – after the
election of a leader of the party – will have a resolution put before it to amend
the party's constitution to provide for the selection of candidates for MP
using the same primary plus Supporters formula.
The primary system chosen by the
Liberals is one of the few manifestations of the Arab Spring movement taking
place in Canada. The first was the mass movement of Quebec voters from the
do-nothing PQ to the Jack Layton NDP in our last federal election.
Justin Trudeau should be complimented for seizing the opprotunity to widen the participation of Canadians in the serious business of selecting the leader of the party that will most likely form the next government.
"The primary system chosen by the Liberals is one of the few manifestations of the Arab Spring movement taking place in Canada. The first was the mass movement of Quebec voters from the do-nothing PQ to the Jack Layton NDP in our last federal election."
ReplyDeletePeople dying for democracy and the Liberal party changing its membership rules or a shift in vote are incomparable. An irresponsible and sensational comparison.
Not at all. The Arab Spring is the reaching out by peoples for remedies for their democratic deficits. The reaching out by the LPC is something similar. Fortunately, no Canadian is being shot because of it.
ReplyDeleteBut the underlying impulse of the NDP vote in Quebec, the LPC new class of Supporters, and the movement labelled the Arab Spring, is the same in my mind: a desire for greater democracy.