Then there were five: Liberal race narrows with Carney the choice of caucus – National

By day’s end on Thursday, the race to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada — and the country’s 24th prime minister — had narrowed to five candidates.

One of those remaining candidates vows to deport 500,000 “illegal immigrants”; another would halve the size of cabinet; another would cut the GST while raising corporate taxes; just about all seemed prepared to bail on the consumer carbon tax while one — the perceived leader in the race — has been noticeably silent and media-shy.

That perceived leader — the former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney — will de-cloak in Halifax Friday morning where he will make an announcement and take questions from reporters, the first time he will answer journalists’ questions in more than a week. Carney will face the press with two of of the more than 50 members of the Liberal caucus that have endorsed him standing behind him.

Carney got what, by my count, is his 53rd caucus endorsement late Thursday when Jaime Battiste, the Mi’kmaw MP who represents the Cape Breton riding of Sydney–Victoria, announced he was out of the race and that he was throwing his support behind the 59-year-old central banker.

Caucus endorsements didn’t much seem to bother the former Government House Leader and leadership candidate Karina Gould, who, at 37, is the youngest in the race by more than a decade. Speaking to reporters in Ottawa Thursday afternoon, she shrugged off the fact that just two of her caucus colleagues have endorsed her while most have endorsed either Carney or the 56-year-old former finance minister Chrystia Freeland.

“When I hear from one of those MPs who said, ‘I’m really sorry, I’m endorsing someone else’, then they always say, ‘But don’t worry, you’ve got my dad’s support, or you’ve got my hairdresser’s support, or you’ve got my [riding association’s] board support’. And guess what? Those votes are equal to the votes of cabinet ministers and MPs,” Gould said.

Indeed, the Liberal leadership race is, like the Conservative races won by Pierre Poilievre, Erin O’Toole or Andrew Scheer, a modified one-member/one-vote system. This race will operate under the new electoral map which will be in place for the next general election. So instead of 338 ridings, there are 343 ridings. Each one is apportioned 100 points and a leadership candidate is allotted points in each riding based on the percentage of votes each wins in that riding.

If, in one riding, candidate A gets 600 votes and candidate B gets 400 votes, then A gets 60 points and B gets 40 votes. But if just 100 people vote in another riding and it’s 60 for B and 40 for A,  then both would be tied with 100 points.

As a result, the system overweights voters in ridings with fewer Liberals — say in Alberta or Saskatchewan — than in Liberal stronghold ridings in Toronto or Montreal. It was the reverse in the Conservative leadership races, where voters in the country’s two biggest cities were more valuable than all those Conservatives in rural Alberta or Saskatchewan.

In any event, whoever gets 50 per cent plus one of the 34,300 points available, wins the race.

The party said Thursday that nearly 400,000 Liberals across those 343 ridings were eligible to vote. The party’s rules say they all must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

Gould had called reporters to an independent bookstore in Ottawa’s west end  Thursday to announce that “when” she becomes prime minister, she’ll cut the GST by one per cent — but only for a year.

“Canadians that I hear from think this is a real, tangible measure that demonstrates that as a leader, I’m listening to them when they say things are expensive and they need a break,” she said.

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She estimates that a year-long one-point GST cut would mean the federal treasury would be foregoing about $11 billion but she would partially offset that by raising the corporate tax rate on any corporation posting annual profits of $500 million from 15 per cent to 17 per cent, a move she figures would rake in about $7 billion.

Gould did not think much of the plan put forward by former Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla, 50, to deport “over half-a-milion illegal immigrants“.  Dhalla, a Brampton, Ont., MP from 2004 to 2011 , said in a social media post, “We must clamp down on human trafficking and those who are here illegally.”

Asked to respond to what is, so far, Dhalla’s signature policy proposal, Gould said: “I don’t think that this election is about scapegoating on vulnerable people in our country. I think that one of the things that has made Canada such an incredible, unique country and quite honestly, the envy of the world is the increase civil, appreciation and understanding of the importance of immigration to our country.“

Freeland, meanwhile, has challenged all other leaders to a debate and the party appears to have responded, saying there will be debates in French and English though details are TBD.

Freeland this week announced that, were she to become PM, she would halve the size of cabinet, from Justin Trudeau’s 38 to something around 20; weaken the power of the PMO — PMO power was a constant complaint of backbenchers from the beginning of Stephen Harper’s time to the end of Trudeau’s — and give more authority to ministers to get about doing their assigned jobs.

Freeland was not taking questions about this Thursday from Global News.

But Freeland, Carney, Gould, Dhalla and former Montreal MP Frank Baylis all managed to meet the deadline, set by the party, of making a second $50,000 payment by 5 p.m. ET Thursday in order to stay in the race. Battiste chose a different path.

For the remaining five to continue towards the conclusion of the race on March 9, they’ll each have to raise another $125,000 by 5 p.m. on Feb. 7, and another $125,000 by Feb 17.

David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.

 

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