The Bring Back Tom Mulcair Campaign Page

Report to the New Democratic Party membership on
the Events of the Federal NDP Convention in
Edmonton Alberta (April 8-10, 2016)
Version 2 (condensed)

By Dale Jackaman
NDP Member (2003-Present), Federal Campaign Manager 2015,
Federal NDP Candidate (2004, 2008, 2011)
Provincial NDP Candidate (2005)

Licenced Private Investigator

Includes new information on the ‘Kudatah’ movement referenced on pages
2, 3 and 10 and changes to the statistical data based on actual convention
voting numbers.

To Members of the Bring Back Tom Mulcair Campaign

Thank you for uniting in support of Tom Mulcair via the ‘Bring Back Tom Mulcair’ Facebook group.  As of this writing in February 23, 2017 more than 5,300 have joined and our ranks continue to grow at up to 3% per week. (over 8,000 by the end of the year) Clearly, there are thousands upon thousands of others like us out there, people who share our intense commitment to seeing Tom return to lead our party.  Tom keeps stating that he’s leaving politics but we’re doing our best to change his mind.

Aside from supporting Tom, we initiated an investigation to determine why he lost the leadership review vote at the 2016 Edmonton Convention.  We all expected Tom to pass this test handily, but when the results came out they did not make sense given the national leadership polling results at the time.  We were frustrated and angry along with a lot of other people.  We still are.

This report contains facts and claims which may anger some who read them.  We believe that the integrity of the delegate body was compromised by a delegate selection system that has well known historical flaws that damaged the integrity of our proportional voting system to the point where the results can no longer be trusted.  Flaws that were quite possibly taken advantage of by specific groups opposed to Tom or the current middle of the road social democratic leanings of the party.  As a result, collective decisions were made by the delegate body that were inconsistent with the will and interests of the membership as a whole. 

We are going to detail the flaws we have found, show just how the corrupted delegate system would have affected the vote, and go through some scenarios of what could have happened.

From the outset we sought to deal with our concerns internally. We contacted both the President and Executive Director of the party, made them aware of the issues described below, and asked specific questions that we hoped would restore our faith in the integrity of the delegate body and the decisions they made in Edmonton. Unfortunately, we did not receive a suitable response to our very simple questions. As long time donors, volunteers, staff, and candidates we saw no reason for the party to deny us the very basic information we sought. In fact, the reluctance of the party to provide us with this very basic information increased our level of concern. 

The seriousness of the issues we discovered in the delegate accreditation process in Edmonton compelled us to pursue this matter further. Given that our concerns were not dealt with in a suitable manner internally, we must reluctantly pursue the matter externally. We feel that members, volunteers, and supporters of the NDP and this group have a right to know about these issues.  The administration of the delegate accreditation process at the Edmonton convention violated our constitution, compromised the integrity of the delegate body, and very likely caused the resignation of our leader, Mr. Tom Mulcair.

As such, please consider the following information in our report.

Sincerely, Dale Jackaman

—————————————————


Our Case in Brief

Here are some facts that we know to be true.

●      The NDP constitution contains an explicit formula for proportional representation of delegates based upon membership in each Electoral District Association (EDA) at our conventions (Article V, Section 6).  This formula was not adhered to at the Edmonton convention of April 2016.

●      Many delegates registered independently online and in person and were given ‘fake’ credentials to represent ridings that they did not reside in.

●      The practice of issuing fake delegate credentials and the location of the convention created a situation whereby Alberta as a province, and quite likely Edmonton as a city, was overrepresented in the delegate body.

●      A Forum Research poll conducted March 15, 2016, less than four weeks before the Edmonton convention, found that Tom Mulcair had only 19% approval among all voters in Alberta compared to 67% nationally amongst NDP voters.

●      Conservative opponents of the NDP in Alberta had tried to sabotage the Alberta NDP convention just two months earlier in the ‘Kudatah’ by signing up one-thousand new members to control the delegate body, but were thwarted by the provincial party who applied intense vetting for all delegates over an unknown period of time by a contractor we were unable to contact.  (NDP members in Alberta are automatically members federally.)

●      If just ⅓  of the ‘Kudatah’ movement (333  delegates) had decided to subvert the federal NDP by registering online or in person and were accredited as fake delegates, they would have changed the results of the leadership review ballot by 12% (reducing the ‘approval’ of the leader from 60% to 48%), and caused the current leadership race.

●      A number of Tom Mulcair-hostile groups knew of the ‘fake’ delegate loophole and may have taken advantage of the situation to boost their negative votes.

A Closer Examination of the Facts and Implications

The letter and spirit of the constitution of the NDP mandates a proportionally representative delegate body based upon the number of party members living in each Electoral District Association (EDA), plus youth and affiliate delegates. The decision to grant accreditation to individual party members, regardless of their place of residence, to represent EDA’s other than their own, in effect created a new category of delegate – the ‘fake’ delegate.

With such a small delegate body (1,659) representing a large general membership (60,000+) it would take very little to significantly alter the votes. Consider the following;

●      If just 100 fake delegates who intended to vote against the leader in the leadership review were disqualified, then the results would have been flipped (to 51% against a leadership contest), and the leader would then have the option to stay on or resign.

●      If just 333 fake delegates intended to vote against the leader but were disqualified, then the result would have 60% against a leadership race.

Of course, we don’t know how many ‘fake’ delegate credentials were actually issued – the party refuses to answer this question – but it could have been more than 333.

In a Forum Research poll conducted less than one month before the NDP convention, Tom Mulcair had only 19% support among Albertans as a demographic group vs. 67% approval nationally amongst NDP voters. The exact results of the poll are below.

The question was: “Do you approve or disapprove of the job Tom Mulcair is doing as interim leader of the NDP? “

Compared to a national average of 67% for Tom Mulcair

Source:  Forum Research. Released: March 16, 2016 (in the field March 15, 2016). http://poll.forumresearch.com/data/4c0e5363-2f5a-460b-b467-fe6a2903287aFederal%20Horserace%20News%20Release%20(2016%2003%2016)%20Forum%20Research.pdf

The party’s decision to grant delegate credentials to party members living in some ridings which had already filled their own constitutionally prescribed allotment, and assigning them to represent other ridings that could not send a full contingent, violated the proportional representation formula contained in Article V, Section 6 of our constitution. This action corrupted the delegate accreditation process, resulted in a delegate body that was not representative of the general membership, and this illegitimate body took actions and made decisions that ran counter to both its will and interests of the general membership.

Article V Section 6

The NDP system of proportional representation at our conventions is, like any other proportional system, designed to represent in a legislative body (in this case the delegate body) each individual, political group or party in proportion to its actual voting strength (in this case the membership in each EDA, and affiliated groups) in the electorate (general membership). Article V, Section 6 of the NDP Constitution contains a simple formula for the delegate selection process to ensure that there is proportional representation for each Electoral District Association based upon the number of members who live within each.

Article V, Section 6(b) reads as follows:

Electoral District Association Delegates:  Each electoral district association shall be entitled to: i one (1) delegate for 50 party members or less; ii one (1) additional delegate for each additional 50 party members or major fraction thereof; and iii one (1) additional credential reserved for a youth delegate.

This makes it clear that the proportionality for each Electoral District Association (EDA) is based upon the number of members in the party that reside within their geographic boundary. This formula was, doubtlessly, enshrined in our constitution to ensure that one or more EDAs did not have a disproportionate say in decisions made at our conventions.  Proportional representation is an important democratic principle designed to reinforce equality among members of a group or body, and it is a keystone policy of the NDP, both internally and externally.  In the case of the Edmonton convention, this principle was not upheld. The President of our party has personally has confirmed this fact.

Accreditation of ‘Fake’ Delegates

In addition to accrediting duly elected delegates to represent their own local EDA, the convention administrators made the inexplicable decision to also accredit members who were not elected by their EDA. There is no provision in the constitution for granting delegate credentials to members who were not duly elected to represent an EDA, or who were not representing an affiliate group.  In fact, the administration created a new category of delegate, the “fake” delegate.

The party’s decision to accredit these fake delegates – those who lived in an EDA that had filled their own delegate allotment but who were assigned ad hoc to represent another EDA that could not send a full allotment – is the root of the problem. Unfortunately, during the course of our inquiry we learned that this practice of accrediting extra “fake” delegates has been employed in past conventions as well as in Edmonton. The party admits to this fact and has attempted to use past precedent as an excuse for this unconstitutional and unethical practice in Edmonton.  We reject this defence.  The party membership may not have been burned in the past but it certainly was in Edmonton.

Breaking a rule, or in this case violating Article V Section 6 of our constitution, in the past does not make the same action legitimate in the present. This defence is the logical equivalent of arguing that the offside rule should be removed from the hockey rulebook because a referee missed several offside calls in a row. We find the argument that ‘we’ve broken the rules in the past, so they do not exist in the present.’ to be unacceptable.

Fake delegates registering online

The above practice – issuing delegate credentials to random party members to represent an EDA that they do not live in – is a clear violation of Article 5 Section 6.

Rather than upholding the provisions of Article V Section 6, which mandates a proportionally representative delegate body based on EDA membership, the party administration actively undermined it. As a result, the delegate accreditation process in Edmonton was corrupted and the body of delegates gathered was not proportional to the membership of each EDA as mandated in our constitution. As such, we must conclude that this body of delegates was not a true representation of the general membership, and thus unable to make legitimate decisions on its behalf.

We would like to point out that each vote cast by a ‘fake’ delegate diminished the weight of every vote cast by an legitimately elected, youth, or affiliate delegates from every other EDA in the country

It has been confirmed to us by the party that these fake delegates filled slots that were willingly abdicated or surrendered by EDA’s that were unable to fill their own slate.  The process described to us by the party administration was that each of these EDA’s was asked to voluntarily surrender their unused delegate spots to the party. The administration then allocated those surrendered credentials to whomever they saw fit, or whomever was next in the queue assembled via the convention website.  They claim that since one EDA willingly surrendered their unused delegate slots, and an individual willingly filled it, that the process is legitimate. We disagree.  We suspect those persons surrendering such unused spots knew not the implications of such an action, or at least the implications of several ridings doing the same with several delegate allocations each.

On the surface, this practice looks harmless, but it is far from so. One particular and predictable outcome of this practice is the inherent creation of bias in favour of the host city and region.  The closer someone lives to a convention, the less likely they are to face obstacles to attending. It is fairly obvious that if a member is not required to purchase airfare, accommodations, or prepared meals, the likelihood of them attending rises exponentially. In fact, in a city of 900,000 plus residents with strong party roots, such as Edmonton, it is fair to say that hundreds more members would likely be interested in attending a convention than there would be available slots in their own EDA.

To take this argument to its logical extreme; if 1000 members from a single condo building on Whyte Ave. wanted to attend the Edmonton convention, and enough delegate spots were surrendered by other ridings, then there would be no rationale for rejecting those unelected delegates so long as they were acting in good faith. One condo building, or housing complex, or EDA could have a majority voice at a convention with a delegate body of 1,800 that represented 60,000+ plus members if they had registered in such a manner and were slotted into enough ‘surrendered’ delegate spots.  Fair to the membership as a whole?  No it is not.

While we believe this misguided initiative was likely undertaken in an effort to raise funds via the collection of extra delegate fees, (and to fill otherwise empty seats in low turnout conventions), and concede that this may have been a common practice at past NDP conventions, we also believe that it unambiguously compromised the proportionality of the delegate body at this convention, and perhaps others.

We would assert that the constitution of the NDP was conceived in such a way as to – deliberately – ensure there was proportional representation of our members at conventions based upon the number of members in each EDA.  There is a proportional formula in Article V, Section 6 for a reason, and actions were taken by the NDP administration in the lead up to this convention (and perhaps others) that undermined the rights of the membership as enshrined in our constitution.

Fake delegates registering at the door

In addition to the online registration of unelected fake delegates, the NDP administration for this convention also signed up an unknown number of unelected fake delegates at the door.  We believe, and have heard anecdotal evidence from a number of sources, that the vast bulk of the delegates who signed up in this fashion came from Alberta. This evidence stands to reason since it would be illogical for someone fly into a convention from another province without having first secured their delegate credentials. Similar to the unelected fake delegates who signed up online, unelected delegates who registered at the door were also accredited to ridings that they did not reside in, but had no requirement to cast votes or assume policy positions on behalf of the members or the demographic of that riding.

In what can only be seen as a partial recognition of the issues and claims contained in this report, the party administration eventually put in an ad-hoc rule for this convention stating that EDAs had to give permission to bring in these fake delegates, and that delegates could only be transferred between EDAs in the same province. Both are meaningless in terms of ensuring a truly representative vote on behalf of the general membership.  After all, a delegate from Edmonton no more represents the will of someone from Red Deer, as someone from Toronto represents Thunder Bay, or from Montreal represents Quebec City, or from Vancouver represents Kelowna. As such, we cannot accept the notion that the voluntary, random, and effectively ‘blind’ ‘swapping of delegates between EDAs within a province, or limiting the practice to EDAs within the same province, is an acceptable substitute for the proportional representation of each EDA as enshrined in the constitution.

We would like to add at this point that we believe the EDAs who surrendered their delegates must be forgiven for granting permission as they were acting in a very selfless manner to – seemingly – assist our party. Taking a couple delegates at a time from one riding or two may not seem like a big deal, but as you will see the effects of this occurring in a widespread manner could prove devastating to very notion of proportional representation, and the idea that delegates are supposed to reflect decisions that are consistent with the will of the general membership. In short, these selfless acts, when taken together, may have proven to be self-destructive.

The “Alberta Factor”

According to a letter from the NDP President Marit Stiles, it is quite normal for a host city and province to be “well represented.” Extra representation, however, is something completely different. Alberta and Edmonton, in this particular case, would already have extra (but constitutionally protected) influence over the proceedings at this convention because logic dictates that it is easier and more affordable for delegates to attend from the host region. The same logic holds true for independent delegates not elected by their EDAs, but who registered online or in person and who were accredited to represent an EDA other than their own. In short, NDP members in Alberta had a very disproportionate say in the decisions taken at this convention compared to NDP members in other provinces.

The reason why Alberta having more delegates than they were constitutionally allowed matters is that, outside of the obvious moral and ethical issues, Albertans as a population feel less positively about the current NDP leader than those living elsewhere  – by a wide margin. Recall that the Forum poll results from just a month prior to the Edmonton showed that just 19 percent of Albertans approved of the performance of the leader, which was 16 percent less than the national average, and 46 percent lower than New Democrat supporters. In fact, the same poll showed that of all regions, party supporters, and genders Albertans (19%) were the least likely demographic subgroup to express approval for the leader – less likely than even Liberals (37%) or Conservative (21%) voters. Regardless of the case in question, the overrepresentation of any such outlier subgroup in a delegate body would dramatically misrepresent the views of the general membership.

More troubling than Alberta receiving a disproportionate number of delegates in violation of our constitution, and the fact that Albertans were dramatically less likely to approve of the leader than any other group of Canadians, is the fact that opponents of the NDP in Alberta had tried to infiltrate a provincial convention and manipulate the internal democratic processes of that party a mere two months prior to the federal convention.The so-called ‘Kudatah’ movement consisted of 1000+ conservative activists who attempted to infiltrate the provincial party, but were prevented from doing so thanks to a determined effort by provincial party officials, who vetted every new member and delegate (even examining their social media posts) and disqualified those found to be infiltrators or held ill will for our movement. That vetting was not completed until after the federal convention.  The success rate of such a vetting process is questionable.

There was a clear violation of the NDP constitution that lead to the overrepresentation of one region that could be only be described as being organically ‘hostile’ in their collective opinion of the leader, but the truth of what caused the current leadership race could be far more sinister. The conservative Kudatah movement in Alberta had a very strong motive for infiltrating the NDP convention, namely to sabotage the operations of our party. This movement had also recently proven that it had the organizational means to pull off such subterfuge, and the opportunity to do so thanks to the ad hoc and unconstitutional accreditation of fake delegates by party administrators. The confluence of these circumstances can only be described as ‘The Alberta Factor’ and we believe that they, in whole or part, explain the illegitimate deposition of our leader at this convention.

We all know that Albertans vote differently on a broad range of issues than the rest of Canada, as do Quebecers and Ontarians and those living in other regions. Indeed, Edmontonians vote quite differently than Calgarians or those who live in Red Deer or Lethbridge. This, then, begs the question: ‘Why should one province, or one region in one province have a disproportionate say in the decisions taken at our convention?’ There is, of course, no reason why they should, but especially given that our party has a proportionally representative delegate system for our conventions.

Every time an extra delegate was assigned from a riding that already had a full slate to a riding that did not, it diminished the weight of the votes of other elected delegates representing all other ridings.  If one travelled all the way from Newfoundland, and paid their full delegate fees, then the weight of their vote would be diminished every time the party granted fake credentials. In the end, after these fake delegates were assigned, the votes of legitimately elected delegates from EDAs across Canada were worth less, yet their delegate fees remained the same. This is unfair to the delegates themselves, their EDA whose voice was illegitimately diminished, and the general membership that the assembled delegates were supposed to represent.

We argue that the delegate selection formula in our constitution was designed SPECIFICALLY to prevent such practices, and to ensure that each riding had a proportional voice at our conventions. This delegate selection formula has, over time or in this instance, been twisted for fundraising and seat filling purposes to the detriment of the spirit of the party constitution, proportional representation, and democracy itself. For a party that prides itself on supporting democratic proportional representation, it smacks of hypocrisy at the highest levels.

In hindsight, given what we know about the corrupted delegate accreditation process and the publicly available data about perceptions of Mr. Mulcair by the general public and NDP supporters alike, we believe that the will and interests of the general membership were not properly represented in Edmonton. We are very confident in our belief that, had our constitution been upheld, and proportionality between EDAs and affiliates in the delegate body been upheld, that the decisions made in Edmonton would have differed greatly. Specifically that  Mr. Mulcair would have had the confidence of a critical mass of NDP members across Canada. As a result, we do not believe that he would have felt obliged to offer his resignation following a properly delegated convention.

Note: Please see ‘Addendum B: Plausible Scenarios’ (page 17) for examples as to how these the above factors could have influenced the results of the leadership ballot.

Attempts to resolve the issue internally

As we began to discuss this issue with other New Democrats from across the country, and investigate the publicly available evidence, we eventually decided that our concerns had to be brought to the attention of the party. We wanted these concerns to be resolved quickly with as little disruption as possible.  As such, we wrote to the President of the NDP to raise her awareness of them.

In our first email we asked for some non-specific information which would not violate the privacy rights of our members, but would still shed some light on the geographic composition of the delegate body in Edmonton. In this email we requested three bits of information to help allay our concerns; a raw tally of the delegates accredited to each EDA and each affiliated group; a separate raw tally of all delegates sorted by the first three letters of their home postal code (ie: K1A, T4A, N3T, etc.); and the total number of delegates who voted on the leadership question and the exact results. All of this information was nonspecific to protect the privacy rights of individuals, and easily retrievable from our party database. It was my hope that this information would allay our concerns or indicate if further investigation was required.

In her cordial response to our initial email NDP President, Marit Stiles, offered some information but not that which we had requested. The delegate information she provided was at the provincial level; the number of delegates by province. Ms. Stiles wrote: “At the Edmonton Convention, there were 1382 delegates from Electoral District Associations; 416 from Ontario, 354 from the host province of Alberta, 241 from British Columbia, 155 from Quebec and 116 from Saskatchewan, with the balance from the other provinces and territories.” This information did not address our concern, which we had explicitly laid in the original email, namely that a few EDA’s in particular may have had a grossly disproportionate say in the decisions taken at the convention. Ms. Stiles also provided provincial level information about the affiliate delegates (“,,,the bulk of whom were from Alberta (101), Ontario (98) and British Columbia (44)”), and indicated that no record of the number of votes cast was kept and did not care to offer an estimate.  (See ’Addendum B’ for copies of all correspondence)

While I appreciated her taking the time to respond, the information provided by Ms. Stiles in this initial response did nothing to allay our concerns that certain EDA’s may have had a grossly disproportionate say in the votes and decisions taken at the Edmonton convention, so we tried again.

In response to Ms. Stiles we wrote the following;

“Initially, we believed that a tally of delegates by postal code (first three letters and number) would suffice, but even that would not provide us with an accurate view in hindsight. We believe the only way to establish the confidence we seek is for the party to provide us with two tallies; a tally of eligible delegates by riding and a second tally of actual delegates by their home riding – not the ridings they were issued credentials for, but the riding they actually live in.  As such, there should be two tallies for the 338 EDAs and these tallies should include the special delegates (i.e.: Ottawa Centre Eligible = 24, Ottawa Centre Actual = 13). The bare minimum requirement for confidence in this case would be the actual delegate tally.”

At this point, it is worth recognizing that the party did not ‘owe’ us this information, but that we were hopeful that hundreds of hours of work in service to our cause would at least yield some information related to my question. We were wrong.  We did not receive a response to this email from Ms. Stiles.

We found the decision to not offer a further response to our legitimate concerns troubling, so we decided that the issue of fake delegates and the undermining of our constitution was significant enough to raise with our federal NDP caucus. As such, we sent an email to each member along with an earlier version of this report.  We received a direct response from caucus which essentially said this was a matter for the NDP executive and had nothing to do with them.  Ironically, after not receiving a response from Ms. Stiles to our previous email that was directly addressed to her, we received a response to this one which was addressed to others. In her response she wrote:

“The rules that applied to delegate accreditation in Edmonton were the same as those that have applied in all recent NDP conventions. Past practice provides that EDAs may assign credentials to any member, regardless of whether they live in the riding. In the event an EDA has unused credentials the Party has traditionally made these available to other interested members in goodstanding [sic] And it is standard practice that delegates can register in person at Convention….It is the norm of course that the host province is well represented. That said, the participation pattern roughly mirrors the distribution of members across the country and no EDA had more than its eligible number of delegates“

We found this response both disappointing and troubling. First, she employs the fallback argument that ‘we’ve always done it this way before, so we were right to do it again.’ Second, the claim that “no EDA had more than its eligible number of delegates,” is presented without the evidence that we had asked for, which would have validated her claim.  Instead of providing evidence to refute our claim, we were simply asked to accept her response at face value and politely go away. Had she provided any evidence to address our concerns, we may well have done just that, but she did not.

Having raised our concerns about the delegate accreditation process and the possible corruption of the delegate body internally, and having not received an appropriate response, we feel compelled to share our concerns with you; the members of the Bring Back Tom Mulcair Campaign and the membership at large. The nature of our investigation and attempts to resolve the issue internally was quite time consuming, which explains the delay in releasing this information to our members.

Recommendations and Conclusion

Given the information and facts detailed in our report, the leadership review vote in Edmonton was illegitimate and should be annulled.

1) The party’s executive needs to admit there were serious problems with the Edmonton leadership review vote and act accordingly and ethically.

2) The practice of granting fake delegate credentials be stopped, permanently, given that it clearly violates the proportionally representative formula contained in Article V, Section 6.

Finally, we have a recommendation for Mr. Mulcair personally.

3) Should the party not accept our recommendations above, and should the decisions of the Edmonton convention continue to be accepted as legitimate, we would implore you to enter this leadership race as a candidate. You have vast support among a great many members of our party and the general public broadly. The membership of the ‘Bring Back Tom Mulcair’ Facebook page now has more than 5,400 members, which is the equivalent of 10% of the current NDP membership. We are your base; your grassroots. We are prepared to volunteer our time, donate what we can (many have already made unsolicited pledges), and work on your behalf to prove that the delegates in Edmonton got it wrong and were not representative of the general membership. We think you should remain NDP Leader and can become the first NDP Prime Minister in 2019, and we are prepared to do all that we can to make it happen.

We know we have opened up a real can of worms but it’s time to get this all out into the open.  We just lost one of the best leaders the NDP has ever had, and many of our members are rightfully angry.

Mr. Dale Jackaman – Bring Back Tom Mulcair Campaign

ADDENDUM A

Plausible Scenarios: Demonstrations of the effect that the corrupted delegate body could have had upon the leadership review ballot result.

We believe that the misguided practice of assigning these ‘fake’ delegates by the party administration violated our constitution. If you think the number of those fake delegates was too small to matter, then you are probably wrong. Just 250 fake delegates could have undermined the general will of the membership. To illustrate, here are three scenarios where such delegates could have taken decisions in violation of the will of the general membership.

Scenario 1 – Unintended Regional Imbalance

Enthusiasm in Alberta NDP circles is riding high, and members in that province are mobilized. Competitive elections are held for delegate spots, but many members wishing to attend as delegates are left disappointed. They add their name to the non-elected delegate ‘queue’ that was publicized on the NDP convention website. Some 250 members from the host region are in the queue, or plan to try and register at the door.

Other EDA’s in Alberta are unable to fill their delegations. In the end, just over half of Alberta’s total delegate allotment ends up not being filled by EDA’s. At this point, the EDA’s “surrender” their delegate spaces at the request of party administration and the queue is emptied. The result is that Alberta fills its allotment of 400+ delegates, which represents approximately ⅕ of all convention delegates, but a full 250 members (or 15% of all delegates) end up as accredited delegates at convention and reside in EDA’s that are already fully represented.

The effects on proportionality are very negative and very significant. Those EDA’s, already benefitting from a regional bias, are now further advantaged. Additionally, other EDA’s from outside of Alberta see the weight of their votes diminished. The result is an unintended regional imbalance that violates the required proportional representation as defined in the constitution. Given the location of the convention (Alberta) the leader is also faced with a delegate body that is decidedly less supportive of his ongoing tenure than the general membership, and the assembled delegates vote disproportionately for a leadership race which is in direct conflict with the will of the general membership.

Scenario 2 – Organized Internal Movement Undermining Will of General Membership

A group of NDP members decide to organize against the leadership, but reside overwhelmingly in a few ridings that fill their slates completely. As long time activists they are well aware of the practice of issuing ‘fake’ delegate credentials and decide to exploit the loophole to depose the leader.

More than 200 members of this group were not elected, but still have the will and financial means to attend convention.  Many Alberta EDA’s have an enthusiastic local membership, but members find the costs or location of the convention to still be prohibitive in spite of it being located within the same province. Several Alberta EDAs are unable to fill their delegate slates, and surrender their credentials. The members of this group opposed to Mr. Mulcair’s leadership then receive their ‘fake’ credentials. Because of this process, the group now has 150 elected delegates and 200 additional ‘fake’ delegates added through the queue process. This group organizes and has large enough numbers to dramatically affect the votes and defeat or pass motions or constitutional changes.

The end result is that these motivated and organized members who oppose the leadership went from having a proportionate voice based on our constitution to a disproportionate one. If some EDA’s had members that wanted to attend, but were unable to due to financial, geographic, or other reasons they become victims of discrimination, and the well-financed and organized internal group are able to pursue their own agenda, which runs counter to the will of the general membership.

Scenario 3 – Organized External Movement to Subvert the NDP

Our conservative opponents have been humiliated by the success of the Alberta NDP government and vow revenge. In February 2016 some organize and try to infiltrate the rank and file of membership of the Alberta NDP, obtain delegate credentials, and undermine that party at its own convention. The Alberta NDP, to their credit, recognizes this movement, closes ranks, and begin vetting individual members and delegates, examining public statements and social media posts to ensure they in fact are members in good standing and acting with goodwill. By June, the Alberta NDP had rejected over 1000 memberships to protect the integrity of their convention.

As the loophole for the Alberta NDP convention closes, the conservatives vow to continue the fight, and some keen eyes read that the federal NDP is coming to Alberta to hold its own convention in a couple of months. They scan the NDP convention website and see in plain sight that they can join the party and become delegates even if they were not elected by their own “riding association.” JACKPOT!  Some 300 conservatives come together and decide to register to see if they can get credentials and cause problems at convention. They for sure want to take out the Leader of the NDP who is responsible for demolishing the credibility of the Harper Conservatives throughout the Senate Scandal. At the very least, they want to diminish his stature.

In the end, their plan works better than expected. The convention organizers are overworked and tired. Many regular elected delegates leave the convention early to catch long flights home, or because they believe that nothing of consequence could happen in the leadership review, mostly because nothing ever does. Everyone’s guard is down. In the end, just 1,500 votes are cast, including the 300 local conservatives, and delegates vote 52% in favour of a leadership race. Had those 300 infiltrators been denied their credentials, and their votes negated, then the vote would have been just 40%  – or put in another way, the Leader would have received the approval of 60% of delegates; enough to prevent the current leadership race.

The true story of how conservatives in Alberta tried to destroy the Alberta NDP by sabotaging their 2016 convention can be read here:

http://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/a-peaceful-kudatah-ndp-opponents-want-to-take-down-party-from-within

http://www.calgarysun.com/2016/06/12/alberta-new-democrats-are-not-in-danger-of-being-taken-over-from-within-says-official