The Liberal party will announce its new leader on March 9 and will restrict voting eligibility to citizens and permanent residents as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to step down.
The party’s national board of directors met Thursday evening to decide on the initial rules of the Liberal leadership contest that will choose Trudeau’s successor.
According to a press release from the Liberal party, the voting will conclude on March 9 and the new leader will be announced on the same day.
Party members have until Jan. 23 to enter their name in the leadership race. The entry fee is $350,000.
Who can vote?
The cutoff date to become a member or registered supporter and be eligible to vote is Jan. 27.
The board also updated the requirements for who can vote in this leadership contest. Eligible voters must:
- be at least 14 years of age
- support the purposes of the party
- be a Canadian citizen, have status under the Indian Act, or be a permanent resident of Canada
- not be a member of any other federal political party in Canada; and
- while registered as a Liberal, not have publicly declared an intention to be a candidate for election to the House of Commons other than as a candidate of the party
Previous Liberal leadership races have required that someone “ordinarily reside in Canada” to be eligible to vote. The fact that the race is the first since the foreign interference inquiry highlighted vulnerabilities in leadership race processes means that previous criterion has been the subject of scrutiny.
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After facing growing calls to resign, Trudeau announced on Monday that he will step down as the Liberal leader and the prime minister after the party chooses a successor.
“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” Trudeau said.
Parliament has been prorogued until March 24 to allow the Liberal party to hold a leadership contest.
Who’s running?
Ontario Liberal MP Chandra Arya and former Montreal MP Frank Baylis are the only two candidates who have officially declared they are in the running.
Baylis announced within hours of Trudeau’s announcement Jan. 6 and Arya jumped in on Thursday morning, though both announced before the $350,000 entrance fee was announced — an increase from the $75,000 to enter into previous leadership races.
Several cabinet ministers are considering putting their names in the hat, including Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, House Leader Karina Gould and Employment Minister Steven MacKinnon are also mulling it over, The Canadian Press reported.
Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, who resigned from the cabinet last month, is considering entering the race, that report said.
A major figure in cabinet who said he was not going to run for Liberal leader is Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc.
LeBlanc said on Wednesday he was going to focus his full attention on his job as finance minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs to co-ordinate a federal response to the threat of tariffs from an incoming Donald Trump administration in the United States.
The new Liberal leader will become prime minister for as long as the party remains the current government, and would lead the party into the next election.
An Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News and released Wednesday showed that Freeland topped the list as potential replacements for Trudeau, followed by former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney.
Regardless of who becomes the new leader, that poll also suggested that a majority of Canadians (86 per cent) say the Liberal party would struggle to win the next election even with Trudeau no longer at the helm.
Eight in 10 Canadians said they are in favour of Trudeau’s resignation, with more than half saying they “strongly approve” of it, according to the Ipsos poll.
However, his decision to make way for a new leader has not moved the needle much for the Liberals’ prospects, with support for the party holding steady at 20 per cent since similar polling was done in late December.
Mary Anne Carter, a principal of government relations at Earnscliffe Strategies in Ottawa, said recent polls like the one Ipsos has done demonstrate that there is “Trudeau fatigue” and “Canadians are ready for a change of government.”
She told Global News in an interview on Wednesday that whoever succeeds Trudeau is “going to face an uphill battle” in the next election, especially given the lead the Conservatives have over the Liberals.
“There could be very well a new interim leader who is able to build back support, but given the significant wedge that the Conservatives have ahead of the Liberal party and the NDP for that matter, it just seems very challenging in a short period of time for them to rebuild the party and win probably a sooner rather than later election,” she said.
–with files from The Canadian Press
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