Quebec has surged in importance, but Ontario and British Columbia will still play kingmaker at the NDP leadership convention next month.
The NDP revealed Tuesday that it now has 128,351 registered members, the largest membership in the party’s history.
This is the definitive number of who can vote in the party’s March 24 leadership convention in Toronto, as the deadline to sign up new members has passed.
But the new reality of the NDP is barely reflected in the ranks. More than half of the NDP’s 102 seats in the House of Commons come from Quebec, but the province makes up just 9.6 per cent of the membership — 12,266 people.
In comparison, British Columbia and Ontario combined make up almost 60 per cent of the party’s membership.
The NDP shares its memberships with provincial affiliates. This put Quebec at a steep disadvantage because it is the only province in the country without a provincial wing of the party. It had about 1,700 members last October.
Leadership candidates, particularly Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair, had put on a heavy leadership drive within the province in recent months.
British Columbia leads the country with 38,735 members followed closely by Ontario at 36,760.
Nova Scotia has 3,844 members, or three per cent of the membership. That’s about in line with Nova Scotia’s share of the Canadian population and the NDP caucus.
The numbers show Nova Scotia is well behind Alberta (10,249), Manitoba (12,056) and Saskatchewan (11,264) but well ahead of the rest of Atlantic Canada.
New Brunswick, which had previously kept its membership ranks secret, has 955 members. The three territories, which also did not report previously, have 924 members.
How good or bad the NDP ranks are is up for debate. The party touted its “remarkable” growth of about 50 per cent since October.
“Canadians are really engaged and involved in our leadership race, as these historic numbers show,” said NDP director Chantal Vallerand in a statement.
However, as previously reported in The Chronicle Herald, the membership growth is exaggerated. The NDP previously had just over 3,000 “federal” members not affiliated with any province. Those numbers were quietly shuffled into provincial totals, making it impossible to tell exactly how much each province has grown.
The membership ranks in the fall were also several months out of date. The federal NDP listed its Nova Scotia membership at 1,300 last October. But the province already had 2,500 members one month earlier, according to the provincial wing of the party.
The Liberal and Conservative parties declined to give their current membership numbers Tuesday. Media reports pegged the Liberals at a membership of just over 60,000 last May.
The Conservative Party of Canada claimed 251,000 at the time of its 2004 leadership convention, while the Liberal Party claimed 185,000 members in its 2006 leadership race.
