Too much party control in ‘highly uncompetitive’ candidate selection: Samara study

‘Parties effectively get to choose the pool of people who will become Members of Parliament,' says Paul Thomas, based on Samara’s recent analysis of 6,600 candidates between 2004 and 2015.

The Samara Centre for Democracy looked at Canada’s five major parties’ approaches to candidate selection. From left: Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet.The Hill Times photographs by Andrew Meade and courtesy of Twitter

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BY SAMANTHA WRIGHT ALLEN

July 17, 2019

Over the past five elections, fewer than one-fifth of candidates earned their name on the ballot through a competitive party nomination process, found a new Samara report, a statistic the group says shows candidate selection is "highly uncompetitive, opaque, unpredictable, and centrally controlled" ...

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