Feb 11, 2011
The membership drive for the BC Liberals ended last week. Like that of the BC NDP, it saw a massive increase in memberships, 10,000 at a pop, primarily from the South Asian community. These new members are also primarily from Surrey and the lower mainland.
Going to the South Asian community to get large numbers of new members is not new for leadership contests in the Liberals and NDP in BC. Ujjal Dosanjh did it when he became leader of the NDP and rumour has it that Gordon Campbell using a similar tactic to take over the BC Liberals.
The whole process is distasteful and mass sign-ups of members from ethnic communities is just one more way to corrupt democracy. While it might be that some from the South Asian community are motivated by a personal desire to get engaged politically, my guess is that is an unlikely scenario . The only way to physically sign up 10,000 people from one ethnic community in a short period of time is to go where thousands of people are normally congregating and sign them up there, likely their place of worship.
The South Asian community in general is more politically involved than most British Columbians. They must be political for a reason. My bet is that they sign up not because of any broad based altruistic interest in bettering the lives of all British Columbians. They join because they believe it will directly benefit the South Asian Community (or Filipino community in the case of MLA Mabel Elmore.)
Mass sign ups from within any ethnic community are more likely to pervert the political system than improve it and these two parties should implement procedures to stop the practice. While I’d like to double or quadruple the membership of the Green Party of BC, I would only want members who are committed to our party and to be willing to work on behalf of all British Columbians. Real members are the only way to measure the strength of a party.
The Liberals have admitted that some of their new memberships seem to have been fraudulently obtained and they are now auditing a sample of these new memberships to fix that problem. The NDP have supposedly implemented some internal review. But the NDP downgraded rules related to membership fees being attached to membership forms from “rules” to “guidelines” when thousands of membership forms being submitted with the required membership fee being delivered separately. They didn’t want to deny anyone the opportunity to participate in their leader selection process.
The Election Act specifies that membership fees are donations and that the person making a donation must pay for it him or herself. It contravenes the act for someone to make a donation on behalf of another person unless the actual donor’s information is provided. When I heard that “bags of money” were delivered to the NDP headquarters separately from the membership forms, I wondered if the Election Act had been breached. Who knows, similar questions about adherence to the Election Act might be asked about some of the BC Liberals 50,000 new members.
If the membership lists of the two parties were to be compared, I expect there would be considerable overlap. Although a person can only be member of one party, it is convenient never to have to check.
While commenting on this kind of “rent a crowd” process is somewhat taboo because it is focused on one particular ethnic group, this kind of thing should not be condoned. And asking questions or demanding changes should not be labeled “racist”. The process perverts policy (I would suggest intentionally) and that further damages democracy.
Money does as well. Mike de Jong has made public his donations (well over $200,000) and his donor list and he is challenging the other leadership candidates to do the same. I have said many times that special interest money determines policy and it is just another way to buy democracy.
When it seems so easy to hijack democracy, I wonder whether it is possible to recreate truly democratic institutions. At least the BC Liberals might reduce the bias if they change their voting system to be used to select the next premier. But that won’t solve the fundament problem of how money, special interest groups and ethnic minorities manipulate what is done in the name of the people of BC.
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