Will the Conservative Party be able to manage the Leadership Election？ (Feat. Ian Brodie)
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Summary
The Conservative Leadership Election Organizing Committee is the body that runs the Conservative leadership race. In the past, Ian Brody was a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, served as the strategic advisor to the Inter-American Development Bank, and was a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
Transcript
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And I think this is a good time, this show, to bring in our friend Ian Brody.
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Ian is currently the head of the Conservative Leadership Election Organizing Committee,
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which is the body that runs the conservative leadership race.
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In the past, he was a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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He served as the strategic advisor to the Inter-American Development Bank
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and was a professor of political science over at the University of Calgary.
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So, Ian, thank you so much for joining the program.
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And so I noticed on social media over on Twitter last week,
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you sent out a tweet basically just saying that you were in the Conservative offices last week.
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I was in the Conservative Party offices' headquarter office last week,
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including for the membership deadline in the race.
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I do not see a scenario in which the race could be delayed.
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Candidates have signed up many, many new members,
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and party staff are doing extraordinary work to produce a voters list.
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I expect we'll meet the deadline set out in the Conservative leadership rules.
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So what do you make of some of the criticism that is being directed towards your party
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that you just simply cannot handle the number of new memberships that you've received?
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we've confirmed that we're looking at more than 600,000 members
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on the final membership voters list for the race that wraps up in September.
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all of those people to vote in that race have to be signed up as members by June 3rd.
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So I was in the party office until the closing of the memberships on June 3rd.
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I mean, we started this leadership with around 180,000 members,
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And so just an enormous growth of membership signups,
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It's not just good news, it's historically good news.
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And I think everybody involved is proud to be involved in this historic piece.
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In the past, memberships for a leadership campaign or for a local nomination campaign,
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have traditionally been signed up on little paper slips, duplicate or triplicate slips
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And it took months and months and months to enter all those names and addresses into the computer
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to generate a voters list and to cash all of the checks.
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This time, for the first time in this leadership race compared to previous leadership races,
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the party insisted that basically all of the members that signed up had to sign up through the party's website.
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That just cuts the processing time to put out a membership list, not in half, but by like one tenth of the effort that we've had before.
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And then we can use all the tools of big data to go through and find duplicates or people whose home addresses are not quite rightly formatted for Canada post-mail it.
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So I think all these criticisms we've had from people who are involved in previous leadership races,
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they're forgetting the huge advance in technology and the change of the rules that required effectively all of the memberships to be entered into our computer system as the race went along.
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The party's membership staff and accounting staff, all the staff that had office are going through trying to clean up that list.
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As you know, lots of people live in rural areas in Canada. It can sometimes be, you know, their mailing address and their home address are in different ridings.
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That matters for our race. So that all has to be done manually.
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But the idea that we're starting with, you know, a shoebox the size of the Sky Dome full of 600,000 paper memberships.
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And I've got, you know, thousands of people at head office, keep punching them all into the computer.
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That's just that's a relic of kind of 10 or 15 years ago thinking we've advanced since then.
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Well, I'm glad to hear that you have the technology to keep up with the demand that it seems like there's so much interest in the party right now.
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So do you have an estimate of how many how many members? You said 600 is a little low now there.
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Some of the criticism may be that some of the memberships might end up getting thrown out, that they're not legitimate.
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What's your estimate for how many current members there are in the party?
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Well, we won't know for another couple of weeks. That's a that's a that's a tricky job of cleaning up the list,
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although this is the third leadership race we've had in the last six years.
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So I have to say party staff are getting very good at this.
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And of course, for each election, the party runs a couple of hundred local nomination races.
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They're smaller events, but it's the same problem of trying to clean up membership lists to vote at local nominations.
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I wouldn't be I'm not too, too worried about about fraud in a big leadership race.
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There's always, you know, organizers out there who are who are signing people up faster than they can
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What I'm mostly worried about is in a big effort like this, especially as you get down to the deadline,
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people signing up through multiple organizations just in order to make sure their name is on the
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membership list. We've seen that already in the staff review of the list.
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People who signed up two or three times just to make sure they had the right to vote.
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But I think that itself is also a good measure of intensity of interest here.
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Right. There are people who really just want to make sure that their vote will count in this
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leadership race. So they're not they're not going to leave it to chance.
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But again, this is the sort of thing we've gone through before.
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I think what encourages me here is that if you think about the Conservative Party, you know,
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upwards of 600,000 members bigger than the city of Hamilton, bigger than the city of Halifax or
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Quebec City, bigger than Regina and Saskatoon combined, we have now almost twice as many
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members as there were voters for the Green Party in the last federal election campaign.
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I mean, this is a huge this is a huge mobilization effort. And look, last week,
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Aaron Wary at CBC had a piece opinion piece out about how the Liberals aren't going to deal with
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this rising prices until the fall. A pretty laxedaysical approach to I think what is the
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number one economic issue in the country right now for Canadians. The NDP Liberal Agreement ensures
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that this approach is going to go on for the next three years. At 8% inflation, you know, that means
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we're all 25% poorer by the time this agreement comes to an end. Conservatives, on the other hand,
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we've had six credible leadership candidates out talking to people in cities and towns across the
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country. They're hearing about this and now they're pressing issues on the ground. I think that's
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what's driven really 400 and something thousand people to sign up new in addition to the 180,000
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we had at the beginning of this race. Well, absolutely. It's the Conservatives that are the
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only ones taking the issues in our economy and our country seriously. And I think that a lot of Canadians
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are waking up to that. Ian, I read a lot of the comments and feedback from True North viewers. A lot of
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them are new members to the Conservative Party, people who have never voted Conservative or never
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been part of the Conservative Party before. So I'm just wondering to the viewers of this podcast or
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listeners of this podcast who are new to the Conservative Party, could you explain a little
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bit about how the leadership process works? Like once you verify the list, what happens next?
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Yeah, so we'll have a preliminary list out to the candidates. Each of the six candidates,
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we'll get a preliminary list over the next couple of weeks once we've done our cleanup of the list.
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After that, each of the campaigns will get 72 hours to submit corrections to the list. There may
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be people on the list they don't think are eligible to vote. That gets a bit technical. I can go into the
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details if you want. Or they may think there are people who should be on the list that for whatever
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reason have been missed. I mean, sometimes you get, you know, ENQ public and ENQ public junior. If they
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get merged as a result of one of our computer uploads, you know, maybe they should be actually
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two different people. We can fix that. So it'll be 72 hours for them to come up with changes to the
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list. We then have about 72 hours to make those changes to the list. At that point,
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the membership list is the voters list is closed. Everyone who has signed up and is on that membership
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list will get a paper ballot in the mail. The party's constitution requires that we have a postal
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ballot sent out to people. So if you think about that, you know, from Central Canada, I always say
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we've got members in Whale Cove, Nunavut, getting mail to Whale Cove, Nunavut, letting those members fill
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out the ballot and send it back. It takes a long time. Canada Post has some challenges these years
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to try to get, during COVID, to try to get mail out and back. So that's many weeks. Plus you can't
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just print 600,000 outgoing ballots, you know, overnight and mail them all in the same day. It's
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going to take several weeks to get all those ballots out. The ballot is itself a little bit
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complicated because in our party we have a single ballot, but people have an opportunity to rank order
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their candidates. So they may want to cast a ballot for a particular candidate. It's their first
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choice. If the candidate gets dropped off a second round of balloting, they get a chance to have a
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second choice and a third choice in this case, down to six choices altogether. Each round of counting,
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we're looking for a candidate to get 50% plus one of the points that are available. The party's
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constitution, to a certain extent, equalizes the voting power of each riding. So just, you know,
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think about the conservative strengths in rural areas and in Western Canada.
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The bulk of the points that are available, the bulk of the voting parts available in this race,
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will be in a riding that we don't hold. So it encourages the candidates to vote and organize
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in riding so the conservatives don't currently hold in the House of Commons. And in particular,
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remote ridings where we don't have quite so many members, territories, Labrador, and so forth.
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There's a huge incentive for the candidates to go out and organize strongly in ridings where the
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party's particularly not very strong on the ground. And so at the end of that, that'll be,
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I expect, multiple days of counting the ballots when they come back to Ottawa. All the ballots have
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to be back by September the 6th. That gives us four days for the last ballot coming in until the
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announcement on September 10th. And I don't see any scenario at the moment, barring a public health
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challenge in the fall. I don't see a scenario that would have us changing any of those deadlines right
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And so four days from the time the ballots are accepted to the time that the leader is announced,
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So because this is a mail-in ballot, so unlike in-person elections during a general election
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campaign where you have to show up at a ballot at a voting station and show some identification,
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you know, showing yourself in person to the returning officer and then mark the ballot,
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this will all be conducted by mail. So we do have to be a little bit careful to make sure that
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the ballots have been cast by the people who they were assigned to. So when people cast a ballot,
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they have to include a copy of some photo identification, something like that. That all has
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to be verified by hand. There's no way to automate that. And we have to make sure that the ballot
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that comes back hasn't been photocopied or otherwise fabricated by someone. So they have to be verified
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before they can be counted. That's a very time consuming process. That process will start in July
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when we expect the earliest ballots to come back and we'll proceed through August. I don't expect we're
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going to get that many ballots at the very end on September the 6th, but it's possible that we could get
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a last minute search. So there's a couple of days in there to go through that process of verifying
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that the ballot has been properly cast. And then I expect we'll take a few days to count ballots at
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the scale that we're talking about here. In the past, it's taken about a day to count, you know, 150,000,
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180,000 ballots in the last few races to 200,000 ballots in the last few races. So if we scale up to
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500,000, 600,000 ballots coming back, we're going to need a little bit more time, even with extra
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people and extra counting machines to help us with accounting. Excellent. And just one final,
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well, one other question about the process here. There has been some criticism specifically from the
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Jean Charest camp about the legitimacy of the race. I know that Tasha Carradine, who's a co-chair for
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Charest said that the next leader will have no credibility if the race isn't transparent. What
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is your response to these kind of criticisms? Look, this is always a challenge in a very long race.
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People get antsy about the outcome. And I understand that having been on the side,
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I've been on Tasha's side before helping to run leadership races. These are long treks. That said,
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as I say, each campaign will get a three-day period to take a look at the interim voters list and to
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make changes or suggest changes of the corrections that they think need to be made. We'll then release
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the final list to everybody sometime in July. Every candidate will have an opportunity to have
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scrutineers, their own campaign observers, observing the verification process. In the last campaign,
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and the verification was webcast live on a web television facility platform. I expect we're
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going to do the same this time. So you can see 24 hours a day what's going on. And then each campaign
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will have the opportunity to have somebody scrutineer or observe the counting process and to take a look
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at the calculation of the of the final result. That's, I think, as transparent as a federal election
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in Canada. I started out in this business as a scrutineer on races like this. So I think it's
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particularly important that we be as transparent about the the mail process, the verification process,
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and the counting process as we possibly can. Absolutely. Well, this is a final question for
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you, Ian. What do you think, what do you make of the scenario in Canada now where, you know, when
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Dustin Trudeau ran for leader of the Liberal Party, he claimed that he had 150,000 members. I think he
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ended up getting about 80,000 people voting for him in that race. We see this huge surge in interest
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in the Conservative Party. As you mentioned, upwards of 400,000 new members for this party.
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What do you make of the enthusiasm? What do you think just is going through Justin Trudeau and
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Jagmeet Singh's head right now? Do you think they should be nervous about this huge growth in interest
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in the Conservative Party? Yeah, I mean, look, in that leadership race,
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the Liberal leadership race when Mr. Trudeau won. As I recall, you could join the party by liking the
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party on Facebook. It didn't require much of an effort to join the Liberal Party. These are all
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people in our party who have signed up and paid a membership fee and been through the membership
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gathering process. So the people who signed up had to make a particular effort to sign up. We also make
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sure under federal law, if you're going to pay the membership fee, you have to pay it yourself.
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And so we don't have any more of the phenomenon in Canada of people, you know,
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some wealthy donor paying for 10,000 members to sign up. Each one of those people signed up
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themselves with their own credit card, or in some cases with a personal check. I mean,
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that is an extraordinary degree of the members that we have are people who really want to be members of
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the Conservative Party. They went through all of these hoops to get into the party in order to ensure
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that they had a say over who the next leader would be. I think this, just as a party building
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exercise alone, an extraordinary amount of new energy in the private party is bigger than it has
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ever been in any party in Canada has ever been before. And I think the Liberals and the NDP are,
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if I were them, right now I'd be trying to figure out where are these people, who are these people,
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where did they come from? I think in some cases, they're people that the Liberals and the NDP might have
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expected to have in their own camp in the past, and maybe were their own camp in the past,
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that they've been attracted by virtue of, I think, the damage that the Liberal NDP
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agreement has done, and the case, the pitch that our six leadership candidates are making out in the
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grassroots from coast to coast. I just, I want you to comment though, because I saw a poll in,
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I think it was the Globe and Mail that said that 60% of Canadians are okay with the agreement between the
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Liberals and the NDP. Do you think that's accurate, or do you think that there is this sort of
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underswell of people who are really not okay with this sort of informal, formal agreement of governance?
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Well, I think that that 60% number was a snapshot, you know, a poll at the time when it wasn't clear
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what that, what the implications of that agreement were going to be. And in so far as it did head off
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the risk of an election in the next couple of years, maybe people are relieved. We've had several
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elections in the past couple of years are relieved not to be back to the polls again. I'm not sure that
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people were too excited about having the election we had in 2021 during the Omicron wave of the pandemic.
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So, you know, I understand the 60% number. That doesn't mean that 60% of Canadians liked the idea
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of three more years of rising food prices, gas prices, housing prices, that kind of lackadaisical
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approach to the economic growth and to the real economic pain that people are feeling from coast to
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coast as a result of all of these cost increases. So if I were in the governing side, I have been in
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government myself, I'd be watching those polls with a big grain of salt because all of the other
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indicators that touch Canadians in their day-to-day lives here are going negative.
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Okay. Well, Dr. Ian Brody, thank you so much for your insight. Thank you for clarifying the
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leadership process and all the best with this entire thing. We're really looking forward to September 10th
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and learning who the new leader of the party will be. Good. Great. Thanks, Ken. It's good to talk to you.