The Liberal Party of Canada president tweeted today:
Proud to say 294,002 signed up! Thanks+welcome to all #LPC Members and Supporters. Now pls register for #lpcldr vote by March 14!
— Mike Crawley (@_Mike_Crawley) March 6, 2013
That’s 294,000 members. At the outset of this contest, the Liberal Party of Canada counted about 100,000 supporters. We can take that difference to mean that 194,000 new supporters signed up during the leadership process. Justin Trudeau’s camp recently boasted that they signed up 150,000 new supporters. This means that 44,000 supporters are split between the other leadership candidates.
These are “supporters”, meaning they did weren’t required to pay any money to join the Liberal Party as full members. Other parties (the NDP and CPC) have members who pay an amount (usually $10 per year) to be a member of that party. Here’s a bit of a comparison regarding what we should take these numbers to mean:
The Conservative Party of Canada had over 250,000 sold memberships for their 2004 leadership race.
The Liberal Party of Canada, in their 2003 leadership race, sold 531,000 memberships.
The NDP in 2012 signed up 128,351 members to select their new leader.