The Key Details of the Liberal Party of Canada’s Leadership Race

Late yesterday, LPC Party President Sachit Mehra announced the first wave of details about the upcoming leadership race. Here’s what we know.

Timelines:

• January 23, 2025: The cut-off date for candidates to declare
• January 27, 2025: The cut-off date to register as an eligible voter
• February 11-12, 2025: The date registration procedures will be posted
• March 9, 2025: The date a new leader is selected
• March 24, 2025: The date Parliament resumes its business

This means it will be a punishing 59-day-long race, one of the shortest leadership races in memory. It’s far shorter than even the 2012–13 Ontario Liberal Party leadership race that I helped deliver, which was closer to 100 days in length.

The good news for the organizers that will make up LPC’s Team Neutral (the people who carry out the party operations of the race in a neutral manner) is that they can focus on delivering a direct vote weighted by riding rather than having to run a wave of local elections ahead of a delegated convention (as we did in 2012–13 in Ontario).

Voting Requirements — Each voter must:

• be at least fourteen (14) years of age;
• support the purposes of the party;
• be a Canadian citizen, have status under the Indian Act, or be a permanent resident of Canada.
• not be a member of any other federal political party in Canada; and
• while Registered as a Liberal, not have publicly declared an intention to be a candidate for election to the House of Commons other than as a candidate of the Party.

These changes to voting eligibility requirements are meant to address suggestions that, like the Conservative Party of Canada’s last leadership race, this race could be a target for foreign interference. This is especially important as the final report of the inquiry into foreign interference is due to be released on January 31 and will likely highlight how stricter party leadership rules are needed.

We don’t yet know how the vote itself will be managed in terms of voting procedure and verification of voter eligibility. In 2013, during the leadership election that selected Justin Trudeau, the vote was held online and by phone over a number of days and the result was announced at an event in Ottawa. More information on both these fronts will likely come no later than mid-February.

Other details:

• A Leadership Vote Committee will plan and organize the race
• Suzanne Cowan, Past President of the Party, and Marc-Etienne Vien, LPC(Q) Director, will co-chair the Leadership Vote Committee
• MP Patricia Lattanzio and John Herhalt, Chair of the Federal Liberal Agency of Canada, will co-chair the Leadership Expense Committee
• The expense committee will adopt Leadership Expense Rules for the leadership race and set a maximum expense limit
• The candidate entrance fee will be $350,000

The standout detail for me from what’s been announced so far, other than how short the race will be, is the entrance fee of $350,000. In 2013, it was just $75,000.

Those who followed along as I tracked the 2023 Ontario Liberal Party leadership race might remember that I also took an interest in the fundraising prowess of each of the candidates, tracking their results here. Just one candidate in that race was able to blow past the $350,000 mark, and she ended up winning that race.

Of course, the Ontario Liberal Party leadership candidates also had a longer period to raise this money. However, while Ontario will provide the bulk of the donations in this race, the LPC leadership candidates will be able to draw financial support from the rest of the country as well.

The biggest challenge for the candidates is that the $350,000 fee goes directly to the party and does not help fund any candidate campaign expenses. Fundraising on top of this total is a tall order and is likely meant to weed out candidates who lack fundraising strength. There are only so many people willing to make a political donation, and there remain strict rules on how much one individual can give.

The size of the fee isn’t the establishment putting its thumb on the scale of this race. The party requires such a large fee because whoever becomes its next leader will need to be able to turn around and immediately raise a war chest to fund a national campaign. The candidate fee helps form the start of that war chest.

Tracking the Race

When a party election takes place, most party experts have either joined a team and face charges of bias when they provide background on the race, or they join Team Neutral and can’t comment publicly or privately on the race.

I like to think it’s helpful for there to be at least some voices that have the expertise of having worked in the backrooms of Liberal politics but that lack a preference for any specific outcome to the race.

I have no plans to back a leadership candidate or campaign for any of them. Instead, I hope to play a similar role as I did during the recent OLP leadership race, tracking candidate commitments and providing partisan context that is sometimes missing in press coverage of these races.

Stay tuned to this account over the coming weeks to hear more.

Theresa has served as the Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party, the VP Communications for the Ontario Women’s Liberal Commission, the Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, and an election-speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. As a member of ‘Team Neutral’, she helped manage the 2013 and 2020 OLP Leadership races.