Taking stock

It looks like the Lingenfelter membership issue is starting to snowball, with bloggers and columnists alike putting matters in stronger terms by the day. But let's take a step back for a wider view of what we've learned over the course of the weekend - and more importantly, what questions remain to be answered and how.

Murray Mandryk's concerns about Lingenfelter's story notwithstanding, I'd tend toward the view that absent some evidence to the contrary, there's no obvious reason to doubt the general outlines as to what happened: that an individual volunteer (or volunteers) arranged memberships on the part of people who didn't want them by copying their names from an outside list, and the Link campaign took the memberships at face value and approved payment for them while missing or ignoring obvious red flags.

But the question of "who" is still up in the air - and that looks to be where there's some significant need for more public disclosure.

On the volunteer end, there's little apparent reason why the name of somebody who signed a thousand-plus membership forms with other people's names would be kept quiet. (And it's only by getting the name public that we'd be able to follow up by asking whether there was more than one person involved - which would seem likely given the time required to fill out that many forms.)

And on the campaign end, the question of who exactly approved the expenses and held responsibility for reviewing the memberships has likewise been glossed over so far. It's well and good that Lingenfelter has recognized that some measure of responsibility lies with his campaign generally, but it would be hard for anybody to be reassured if nobody takes personal responsibility for what Lingenfelter has acknowledged to be a serious problem.

Moreover, it's precisely by naming some names and getting details from the individuals involved in submitting the list and the payment that we can find out if there's any reason to doubt the current line from the Lingenfelter camp.

Meanwhile, there's certainly room for discussion as to what more the party can do to prevent problems like this from turning up. At least some have suggested that leadership campaigns shouldn't be able to pay for individual memberships, though I'd wonder if that should be accompanied by making fee waivers more accessible at the party level (as they don't appear to be provided for on the party's current membership forms). And I'll agree with Jason that the party's response to Lingenfelter's campaign needs to be strong enough to create a genuine deterrent to similar actions in the future.

But aside from one minor issue of membership policy and the yet-to-be-determined question of Link's punishment, it's hard to see how the NDP as a whole could have avoided the problem initially, or done anything more in response once it surfaced. And it'll be important to distinguish between the NDP's genuine interest in dealing with issues like this one to make sure they don't happen again, and the bad faith of those who would shriek "cover-up" in hopes of smearing the party no matter how thoroughly an issue gets canvassed.