Typically, highly organised campaigns that have deep pockets and a long reach benefit most from ridings that are rural and sparsely populated with Liberals. Is this by accident or is it contrived?
There is information circulating that suggests Rae has gained 14 delegates from two votes cast in one rural Quebec riding. Would anyone disagree with me that this is at least not helpful to fair process and at most insulting to the Liberal leadership process and to democracy?
Does anyone think the Party does not have an obligation to create systems that prevent this from happening? Are those who make these rules sloppy or strategic?
In a sense, the current system for choosing delegates, which has much influence over who will become leader favours those with resources and those who are organized to know that many delegates can be picked up in rural regions.
If the Liberal party can build a successful country like it has since 1993, it can build a system that does not allow things like this to happen at the expence of some very good candidates with fewer resources. After all, we are not electing their organisations, eh?
22 comments:
take a look at what Iggy has done to write in ballots in BC.
This does not make sense. The 14 delegates were presumably members of the riding association and would therefore have voted for themselves & the rest of the Rae slate
absolutely ridiculous. even some of the youth clubs with low memberships don't go this nearly this low.
you should not be able to elect more delegates than people who voted.
As for the slate issue, no. You could run as a delegate in a riding you were not a member of, and that's probably what at least 12 of those 14 people did.
This demonstrates one thing though. Between the established mega-organizations and the ridiculousness in the rural areas, its no crying shame that Gerard Kennedy didnt perform better in Quebec. In fact I'm kind of glad he wasnt a part of this crap.
and with the fancy 1 member 1 vote thing still would have done exactly the same thing with its riding weighting. sheesh.
it's about time the party released the popular vote numbers if this is what determined delegate percentages. Let's find out what liberals really think.
that is factually incorrect.
Rae did not elect 14 delegates with two votes.
I checked again, and this is absolutely correct. Two votes total in the riding, both for Rae (100%), and none for the other partial slates (and each of the big three ran delegates in this rural riding btw). Rae ran 9 or 10 - the rest will be back filled.
In time the details will come out, however, presumeably this is because most of the delegates run were not Liberal members as of July 4th or were out of riding and could not vote for themselves (another process flaw).
THIS MEANS TWO VOTES TOTAL CAST IN THE RIDING, BOTH FOR RAE (100%).
After all, most voters in Quebec last weekend it seems were recent sign ups. I have heard that voter turn out was either 10% or 18%. Either way, this is not a reflective sample of who has the final say about who should lead the party (i.e. the other 90%). This is the input of the highly organised machines, not the party proper.
Numbers like this make the leadership process seem very irrelevant, contrived and tainted in favour of some at the expence of others.
Do Liberals deserve better? This is why those campaigns who have been jockying for frontrunner status since May, even once the numbers came out last week, is a joke.
The frontrunner should be who can win Canada - not who can win Abitibi St James etc. - or whatever that infamous riding is.
If the percentages are correct, then Iggy, Dion, nor Rae received more than 2,000 votes in all of Quebec.
So much for opinionated claims this past week that only one of them can rejuvenate the Liberal Party in Quebec.
Yes Peter,
But ALL of them got waaaaaay mor than Gerard.
You can only back-fill 2 spots, so once again you have misled your readers.
You are a scumbag to keep up this lying.
The only thing that the totals of Iggy, Rae and Dion show is that their machines know how to work the system by:
1. Buying memberships for others
2. Falsifying signatures when needed (there are examples of this in Quebec)
3. Mastering the 20% out-of-riding rule
4. Taking advantage of the fact it was left to riding associations - not LPC(Q) - to notify members. How many residential members were notified? Not many, by all accounts.
5. Identifying people to run in rural ridings where they don't live.
6. Making sure all those Montrealers - oops rural Quebecers for a day - got their postal ballots in with the correct x's in place.
Sure these campaigns can all cry dubious victory in Quebec, but they are deluding themselves. The stench lingers on.
Yes, you can only backfill two, but it doesn't change the numbers. So Rae got 11 at the end of the day with two votes cast. Where's the scum?
How come only Ontario and Quebec get to move people form one riding to stand in another?
You can't do that in the other provinces. This seems really unfair to the other provinces that had to find people to run in the actual riding.
EGK - you would not even have to move to Quebec. The machines make more use of the 20% out of riding rule than most Canadian investors use their RRSP limit on foreign investments.
Most of the delegates elected through slates in rural Quebec live in Montreal (to minimise the cost of the representatives going to convention. This also happens in other remote parts of Canada.
The riding associations tend to be controlled by the MP presiding (or someone else endorsing a candidate) sometimes on the promise of a reward by an aspiring leadership candidate's organisation, and they notify only those committed to supporting their choice of candidate as to when and where the vote will take place. The LPC (Q) made individual ridings responsible for this notification (which is only required to be a posting on a website) and they manipulate the process at that level.
Idologically I am so committed to the Liberal party. However, I would take the outcome of leadership process much more seriously if I felt our new leader is elected because he captures the hearts and mins of Liberals, not because of rubbish - remember how GWB got elected initially and what that represents for future corruption. Even Neil Young openly sings about it.
Wow, you sound like you're blaming Rae for having some big gun organization, when all his team did was get out the vote! 2 votes. Some organization to get out only two votes. Do you think they expected to take the whole riding with only two votes? I doubt they expected to win many delegates there at all if the others had full slates and they didn't.
Sure the process is flawed in these circumstances, but I doubt if they anyone of the three campaigns you take digs at “took advantage” of the rules any more so than Kennedy did in Ontario and BC.
Edgewater;
Interesting discussion, and not only in rural Ontario & Quebec. I live in VIN where we had a mail in ballot. I did a post at my site about it, and all my concerns.
When I finally received my ballot I went through the entire list of members and the slates. All is layed out in detail on a subsequent post at my site. Only 2 of the Leadership Candidates had made any effort to fill out a local slate, Ignatieff and Dion.
This is not the 1st Leadership race where parachuting of slates has taken place, but it is the first that I am aware that has put the same slates in multiple ridings. At one time there was every effort made to fill slates from within a riding.Some time, some place, somewhere in the ensueing years the rules relaxed to the point where there really is no point. Here in BC the LPC has chosen to turn a blind eye/ ignore or delude itself of any complicitness.
It has only through blogs that I have learned more about the things I want nothing to do with. This is not democracy as it was intended to be, at least not for my altrueistic self.
I can tell you that the Gerard Kennedy slate on my ballot were comprised of all his BC organizers who live in the lower mainland. It appears to be Rural Canada where we don't elect Liberals and don't get local members to sign on or GOTV.
Lolly. Thanks for the comment. It seems this is the default way those heavily involved choose to do politics: perhaps because it is familiar to them; and perhaps because it is believed to be the only way to win.
Does this choice also represent the majority of Liberals as opposed to those who are involved because they benefit from being involved in political organisation? I sure hope not.
If leaders were measured on more than just the content of their leadership but also on the integrity of the process used to get them there, their example and leadership by example would permiate through the system. To me this would be the most powerful political tool one could use to govern and to continue to govern Canada.
Then, politics would be more like a sport where the playing field is made level as the first step via rule adjustments. In sport, this is necessary for there to be any credibility (i.e lifetime suspention for Pete Rose for gambling and or game fixing).
Why is this any less important in politics, amongst Liberals? And, how can there be any credibilty when it is known those who need to stand up for true Liberal values choose to turn a blind eye?
Only once the inequities are removed can the process carry the credibility it needs to overcome the pessimism. The party will face apathy. The party will continue to have problems until it adopts true renewal and faces and accounts for some of the demons that lurk in past electoral habits..
1. Out of riding membershpis shouldn't be allowed. To my knowledge only two or three provinces permit it. But that's not really relevant here.
2. If Bob Rae got two votes and won 14 delegates (which I am not convinced is accurate), then good for him. It means all of the rest of us were too lazy to find one voter in that riding and we don;t deserve the delegates anyway.
3. You'll note thay most of the ridings that have such small vote numbers are rural (although 2 is pretty f***ing low). You'll also note that many of the candidates simply didn't bother to visit any of these ridings because of the cost. My home riding, for example, which is rural and one of the safest Liberal seats in the country, did not have a single visit by a single candidate to date. Not one.
The issue isn't so much finding the voters, but finding the slates to parachute into these areas.
Jmaes Curran,
You are right, Iggy, Dion, and Rae got way more votes than Gerard. But getting tens of thousands more (as the delegate counts and MSM would make us believe) is a lot different than getting less than 2,000 votes in a province as large as Quebec.
MississaugaPeter
Edgewater, you have spoken wisely in the following paragraph.
"Only once the inequities are removed can the process carry the credibility it needs to overcome the pessimism. The party will face apathy. The party will continue to have problems until it adopts true renewal and faces and accounts for some of the demons that lurk in past electoral habits.."
A BCer has done a post on Quebec with very mixed comments.
My personal feelings are:The Party has been facing apathy over the past 8-10 years. Chretien didn't need us when the opposition was regionalized and we withered away.
Hmm, a wee bit melodramatic, the truth hurts.
The Rae team can only send 10 delegates from that riding. They presented 10 people, the two vote were for only 8 of the candidates. So only 8 were elected, they can backfill two more. Those two delegates have to be from the riding since they have reached their limit for "out of riding" delegates.
The very low turnout is because it was a postal vote and the party did not allow sufficient time for people to receive their ballots and mail them back. Those are logistics problems.
So Rae would most likely send only 8 delegates from that rural riding.
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