Mark Carney will be sworn in as Canada’s 24th Prime Minister later today. 
I learn from Larry Elliott – the economics editor of the UK’s Guardian newspaper throughout Carney’s time as Governor of the Bank of England – that Carney had
“…a volcanic temper and Bank staff were wary of getting on the wrong side of him. As a governor he was respected but not especially liked.”
The volcanic temper was news to me - as it probably is to the Liberal Party members who voted for him. But I am sure they were all beguiled by the pollsters’ predictions that put Carney within touching distance of the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre.
To them, he is clearly the man of the moment.
Heavy lifting
Carney won a landslide victory here in Newmarket-Aurora, which mirrored the national vote. The 317 people – card carrying Liberals – who actually participated in the ballot constitute a tiny fraction of the voting age population. Under half of one per cent.
This isn’t a complaint. Members of political parties do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
We don’t have mass membership political parties in Canada.
Selling memberships
But “membership” numbers inflate massively during Party leadership contests when, astonishingly, the wannabe leaders can sell Party memberships to their supporters.
This leads to clientism and cronyism and should be outlawed. I take the old fashioned view that people participating in Party leadership votes should have been members of the Party for, say, six months beforehand. Just to show some affinity to the Party in question.
And it’s not just the Liberals I’m getting at. The Conservatives too sell memberships on an industrial scale. 
Soft underbelly
The nominations process is the soft underbelly of Canadian democracy.
In some ridings, memberships balloon into the thousands during nomination contests for candidates for the House of Commons. These are the phoney members who disappear as soon as the contest is over.
In some safe ridings, winning the Party nomination is a passport into the House of Commons.
Getting selected is the challenge. Getting elected is the easy part.
Quest for truth
The former Liberal MP and one time wannabe Liberal Prime Minister, Ruby Dhalla, who was disqualified by the Party, is on a "quest for truth".
She wants to know what happened to the 250,000 “registered” Liberals who didn’t make it through the certification process.
Seems to me that if her registered Liberals can’t be bothered to answer a few simple questions to prove they are who they say they are (and in a vote that will decide the next Prime Minister of Canada) then what’s the point of being a “registered Liberal” in the first place?
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Note 1: The Liberal results by riding are here.
Note 2: There is no membership fee to join the Liberal Party of Canada.
Click "Read More" for the Globe and Mail report of 11 March 2025: Fewer than 40% of 400,000 registered Liberals voted in leadership race
11 March 2025: From the Globe and Mail: Fewer than 40% of 400,000 registered Liberals voted in leadership race
BILL CURRYDEPUTY OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF
EMILY HAWSPOLITICS REPORTER
OTTAWA
PUBLISHED YESTERDAYUPDATED 10 HOURS AGO
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After the Liberal Party boasted in January of signing up nearly 400,000 registered Liberals, only about 38 per cent of them made it through the verification process and turned out to vote in the race that elected Mark Carney as the party’s new leader and Canada’s next prime minister.
The party said 163,836 people successfully went through the authentication process. Of those, 151,899 voted in the race, or 93 per cent, which is the percentage the party is using for turnout.
But the party has not publicly explained why such a low proportion of registered Liberals voted. It has also not said how many registered Liberals were unable to be verified using its authentication process, which relied on a tool managed by Canada Post, or how many were disqualified because they did not meet the eligibility requirements. The party has also declined to provide a breakdown of how many members each campaign signed up.
Liberal MPs praised the turnout, pointing out that the number of voters was up significantly from the more than 104,000 who voted in the 2013 race that elected Justin Trudeau as party leader.
Former Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla, however, claimed Tuesday that her campaign had signed up 100,000 supporters before the party ousted her from the race. Her figure could not be independently verified.
“Imagine the outcome if the remaining 250,000 registered Liberals had voted,” she said in a news release.
The Liberal Party disqualified Ms. Dhalla’s candidacy last month just before the French and English leadership debates, citing various campaign-finance irregularities.
One Liberal party official dismissed Ms. Dhalla’s figures, saying the party has only identified about 200 registered Liberals as Dhalla supporters, though they did not explain how they reached that figure. The official said the fact that not all registered Liberals voted can be attributed to several factors, including tighter eligibility criteria, a short leadership campaign that meant less time for campaigns to organize their supporters and the general turnout patterns for all types of elections.
The Globe agreed not to identify the official, who was not authorized to discuss internal party matters.
The Liberals used a ranked ballot to elect their new leader, and a points system that allocated each riding in the country 100 points. The winning percentages were based on the number of points each candidate received.
Mr. Carney won 85.9 per cent of the vote, followed by 8 per cent for Chrystia Freeland, 3.2 per cent for Karina Gould and 3 per cent for Frank Baylis.
This was the party’s first leadership race since the 2013 contest that elected Mr. Trudeau. He went on to win a majority government in 2015 and then two minority governments, before announcing on Jan. 6 of this year that he would be proroguing Parliament until March 24 to allow time for the Liberal Party to select a new leader.
In the party’s 2013 race, around 300,000 people took the initial step to sign up as registered Liberals. Of them, 130,774 successfully registered to vote and 104,552 voted.
Prior to that race, the Liberal Party ended the practice of requiring paid memberships to vote. Instead, people could register as Liberal supporters at no cost.
Dalhousie University political science professor Lori Turnbull said that type of change can create problems because the membership base is so fluid.
“That strikes me as a very low number,” she said of the percentage of people who ultimately voted. She said large numbers of people are signed up at the last minute during leadership races.
“They have no particular loyalty to the party,” she said. “Now the approach to party membership is very transactional, and in the case of the Liberals, they don’t even charge a fee.”
Liberal MPs were on Parliament Hill Monday for a caucus meeting after Sunday night’s results. On their way into the meeting, several of them highlighted the increase in votes from 2013.
Ms. Gould said “it’s not abnormal” that a significant number of registered Liberals did not vote.
“I was thrilled to see the number of people who took out memberships, the number of people who participated and the number of people who voted,” she said.
Liberal MP Ben Carr said the party will need to do a postmortem to pin down the main reasons why some registered Liberals didn’t vote.
“It could be that there were some technical issues. People gave up,” he said. “It’s normal, just like in elections, to have a lower turnout than what the actual available voting population is.”
For the first time, the Liberal Party relied heavily on Canada Post to confirm the voters’ identities.
Before being allowed to cast a ballot, registered Liberals had to verify their identity through an in-person visit to a participating Canada Post Office or by using Canada Post’s Identity+ mobile app.
The focus on confirming voter identity was driven in part by scrutiny about the vulnerability of political parties to foreign interference in their electoral processes.
Justine McIntyre, a spokesperson for the Baylis campaign, said they were receiving messages right up until Sunday from supporters who said they were unable to vote.
Liberal MP Kody Blois said he’s proud of the fact that the party took extra steps to confirm the identity of voters.
“We know every single person who voted was legitimate, that there was no issue around foreign interference. I know there were some technical issues. We’re going to be following up with some members today. It wasn’t a perfect process, but I do think it was legitimate,” he said.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre won his party’s leadership in 2022 with 295,283, or 70.7 per cent, of the 417,635 votes cast. The Conservative Party had said 675,000 members were eligible to vote, meaning 62 per cent of them actually voted.
Around 65 per cent of 270,000 party members voted in the 2020 Conservative Party leadership race that elected Erin O’Toole. Turnout in the 2017 Conservative leadership race was about 55 per cent and it was about 37 per cent for the party’s 2004 race.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh won his party’s 2017 leadership race with 35,266 of the 65,782 votes cast. The NDP had boasted before the vote that its membership had tripled to more than 124,000, which works out to slightly over half of the party members casting ballots in that race.
Voter turnout in federal election campaigns has been below 70 per cent from 1993 onward. Turnout in September, 2021, the most recent election campaign, was 62.6 per cent.
With reports from Stephanie Levitz and Stephanie Chambers