The NDP has made a lot of noise arguing Quebec deserves a fixed percentage of seats in the House of Commons. At the same time, they continue to move full speed ahead with a leadership race where Quebecers will be little more than an afterthought.<\/p>\n
After some enthusiastic headlines about the party’s membership numbers “soaring<\/a>” and “tripling<\/a>” in Quebec earlier this week, comes a dose of reality<\/a>:<\/p>\n The NDP has attracted 11,200 new members since the launch of its leadership race in August, with the addition of 3,900 new card holders in Quebec providing the biggest boost.<\/p>\n Overall, the party has now 95,000 official supporters, up from 83,800 when Jack Layton died three months ago.<\/p>\n Still, Quebec continues to be under-represented in the race to find a new party leader with just 5.9 per cent of the party cards in the one-member, one-vote leadership race<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The 5.9% figure isn’t the worrisome number for the NDP – that number is due to the fact that no one<\/em> (not even some of their MPs) had membership cards in Quebec a few months ago. What’s more relevant is that Quebecers made up just 35% of the new members the party has signed up during the leadership race. If the NDP keeps adding 12,000 members a month, with 35% coming from Quebec, Quebecers are going to cast just 15% of the votes in the leadership race.<\/p>\n This from a province home to over half the NDP’s caucus. This from a province the NDP has recognized as a “nation” deserving special status in all areas…except leadership races apparently<\/em>.<\/p>\n Maybe that’s fair, but it’s certainly not good news for a party hoping to build an organization in Quebec. And it’s certainly not good news for Thomas Mulcair, who hopes to ride Quebec to victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The NDP has made a lot of noise arguing Quebec deserves a fixed percentage of seats in the House of Commons. At the same time, they continue to move full speed ahead with a leadership race where Quebecers will be little more than an afterthought. After some enthusiastic headlines about the party’s membership numbers “soaring” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}