Singh’s campaign denies wrongdoing

OTTAWA • Jagmeet Singh’s campaign says its rivals are “confused,” denying allegations from fellow NDP leadership contender Charlie Angus’s campaign that the membership sign-up numbers Singh’s camp has claimed don’t add up.

Singh’s campaign announced earlier this week it had brought upwards of 47,000 new members to the party — more than a third of the 124,000 people the NDP announced would be eligible to vote in its upcoming leadership election.

The party confirmed to the National Post that as of March it had about 41,000 active members in good standing. That number rose to 41,500 in May and 53,000 in July, although a party official admitted that some signups from provincial branches of the NDP may not yet have been reflected in those numbers.

But Jesse Brady, a co-campaign manager for Charlie Angus’s campaign, contends these numbers don’t sound quite right.

Since Angus entered the race in March, Brady has kept an active database of all names that appeared on the NDP’s central database, which is shared with campaigns. Based on cross-referencing duplicates out of the database, Brady said he believed there were about 70,000 members in the party as of early May, before Singh announced his candidacy. This, added with Singh’s announced sign-up numbers, is just 7,000 names short of the total list. Other candidates and provincial branches of the NDP would surely have added more than that to the pile, Brady contended, so how could Singh’s numbers be accurate?

Michal Hay, Singh’s campaign manager, has now denied the inference that her organization either messed up the numbers or deliberately inflated them.

“We are very proud of our field team, and the thousands of volunteers and organizers across the country who worked tirelessly to bring in more than 47,000 NDP membership sign ups for Jagmeet,” Hay told the Post in a written statement. “Unfortunately, as the Federal Party has pointed out, one campaign misunderstood the totals provided by the Party and confused lapsed members with members in good standing.”

Angus and Singh are perceived to be the two frontrunners in the race, ahead of Guy Caron and Niki Ashton. A source from one of the two latter campaigns told the Post earlier this week they believed Brady’s numbers sound accurate, although they did not want their candidate’s name involved.

By the party’s explanation, many of the names the Angus campaign would’ve kept on its membership list may not be actual members anymore. Party membership is typically valid only for one year. Because the Angus database was kept on a separate system, people whose membership had expired weren’t dropping off the list.

Brady said, however, most of the people the campaign called based on its database either said they were members, didn’t know their membership had expired and decided to renew it, or said they had already renewed.

In any case, it is not possible to double-check numbers put out by campaigns because party membership lists are kept confidential. None of Singh’s competitors intend to release their own sign-up numbers.

Caron, meanwhile, scored a major endorsement from the United Steelworkers, a union that supports the NDP, Friday after gaining the support of former party leader Alexa McDonough earlier this week. Voting in the NDP leadership race begins Sept. 18. First-ballot results will be announced Oct. 1. If the race gets to a second ballot, it will be announced a week later, Oct. 8.