It’s mere hours before thousands of New Democrats converge on the Metro Convention Centre to select the next leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
It’s been an interesting, though relatively quiet, race. Most of the contenders have minimized the nasty personal attacks, which signals two things. It’s both a sign of the NDP’s political culture, and a strategy, since each candidate requires the support of other candidates’ voters and can’t afford to offend or alienate those who may consider voting for them as their second or third choice on a ranked ballot.
The ranked ballot, allowing members to rank as many or as few candidates as they choose in their preferred order, makes it hard to predict the outcome. But it offers valuable lessons for the broader electoral process.
Is it possible that ranked ballots could improve the quality of discussion nationally? What if we really could ensure that the winner of an election had the support of over 50 per cent of the population?
The ranked system in the NDP leadership run-off guarantees that the winning candidate gets over 50 per cent support of all voters in the end, hopefully helping to strengthen party unity. Some members may eventually have to decide to support a candidate even if he/she was not their first choice.
This potentially feeds the sense that the final result is the product of open persuasion and reconsideration as opposed to backroom deals.
Many members at this point have likely already chosen their ranking – their vote is locked in – but around two-thirds still have not. This means they’re waiting to see how the race changes over the next few days. Once the convention starts, those voting either on site or via computer at home won’t have a ranked ballot option. They will just vote their choice, one at a time, on each round.
In this sense it may turn out to be more like a traditional convention, where there’s a lot of movement between ballots.
It appears at this point that none of the candidates has the ability to score a first-ballot win, so Saturday will likely be taken up with more rounds. The deadline for first-ballot voting is 9 am Saturday, and the first results are due at 10 am. Then things will get crazy, as various camps lobby members who aren’t locked into a preferred ballot.
This race is also the first real one member, one vote election of a national leader. All previous leaders, NDP or otherwise, were chosen either by delegates elected locally or by a OMOV process weighted geographically in the case of the Tories or weighted via allocation of labour votes in the case of the NDP.
A pure OMOV system changes the dynamic and places greater responsibility on each member, a good way to promote direct democracy and political engagement.
The other interesting thing is the relatively small amounts of money being spent by NDP hopefuls – a plus for democracy, because it keeps elected office within reach of most talented people.
The amounts raised up to mid-February top out at around $150,000 for Brian Topp and about $145,000 for Thomas Mulcair. Of course, as Elections Canada processes the spending since then, the amounts will go up. But they undoubtedly won’t hit the party limit of $500,000, in contrast to the million-dollar-plus sums of contenders in other parties.
The convention this weekend provides an opportunity for New Democrats to grab the national spotlight once more and showcase themselves as a strong party capable of leading the country. Let the media scrums begin.
NOW will be live-tweeting and blogging all the action from the NDP convention, March 23-24 Check it out at nowtoronto.com and twitter.com/nowtorontonews
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