First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
Whoever is sworn in as the 24th prime minister of Canada next month, they will become the first-ever G7 leader who will owe their position in part to the votes of non-citizens who aren’t of voting age and were able to cast their ballots by clicking an online checkbox.
Although the Liberal Party has promised a “secure, fair, and robust” leadership race, there has never been a more low-barrier contest by which to choose Canada’s next head of government.
In fact, the next leader of Canada will effectively be chosen by the equivalent of an online poll.
On Thursday, the Liberal Party of Canada announced that 400,000 people had registered to participate in the March 9 vote that will choose the next party leader, and thus the next prime minister of Canada.
That’s about quadruple the 100,000 party members that the Liberals counted on Jan. 6, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first announced his intention to resign.
Becoming one of those 300,000 new party members was as easy as going to Liberal.ca and registering as a party member. There is no cost to do so, and the standards are much lower than those for voting in a Canadian federal election.
Liberal Party members only have to be 14 years old, instead of 18. And they only have to be a permanent resident, instead of a citizen. Although permanent residency doesn’t apply to temporary immigrants such as refugee claimants or those on a student visa, it’s the immigration status that precedes full citizenship.
This week, former Liberal operative (and Postmedia columnist) Warren Kinsella said he’d heard from readers who had been able to obtain party memberships using obviously fake identities, such as claiming to be a 16-year-old “Yaya Sinwar” based in India. (Yahya Sinwar being the Hamas leader who was killed by Israel last year.)
Although the Liberal Party has yet to reveal the verification procedures they will use to certify online voting on March 9, they have said there will be checks to screen out fake accounts – which is why the party has said that the 400,000 figure might be subject to change.
“This number is preliminary, as the Party continues to review Registered Liberal applications and leadership campaigns will be able to challenge the status of those who are registered to vote,” read a party statement on Thursday. It also promised “strict identification verifications” before voting begins on March 9.
It’s not unusual for a Canadian prime minister to obtain their position via party appointment, rather than by winning a general election. In fact, of Canada’s 24 prime ministers, just 13 got the job only after leading their party to an election victory.
The other 11 includes all of the most ignominious prime ministers in our history, such as Kim Campbell, Mackenzie Bowell and Arthur Meighen – although the category also has some bigger names such as Louis St. Laurent and Pierre Trudeau. Both St. Laurent and the elder Trudeau ascended to the prime minister’s office in the middle of a term before successfully winning several majority governments. Historically, whenever an incumbent party held a leadership election that would decide the next prime minister, they did so with a much more tightly regulated pool of party members.
The last time this happened was in 2003, when Paul Martin became prime minister after winning a Liberal leadership race against challenger Sheila Copps.
That race saw a record 530,000 Liberal Party members elect local delegates who then travelled to a convention at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre to vote for Martin on the first ballot (3,242 delegates went for Martin, 211 went for Copps).
At the time, Liberal Party membership was limited to those eligible to vote in Canadian federal elections. And it certainly wasn’t as easy as filling out on online form; it had to be purchased in person from a party representative.
In fact, one of the controversies of the leadership race had surrounded attempts to limit the number of memberships that could be sold at a time. This was proposed to prevent a “hostile takeover” of the party by new members.
A similar “delegated convention” process had elevated Kim Campbell to the prime minister’s office in 1993. Her race for leader of the Progressive Conservatives was not decided in a direct vote by party members – and certainly not by party members who had joined in the immediate days before the leadership election.
Rather, the race saw local Progressive Conservative organizations send 3,000 delegates to a convention in Ottawa where they then voted in Campbell on the second ballot against Jean Charest.
Trudeau himself first became Liberal Party leader in a 2013 leadership race whose barriers to entry were even lower than they are now, with the party boasting that it was the “biggest, most open federal political party leadership vote in Canadian history.”
Most notably, the leadership race was decided in part by a new class of “supporters”; a free-to-join category where supporters simply had to solemnly declare that they weren’t members of another political party.
The Liberal Party did their best to check the supporters list for potential fraud, but as one party official told CBC at the time, “No leadership process is without risk — if people want to try to defraud the system, they can.”
Regardless, the “biggest, most open federal political party leadership vote in Canadian history” wasn’t deciding who would immediately be sworn in as prime minister of Canada. When Trudeau rode a tide of “supporter” votes to become Liberal leader, he merely became the head of a caucus of 34 MPs whose leader was technically known as “Leader of the Third Party.”
IN OTHER NEWS
As you receive this newsletter, it should be clear whether the Trump White House has hit Canada with 25 per cent tariffs. But just to point out how confusing this has all been, Reuters published a story on Friday citing White House sources saying that tariffs against Mexico and Canada wouldn’t be coming until March 1. A few hours later, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told a press briefing she had “just been with” Trump and the tariffs would be coming Feb. 1 as scheduled.
Some consolation is that U.S. financial types don’t think they’re going to be lasting all that long. Washington Analysis, a Washington, D.C.-based financial analyst, placed odds this week on how the U.S. tariff fight with Canada was likely to go. Their four main predictions, with indicated likelihood:
25 per cent. Trump drops the threat altogether and moves on to something else.
45 per cent. No tariffs on Saturday, but a “formal tariff notice” with a new deadline.
20 per cent. Tariffs for a “hot second.”
10 per cent. “Tariffs sustained long term.”
On the subject of threatened taxes being delayed, however, the Trudeau government has suddenly decided to delay implementation of its hike to the capital gains tax. This was easily the most controversial plank of their 2024 budget, with economist Jack Mintz estimating that it would impose a $90 billion hit to Canadian GDP – about five times larger than the $17 billion it was poised to collect in additional revenue.
It was only three years ago that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that it was “cruel and unusual punishment” to give lifelong prison sentences to mass murderers. And now, a B.C. Supreme Court decision has ruled that it’s “cruel and unusual punishment” even to give murderers a 25-year sentence in jail. The decision reasoned that since you now get 25 years in jail no matter how many people you kill, you should get less time if you only kill one. The case concerned B.C. man Luciano Mariani, who beat his ex-girlfriend to death with a baseball bat in an attack he’d been planning for months.
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