Conservative party says nearly 679,000 members eligible to vote for new leader

Conservatives announce third debate CPC National Council President, Robert Batherson, says the party isn’t reluctant to hold a debate despite rule-breaker candidates.

OTTAWA — The Conservative Party of Canada has announced its finalized membership list, reporting that a total of 678,708 people will be eligible to cast a vote in the leadership race.

In a statement released Friday, party spokesperson Yaroslav Baran said membership has quadrupled since last year, claiming that this makes the Conservatives the largest party in Canadian history by memberships.

The Liberal Party of Canada, for its part, said it had nearly 300,000 members at the time of its last leadership election, in 2013.

According to the party’s numbers, the most significant growth was in Quebec, where the number of memberships jumped from 7,648 at the end of last year, to 58,437 now.

While there were 261,984 total party members during the 2020 leadership race, the party says there are now nearly 300,000 people eligible to vote in Ontario alone. The party says membership doubled, at least, in all the provinces and territories, even quadrupling in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, and British Columbia.

The party will not release the number of memberships sold by individual leadership campaigns, so it’s unknown whether any one candidate can claim responsibility for the huge growth in certain regions.

The party says 80,000 members have already sent in their votes. But exactly how many of the nearly 679,000 members will actually cast their ballots by the Sept. 6 deadline won’t be known until the winner is announced on Sept. 10.

The deadline to sign up for a membership, and therefore be able to vote in the upcoming leadership election, was June 3.

The previous record number of party members was in 2004, when the then-Progressive Conservative Party and then-Canadian Alliance merged to create the Conservative Party of Canada. There were nearly 282,000 members at that time. Since then, the record high during a leadership campaign was in 2020 with 261,984 members.

“This massive surge in membership demonstrates the excitement generated by this leadership race, and the momentum for a change of government in Ottawa,” Conservative Party President Robert Batherson said in the release.

Party officials released a preliminary membership list to the leadership campaigns in late June for review. All the campaigns were then given the opportunity to challenge memberships. At that time, there were approximately 675,000 members on the list.

According to the party, the final list has about 3,500 more members because the review period allowed time for the campaigns to challenge some of the exclusions, proving some members should in fact be eligible to vote.