Angus campaign calls foul on Singh sign-ups

NDP LEADERSHIP

OT TAWA • A rival campaign in the federal NDP leadership race is accusing candidate Jagmeet Singh of inflating the number of new party members he signed up.

Singh announced Tuesday he had signed up 47,000-plus new people, more than a third of the 124,000 the party says are eligible to vote this fall.

But Charlie Angus’s campaign says t his number doesn’t make sense, based on how many people were members of the party at the beginning of May before Singh entered the race.

“Looking back through the records of the updating of the party database, of the membership, we found that we are approximately around 41,000 around the end of March, as the party reported. However, by the beginning of May, the party had updated the database systems and the party list and we were at about 70,000 members at that point,” said Jesse Brady, a co- campaign manager for Angus.

The difference would be roughly 54,000 new members between early May and the party’s announcement this week. Singh’s number would leave only 7,000 new members signed up through other channels.

Several attempts to reach Singh’s campaign team Wednesday were unsuccessful. One of the two other campaigns confirmed the 70,000 number looks accurate, but they did not want to say so on the record unless the third campaign would corroborate it. The third campaign was unable to reach its data team to confirm the number.

A party official said the number of active, in- goods t anding members was roughly the same in May as in March: just over 41,000. Additional names in the database were likely people whose memberships had lapsed, they said, though admitting that because of how the database system works, it would be difficult to go back and get a precise number from May.

That the party didn’t bring in new members for over a month doesn’t ring true to Brady, since it was a busy time during which leadership candidates were getting their campaigns underway.

And since provincial and federal branches of the NDP are connected, new members were coming not just from nascent l eadership campaigns, but also from sign- ups generated by the B. C. provincial election, a leadership race in Manitoba, the nomination of candidates in Ontario and an upcoming leadership race in Saskatchewan — though provincial sign- ups weren’t automatically entered into the federal database.

Brady added many of the “new” names could have been renewals from lapsed members, but said the Angus database was checked for duplicates and they are confident in their number.

A spokesperson for candidate Niki Ashton’s campaign wouldn’t comment on whether Singh’s numbers made sense to them, but said they were “extremely proud” of their own numbers. “We over- achieved our goal,” the spokesperson said.