Supporter category

Thousands had been allowed to vote without party membership

The Alberta Liberals ended a political experiment Saturday that allowed thousands of people without party memberships to vote in its leadership races.

The party was the first in Canada to create a supporter category in 2011, which allowed people to register to vote in leadership and constituency contests without becoming a card-carrying party member. About 29,000 people became supporters during the 2011 leadership contest won by Raj Sherman.

Liberal party president Todd Van Vliet said delegates at the party’s annual general meeting Saturday decided to eliminate the supporter category after it failed to convert most of those supporters into party members.

“That’s been a source of frustration because we hoped this would be a form of outreach, that we’d be able to talk to people that we otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to talk to and that we’d be able to convert at least some reasonable percentage of them to membership,” Van Vliet said.

“What it appears is that people were involved as supporters for the very, very specific and sole reason of having a say on the leadership and they didn’t appear to be really interested in the party, and that’s not the way for us to grow our base.”

The party has about 1,200 registered members, compared to about 3,500 members in August 2011.

More than 8,900 members and supporters voted in the September 2011 leadership race Sherman won after his defection from the Progressive Conservative caucus.

The Liberals ceded their status as the Official Opposition in the 2012 election to the Wildrose Party, winning 10 per cent of the popular vote.

But the party also defied predictions that it would be wiped out, holding onto five seats.

The idea to give people equal say with official party members seemed to work better at the federal level in the recent Liberal leadership race, which Justin Trudeau won in April, Van Vliet said.

“If you get 50,000 or 100,000 supporters for a party as large as the federal Liberal party, it’s no big deal,” he said.

“If that was to happen to our small organization, it would be a problem.

“It did cost us. The leadership race ran over budget quite dramatically.”

Van Vliet said he does not think Saturday’s decision means the party made a mistake when it adopted the supporter category two years ago. But it does acknowledge that party members feel it does not work under the Liberals’ current bylaws.

Sherman said he believed the supporter system helped generate enough interest in the Alberta Liberals to help it survive the 2012 election.

He said he was intrigued by the system when he joined the party and called it an interesting way to engage people in democracy.

“Great idea, but really at the end of the day it has to translate into volunteers and donors,” Sherman said.

Looking back at the leadership, Sherman said he did not believe the result would have changed if it had been a members-only vote since he would have played by whatever rules were in place.