On separation

The NDP's upcoming convention is starting to get plenty of mainstream coverage. But while most of the reporting about a party name change and election readiness sounds familiar, there does appear to be one new development in the topics up for discussion:

In related resolutions, delegates will be asked whether to separate the NDP's provincial and federal memberships, which total about 70,000.

"As the caucus gets larger, as we build our infrastructure and get our party into more of a breakthrough mode, these issues are taking on a greater significance," says NDP national director Brad Lavigne.

Now, I'll be curious to see what rationale there is for splitting off provincial and federal memberships. But for now, I'd have to be skeptical of the proposal.

After all, a common membership list effectively allows the two levels of NDP organization to complement each other: where one recruits a new member, the other both benefits from the new arrival within the party, and can avoid putting its own resources into pursuing the same individual. In contrast, a membership split would seem to me to require each level of the party to go through its own registration process for each individual member - creating double the workload just to administer the current level of membership even if the numbers stay the same.

So even leaving aside the question of whether a split membership process would make it more difficult to share information or otherwise coordinate between the federal and provincial wings, there would seem to be an obvious cost to the plan.

Meanwhile, the apparent benefit of splitting the two types of membership would be the potential to add new members at one level of government who prefer not to be affiliated at the other. But it's hard to see how the federal party would stand to gain much on that front either.

Of the provinces where there's any arguable gap in political orientation between the NDP's federal and provincial wings, it's uniformly the provincial wing which has expanded its reach somewhat further toward the political centre than the federal wing. Which means that by separating the lists, the federal NDP would seem to be undercutting its own apparent efforts to work with an expanded base of potential support. Yet it's not clear that the provincial wings would seem to benefit much from a split either, as the dual membership requirement may well keep more activists inside the party's tent than would be the case otherwise.

Mind you, there's an important exception to the rule in Quebec, where one can make the case that there might be a wave of potential recruits into the federal NDP who wouldn't want to bind themselves to any provincial party in the process. Indeed, I'm not sure for the moment how the dual membership requirement even applies in a province where the NDP doesn't run candidates provincially.

That said, it would seem to make more sense to establish an exception for provinces where there isn't a substantial NDP presence at the provincial level than to make a change which would radically overhaul the party's membership structure across the country. And hopefully the convention will agree that the last thing that either the federal or provincial wings should want to do is to limit the NDP's cooperation and party unity across jurisdictional divides.