Will the BC NDP DQ Anjali?

The answer is probably yes but the vote happens tonight.

Update 1: Appadurai was ousted from the race last night.

You may have heard that the BC NDP is on the verge of disqualifying Anjali Appaduri from the party’s leadership race.

News broke last night that the party’s chief election officer is recommending that she be disqualified, "Because no other remedy can adequately address the failings and breaches of the Appadurai campaign in this leadership election contest."

Here’s a recap of those “failings and breaches”

1. she signed up a lot of new members to the campaign. Some of them had been BC Green Party members.

That’s it.

The party contends that it was inappropriate for Dogwood, an environmental justice organization, to encourage people to sign up for the party to support Appadurai. Their encouragement amounted to an illegal political donation, goes the logic.

CBC reported that Dogwood’s Kai Nagata had sought advice from Elections BC before encouraging their members to join the BC NDP, and that he was told that they are allowed to communicate with their own members.

The Tyee reported that each of the new members signed up had been aggressively vetted by the party. Appadurai hadn’t been approved yet by the NDP to run, and didn’t have access to the party’s membership list. Her only opponant, David Eby, does have access to that list and made about 1000 challenges to the new members signed up by Appadurai.

The chief electoral officer, in her report, argued that, "it is impossible to create a level playing field at this point, and thus impossible to restore the leadership election campaign to a state of integrity in which I could have confidence."

It is worth noting that a letter circulated on Twitter from a Steelworkers local that encouraged its members to sign up to vote for Eby.

Terra 😷 @VanIsleVeggie

@richardzussman So, to clarify… Dogwood promoting #BCNDP memberships = Bad Steelworkers promoting BCNDP memberships = Perfectly fine #Bcpoli

The BC NDP is afraid of Appadurai. They know how many new members both camps signed up and it’s clear that they think she has a chance of winning. They wouldn’t bother to disqualify her if that wasn’t the case. The politcal calculus is that disenfranchising a bunch of people whose support for the BCNDP is fickle isn’t as much of a risk as having her win.

Appadurai threatens the BC NDP not just because she has more radical politics than Eby, but because her success exposes the great logic of the NDP to be a lie: that a radical, with a radical platform, cannot win general elections. Social democrats therefore need to tamper their politics if they’re going to achieve electoral success.

Appadurai is an outsider whose campaign has been called “a hostile takeover” by the party’s provincial director, Heather Stoutenburg. Heather is trying to keep her job, obviously. But there is a huge risk to the credibility of the BC fNDP if they go ahead and nix Appadurai’s campaign. This is enough to sink their chances in the next general election.

If the party brass decides to take the scortched earth approach to stop it from being pushed to the left, fine. Let it dig its own grave.

If they were wise, they would take a page out of Alberta’s recent experience where a maverick outsider squeaked by a more centrist candidate to become premier. Imagine Danielle Smith had been nixed just before the race because she had signed up too many new members? There would be a revolt.

But that’s what the NDP is counting on not to happen — that Appadurai’s new members don’t care enough to make a fuss about all of this. Judging by the hashtag #letherrun, the campaign and its supporters are not going down without a fight.

To add insult to injury: CHEK’s Rob Shaw is reporting that the party is insisting Appadurai’s campaign pay the $25,000 entrance fee even if she’s booted.

Rob Shaw @RobShaw_BC

In one final twist, @AnjaliApp says her campaign must pay BC NDP its outstanding application fee of $25,000 by 5pm tonight. Vote to DQ her starts at 6pm. So, she either pays and hopes exec council votes in her favour. Or does not, and even if she wins vote is DQd for not paying.

post script: recall that Jagmeet Singh’s campaign signed up 70,000 members when he was running for leader. There was never any report of how he did it or which organizations and groups helped him, though there absolutely had to have been help to reach that number of members. Singh was not an anti-establishment candidate though, so it didn’t become an issue that risked DQing him. In fact, he was hailed for bringing so many new members into the party fold.