OTTAWA – A historic number of New Democrats will be eligible to vote for a new leader next month after the party signed up about 44,000 new members since October.
The NDP now has 128,351 card-carrying members and the swelling party ranks come as they try to pick a new leader, who will not only guide the party, but will go head-to-head with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The campaign has been criticized as boring, and although some remain skeptical, others say these numbers show momentum is gaining around the NDP leadership race.
“The NDP has had to get a larger venue for the leadership selection convention.
They’ve enrolled a lot of members. To me, that is excitement,” said Steven Wheldon, the director of the Centre for Public Opinion and Political Representation at Simon Fraser University.
There are eight candidates left in the race to succeed Jack Layton, a contest which started in October. Since then, the campaign and the all-candidates debates have been scrutinized by many as being too collegial for people supposedly battling to lead the next government.
Polls, generally a mainstay of campaign coverage, have been sparse, leaving the media without the horse race stories that so often garner attention.
Add to that the wildly combative Republican race happening south of the border, and the NDP campaign has come under fire for a lack of heat.
A recent poll of 1,000 people done by Abacus Data and released in January found that 40 per cent of Canadians could not identify any of the leadership candidates names.
Such criticism is misplaced, according to Wheldon.
“It’s actually good for a party not to have tremendous interest in its leadership campaign outside of the core supporters,” he said.
While parties should want to see excitement around a leadership contest, Wheldon says they don’t want it to be at the cost of a vicious fight that leaves the party divided.
According to Wheldon, energy around the race is growing where it counts, amongst the party’s base.
“This is impressive, especially in an age where party membership has traditionally declined,” he said.
British Columbia and Ontario will hold the most influence when it comes to selecting the leader with 38,735 members (30 per cent) and 36,760 members (28.6 per cent) respectively.
Membership swelled by 600 per cent in Quebec, the province home to more than half of the party’s 101 seats. Still, this dramatic rise only accounts to 12,266 members, or 9.5 per cent of the total membership.
Pollster Darrell Bricker said the numbers won’t mean much unless the NDP can reach beyond their base and get average Canadians energized about the leadership campaign.
“Their need, eventually, is not to appeal to a bunch of people that are going to vote NDP anyways,” said the CEO of Ipsos-Reid. “It’s to appeal to those people that didn’t vote NDP in the last election, particularly Liberal voters and people who are uncomfortable with some of the choices the Conservatives are making.”
Bricker said the leadership campaign is a “wasted opportunity” if the party doesn’t use it to catch the eye of undecided voters.
To him it looks like the NDP campaign is headed that way thanks to a lack of fight from the candidates.
“They are very earnest, very politely earnest. Politely earnest does not attract any attention at all,” he said.
The new numbers may add some excitement by giving political observers some clues about the candidates’ political fortunes.
Montreal MP Thomas Mulcair, considered the front-runner, is likely the prime beneficiary of the Quebec growth spurt. However, the numbers are well short of the 20,000 members his camp had hoped to recruit in the province.
The B.C. numbers are especially encouraging to former party president Brian Topp and B.C. MP Nathan Cullen, both of whom have been working hard to build momentum in the province.
Strength in Ontario bodes well for Toronto MP Peggy Nash and Ottawa MP Paul Dewar, although Topp also claims to have strong support in the province.
With files from The Canadian Press.
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