Juno News - June 16, 2022


Will the Conservative Party be able to manage the Leadership Election？ (Feat. Ian Brodie)


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

192.47113

Word Count

3,412

Sentence Count

174


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 And I think this is a good time, this show, to bring in our friend Ian Brody.
00:00:03.860 Ian is currently the head of the Conservative Leadership Election Organizing Committee,
00:00:07.840 which is the body that runs the conservative leadership race.
00:00:11.360 In the past, he was a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
00:00:16.040 He served as the strategic advisor to the Inter-American Development Bank
00:00:19.120 and was a professor of political science over at the University of Calgary.
00:00:22.740 So, Ian, thank you so much for joining the program.
00:00:25.880 Great to see you, Candice.
00:00:26.640 And so I noticed on social media over on Twitter last week,
00:00:30.940 you sent out a tweet basically just saying that you were in the Conservative offices last week.
00:00:35.040 Well, here, I'll read it.
00:00:35.620 I was in the Conservative Party offices' headquarter office last week,
00:00:39.240 including for the membership deadline in the race.
00:00:42.220 I do not see a scenario in which the race could be delayed.
00:00:44.800 Candidates have signed up many, many new members,
00:00:47.040 and party staff are doing extraordinary work to produce a voters list.
00:00:50.320 I expect we'll meet the deadline set out in the Conservative leadership rules.
00:00:54.360 So what do you make of some of the criticism that is being directed towards your party
00:00:58.980 that you just simply cannot handle the number of new memberships that you've received?
00:01:03.920 Yeah, I should say since that tweet, Candice,
00:01:06.860 we've confirmed that we're looking at more than 600,000 members
00:01:09.940 on the final membership voters list for the race that wraps up in September.
00:01:16.300 So like you mentioned last week,
00:01:17.640 all of those people to vote in that race have to be signed up as members by June 3rd.
00:01:21.420 So I was in the party office until the closing of the memberships on June 3rd.
00:01:26.860 Yes, it's a huge number.
00:01:28.140 I mean, we started this leadership with around 180,000 members,
00:01:33.460 I guess, at the beginning of the year.
00:01:34.900 And so just an enormous growth of membership signups,
00:01:38.020 which is, let's just say it's good news.
00:01:39.860 It's not just good news, it's historically good news.
00:01:41.980 And I think everybody involved is proud to be involved in this historic piece.
00:01:45.420 In the past, memberships for a leadership campaign or for a local nomination campaign,
00:01:51.580 have traditionally been signed up on little paper slips, duplicate or triplicate slips
00:01:58.140 with checks attached or whatever.
00:02:00.920 And it took months and months and months to enter all those names and addresses into the computer
00:02:06.120 to generate a voters list and to cash all of the checks.
00:02:09.720 This time, for the first time in this leadership race compared to previous leadership races,
00:02:14.920 the party insisted that basically all of the members that signed up had to sign up through the party's website.
00:02:21.480 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.
00:02:30.520 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.
00:02:43.240 So I think all these criticisms we've had from people who are involved in previous leadership races,
00:02:49.160 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.
00:02:59.800 So there's still work to be done.
00:03:01.480 The party's membership staff and accounting staff, all the staff that had office are going through trying to clean up that list.
00:03:07.720 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.
00:03:15.400 That matters for our race. So that all has to be done manually.
00:03:18.280 But the idea that we're starting with, you know, a shoebox the size of the Sky Dome full of 600,000 paper memberships.
00:03:27.400 And I've got, you know, thousands of people at head office, keep punching them all into the computer.
00:03:31.560 That's just that's a relic of kind of 10 or 15 years ago thinking we've advanced since then.
00:03:37.240 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.
00:03:44.360 So do you have an estimate of how many how many members? You said 600 is a little low now there.
00:03:49.720 Some of the criticism may be that some of the memberships might end up getting thrown out, that they're not legitimate.
00:03:54.280 What's your estimate for how many current members there are in the party?
00:03:56.920 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,
00:04:03.240 although this is the third leadership race we've had in the last six years.
00:04:06.360 So I have to say party staff are getting very good at this.
00:04:09.400 And of course, for each election, the party runs a couple of hundred local nomination races.
00:04:14.040 They're smaller events, but it's the same problem of trying to clean up membership lists to vote at local nominations.
00:04:21.320 I wouldn't be I'm not too, too worried about about fraud in a big leadership race.
00:04:27.640 There's always, you know, organizers out there who are who are signing people up faster than they can
00:04:33.000 faster than they can read the rules.
00:04:34.280 What I'm mostly worried about is in a big effort like this, especially as you get down to the deadline,
00:04:39.720 people signing up through multiple organizations just in order to make sure their name is on the
00:04:43.560 membership list. We've seen that already in the staff review of the list.
00:04:48.280 People who signed up two or three times just to make sure they had the right to vote.
00:04:52.280 But I think that itself is also a good measure of intensity of interest here.
00:04:55.960 Right. There are people who really just want to make sure that their vote will count in this
00:04:59.960 leadership race. So they're not they're not going to leave it to chance.
00:05:02.680 They're going to sign up two or three times.
00:05:04.440 That makes our our job a little trickier.
00:05:07.240 But again, this is the sort of thing we've gone through before.
00:05:09.640 I think what encourages me here is that if you think about the Conservative Party, you know,
00:05:16.680 upwards of 600,000 members bigger than the city of Hamilton, bigger than the city of Halifax or
00:05:23.000 Quebec City, bigger than Regina and Saskatoon combined, we have now almost twice as many
00:05:30.600 members as there were voters for the Green Party in the last federal election campaign.
00:05:34.600 I mean, this is a huge this is a huge mobilization effort. And look, last week,
00:05:42.440 Aaron Wary at CBC had a piece opinion piece out about how the Liberals aren't going to deal with
00:05:47.160 this rising prices until the fall. A pretty laxedaysical approach to I think what is the
00:05:53.320 number one economic issue in the country right now for Canadians. The NDP Liberal Agreement ensures
00:05:59.480 that this approach is going to go on for the next three years. At 8% inflation, you know, that means
00:06:03.880 we're all 25% poorer by the time this agreement comes to an end. Conservatives, on the other hand,
00:06:10.120 we've had six credible leadership candidates out talking to people in cities and towns across the
00:06:14.360 country. They're hearing about this and now they're pressing issues on the ground. I think that's
00:06:18.840 what's driven really 400 and something thousand people to sign up new in addition to the 180,000
00:06:24.680 we had at the beginning of this race. Well, absolutely. It's the Conservatives that are the
00:06:28.840 only ones taking the issues in our economy and our country seriously. And I think that a lot of Canadians
00:06:34.120 are waking up to that. Ian, I read a lot of the comments and feedback from True North viewers. A lot of
00:06:40.600 them are new members to the Conservative Party, people who have never voted Conservative or never
00:06:44.920 been part of the Conservative Party before. So I'm just wondering to the viewers of this podcast or
00:06:49.960 listeners of this podcast who are new to the Conservative Party, could you explain a little
00:06:54.200 bit about how the leadership process works? Like once you verify the list, what happens next?
00:06:59.960 Yeah, so we'll have a preliminary list out to the candidates. Each of the six candidates,
00:07:05.320 we'll get a preliminary list over the next couple of weeks once we've done our cleanup of the list.
00:07:13.080 After that, each of the campaigns will get 72 hours to submit corrections to the list. There may
00:07:19.000 be people on the list they don't think are eligible to vote. That gets a bit technical. I can go into the
00:07:23.640 details if you want. Or they may think there are people who should be on the list that for whatever
00:07:28.840 reason have been missed. I mean, sometimes you get, you know, ENQ public and ENQ public junior. If they
00:07:35.960 get merged as a result of one of our computer uploads, you know, maybe they should be actually
00:07:41.640 two different people. We can fix that. So it'll be 72 hours for them to come up with changes to the
00:07:46.280 list. We then have about 72 hours to make those changes to the list. At that point,
00:07:51.320 the membership list is the voters list is closed. Everyone who has signed up and is on that membership
00:08:00.760 list will get a paper ballot in the mail. The party's constitution requires that we have a postal
00:08:05.960 ballot sent out to people. So if you think about that, you know, from Central Canada, I always say
00:08:12.920 we've got members in Whale Cove, Nunavut, getting mail to Whale Cove, Nunavut, letting those members fill
00:08:18.120 out the ballot and send it back. It takes a long time. Canada Post has some challenges these years
00:08:23.080 to try to get, during COVID, to try to get mail out and back. So that's many weeks. Plus you can't
00:08:28.520 just print 600,000 outgoing ballots, you know, overnight and mail them all in the same day. It's
00:08:33.160 going to take several weeks to get all those ballots out. The ballot is itself a little bit
00:08:39.080 complicated because in our party we have a single ballot, but people have an opportunity to rank order
00:08:44.920 their candidates. So they may want to cast a ballot for a particular candidate. It's their first
00:08:49.240 choice. If the candidate gets dropped off a second round of balloting, they get a chance to have a
00:08:54.280 second choice and a third choice in this case, down to six choices altogether. Each round of counting,
00:09:01.800 we're looking for a candidate to get 50% plus one of the points that are available. The party's
00:09:07.000 constitution, to a certain extent, equalizes the voting power of each riding. So just, you know,
00:09:13.080 think about the conservative strengths in rural areas and in Western Canada.
00:09:18.680 The bulk of the points that are available, the bulk of the voting parts available in this race,
00:09:23.160 will be in a riding that we don't hold. So it encourages the candidates to vote and organize
00:09:27.800 in riding so the conservatives don't currently hold in the House of Commons. And in particular,
00:09:33.160 remote ridings where we don't have quite so many members, territories, Labrador, and so forth.
00:09:38.680 There's a huge incentive for the candidates to go out and organize strongly in ridings where the
00:09:44.280 party's particularly not very strong on the ground. And so at the end of that, that'll be,
00:09:50.200 I expect, multiple days of counting the ballots when they come back to Ottawa. All the ballots have
00:09:55.880 to be back by September the 6th. That gives us four days for the last ballot coming in until the
00:10:02.120 announcement on September 10th. And I don't see any scenario at the moment, barring a public health
00:10:08.440 challenge in the fall. I don't see a scenario that would have us changing any of those deadlines right
00:10:13.080 now.
00:10:13.300 And so four days from the time the ballots are accepted to the time that the leader is announced,
00:10:21.400 why does it take that long?
00:10:22.360 So because this is a mail-in ballot, so unlike in-person elections during a general election
00:10:28.520 campaign where you have to show up at a ballot at a voting station and show some identification,
00:10:33.800 you know, showing yourself in person to the returning officer and then mark the ballot,
00:10:39.080 this will all be conducted by mail. So we do have to be a little bit careful to make sure that
00:10:45.240 the ballots have been cast by the people who they were assigned to. So when people cast a ballot,
00:10:50.760 they have to include a copy of some photo identification, something like that. That all has
00:10:54.840 to be verified by hand. There's no way to automate that. And we have to make sure that the ballot
00:11:01.000 that comes back hasn't been photocopied or otherwise fabricated by someone. So they have to be verified
00:11:06.440 before they can be counted. That's a very time consuming process. That process will start in July
00:11:12.280 when we expect the earliest ballots to come back and we'll proceed through August. I don't expect we're
00:11:18.040 going to get that many ballots at the very end on September the 6th, but it's possible that we could get
00:11:23.080 a last minute search. So there's a couple of days in there to go through that process of verifying
00:11:27.720 that the ballot has been properly cast. And then I expect we'll take a few days to count ballots at
00:11:34.920 the scale that we're talking about here. In the past, it's taken about a day to count, you know, 150,000,
00:11:40.520 180,000 ballots in the last few races to 200,000 ballots in the last few races. So if we scale up to
00:11:47.720 500,000, 600,000 ballots coming back, we're going to need a little bit more time, even with extra
00:11:53.720 people and extra counting machines to help us with accounting. Excellent. And just one final,
00:11:59.320 well, one other question about the process here. There has been some criticism specifically from the
00:12:05.160 Jean Charest camp about the legitimacy of the race. I know that Tasha Carradine, who's a co-chair for
00:12:11.960 Charest said that the next leader will have no credibility if the race isn't transparent. What
00:12:18.680 is your response to these kind of criticisms? Look, this is always a challenge in a very long race.
00:12:25.880 People get antsy about the outcome. And I understand that having been on the side,
00:12:31.560 I've been on Tasha's side before helping to run leadership races. These are long treks. That said,
00:12:38.200 as I say, each campaign will get a three-day period to take a look at the interim voters list and to
00:12:46.120 make changes or suggest changes of the corrections that they think need to be made. We'll then release
00:12:51.720 the final list to everybody sometime in July. Every candidate will have an opportunity to have
00:12:58.360 scrutineers, their own campaign observers, observing the verification process. In the last campaign,
00:13:04.280 and the verification was webcast live on a web television facility platform. I expect we're
00:13:11.800 going to do the same this time. So you can see 24 hours a day what's going on. And then each campaign
00:13:17.640 will have the opportunity to have somebody scrutineer or observe the counting process and to take a look
00:13:23.640 at the calculation of the of the final result. That's, I think, as transparent as a federal election
00:13:30.200 in Canada. I started out in this business as a scrutineer on races like this. So I think it's
00:13:35.000 particularly important that we be as transparent about the the mail process, the verification process,
00:13:40.680 and the counting process as we possibly can. Absolutely. Well, this is a final question for
00:13:44.760 you, Ian. What do you think, what do you make of the scenario in Canada now where, you know, when
00:13:49.880 Dustin Trudeau ran for leader of the Liberal Party, he claimed that he had 150,000 members. I think he
00:13:55.800 ended up getting about 80,000 people voting for him in that race. We see this huge surge in interest
00:14:02.120 in the Conservative Party. As you mentioned, upwards of 400,000 new members for this party.
00:14:08.520 What do you make of the enthusiasm? What do you think just is going through Justin Trudeau and
00:14:12.360 Jagmeet Singh's head right now? Do you think they should be nervous about this huge growth in interest
00:14:18.280 in the Conservative Party? Yeah, I mean, look, in that leadership race,
00:14:22.520 the Liberal leadership race when Mr. Trudeau won. As I recall, you could join the party by liking the
00:14:28.280 party on Facebook. It didn't require much of an effort to join the Liberal Party. These are all
00:14:32.680 people in our party who have signed up and paid a membership fee and been through the membership
00:14:39.000 gathering process. So the people who signed up had to make a particular effort to sign up. We also make
00:14:45.160 sure under federal law, if you're going to pay the membership fee, you have to pay it yourself.
00:14:49.400 And so we don't have any more of the phenomenon in Canada of people, you know,
00:14:53.960 some wealthy donor paying for 10,000 members to sign up. Each one of those people signed up
00:14:58.760 themselves with their own credit card, or in some cases with a personal check. I mean,
00:15:03.320 that is an extraordinary degree of the members that we have are people who really want to be members of
00:15:08.200 the Conservative Party. They went through all of these hoops to get into the party in order to ensure
00:15:12.920 that they had a say over who the next leader would be. I think this, just as a party building
00:15:20.360 exercise alone, an extraordinary amount of new energy in the private party is bigger than it has
00:15:25.400 ever been in any party in Canada has ever been before. And I think the Liberals and the NDP are,
00:15:31.400 if I were them, right now I'd be trying to figure out where are these people, who are these people,
00:15:36.280 where did they come from? I think in some cases, they're people that the Liberals and the NDP might have
00:15:40.440 expected to have in their own camp in the past, and maybe were their own camp in the past,
00:15:44.360 that they've been attracted by virtue of, I think, the damage that the Liberal NDP
00:15:49.560 agreement has done, and the case, the pitch that our six leadership candidates are making out in the
00:15:54.680 grassroots from coast to coast. I just, I want you to comment though, because I saw a poll in,
00:16:00.200 I think it was the Globe and Mail that said that 60% of Canadians are okay with the agreement between the
00:16:05.480 Liberals and the NDP. Do you think that's accurate, or do you think that there is this sort of
00:16:09.320 underswell of people who are really not okay with this sort of informal, formal agreement of governance?
00:16:15.880 Well, I think that that 60% number was a snapshot, you know, a poll at the time when it wasn't clear
00:16:21.640 what that, what the implications of that agreement were going to be. And in so far as it did head off
00:16:26.920 the risk of an election in the next couple of years, maybe people are relieved. We've had several
00:16:31.080 elections in the past couple of years are relieved not to be back to the polls again. I'm not sure that
00:16:35.400 people were too excited about having the election we had in 2021 during the Omicron wave of the pandemic.
00:16:43.560 So, you know, I understand the 60% number. That doesn't mean that 60% of Canadians liked the idea
00:16:48.520 of three more years of rising food prices, gas prices, housing prices, that kind of lackadaisical
00:16:55.880 approach to the economic growth and to the real economic pain that people are feeling from coast to
00:17:00.840 coast as a result of all of these cost increases. So if I were in the governing side, I have been in
00:17:07.160 government myself, I'd be watching those polls with a big grain of salt because all of the other
00:17:12.520 indicators that touch Canadians in their day-to-day lives here are going negative.
00:17:18.440 Okay. Well, Dr. Ian Brody, thank you so much for your insight. Thank you for clarifying the
00:17:22.360 leadership process and all the best with this entire thing. We're really looking forward to September 10th
00:17:27.720 and learning who the new leader of the party will be. Good. Great. Thanks, Ken. It's good to talk to you.