Jordan Owens

It’s been 12 months since Rae became Interim leader; what do Liberals have to show for that? I’m afraid it isn’t much

The NDP has a seemingly fluid stance on party leaders with dual citizenship

In the upcoming days, watch for criticism in the media—probably by anonymous Liberal sources (not to be confused with Anonymous Liberal Sources)—of the decision to allow the leader to veto policies. You should also expect criticism of the other major constitutional change to take place this weekend: the process to select the next leader has been opened to include non-member “Liberal supporters,” in addition to card-carrying members.

Update: they have now ruled it out.

Anonymous Liberal Sources stole a moment of PEI Premier Robert Ghiz’s time during his visit to the Liberal biennial convention. Here are some highlights:

Liberal party presidential candidate Mike Crawley’s war room is a hub of action; volunteers are assembling swag kits, making stickers, and entering data, all to ensure their candidate becomes the next president of the Liberal party of Canada.

This morning, Anonymous Liberal Sources sat down again with Michael Ignatieff. We talked about his view from the stage at last night’s tribute and his thoughts on what comes next for the Liberals.  We’ll have a longer piece later, but will leave you with this snippet where he mentions presidential candidate Mike Crawley:

The Young Liberals of Canada have managed to garner attention with a priority policy resolution calling for the abolition of the monarchy. The reason for doing so? To make the country more democratic. Yet the means by which this resolution will arrive on the convention floor was apparently anything but.

Earlier today, Adam and I sat down with our old boss, Michael Ignatieff.  We’ll have more for you shortly, but here’s some of what he had to say about the Canadian political landscape.

Following along with my previous post, the policy process has also taken a digital twist.  At previous policy conventions, a floor vote would be held to select resolutions with enough support to be debated at plenary sessions. Instead of holding two in-person votes, the Party has used Liberal.ca to open first round voting to the entire membership. With the first round of voting moved online, priority resolutions will only be voted on by in-person convention-goers once, at a plenary session early Sunday morning.

It’s too bad for the Liberals that 2011 wasn’t the year of the social media election. Despite killing it in online metrics, Liberal efforts to cash retweets in at the ballot box were largely unsuccessful. Unfortunately for us humble bloggers, social media remains largely dominated by members of the mainstream media, “web 2.0 experts,” people making slanderous allegations about Julian Fantino, Beliebers, people who aren’t Mike Duffy, and an increasingly large group of folks determined to give me an Ikea gift card.

Voters are prepared to go about their lives, with or without the party