OTTAWA
- (PoliticsWatch.com, web posted Feb. 12, 2002 @ 6:30 p.m.) - Canadians who go
online to try and buy a Liberal Party of Canada membership must do what Internet
users dislike, and that's wait, up to five days in fact.
 "You
cannot join online," confirmed Jean Scott, membership administrator with
the Liberal Party of Canada (Ontario) during an interview with PoliticsWatch.com
on Tuesday.
What you can do is send the federal Liberal Party, or their provincial cousins,
an e-mail and ask for an application package. It's the responsibility of the
provincial wing of the Liberal Party of Canada to get the application to your
mail box, and then manually process the document once it's returned.
"If the e-mail came directly to us, it
(the application) would go out the next day, and it depends when Ottawa sends
it," said Richard Sayej, executive director Liberal party of Canada
(Ontario).
Depending on the volume of requests, he said
the process could take five business days.
"I don't see that being a problem. If
you're getting online you can give us your name and information and we'll send
you our form."
Sayej said the Liberal party wants members
to join their local riding associations. As well, the Liberals mail their
application for membership forms because they require the applicants signature.
In contrast, however, the Canadian Alliance
and the Tories provide their Web site users with the ability to apply for a
party membership online in real time.
Since Canadian political parties began using
the Internet in earnest in the mid- to late-1990s, the Web has been hailed by
activists, journalists, academics and politicians as a medium that could
encourage more Canadians to engage and participate in the political process.
Rather, it has been used as a device for
political parties to spread their own message to voters, and it has failed to
ignite a resurgence of political interest and participation among Canadians.
"Generally, the parties in Canada, and
certainly the Liberal party, have not made, sort of, broad use of the Internet
other than as a communications medium, and even there it's pretty much one
way," said Reg Alcock, the Liberal member of Parliament for Winnipeg South,
who has examined the Internet's political potential for years.
When you deal with party memberships and the
Internet, matters get even more complicated.
The issue of joining the Liberal party
became a hot topic on the weekend when the Ontario wing of the federal Liberal
party voted to limit access to membership forms.
 A
policy is now in place that requires names and addresses of potential new
members to be provided before release of the forms.
The new rules have created a bitter public
dispute between Industry Minister Allan Rock and Finance Minister Paul
Martin, two Liberal leadership hopefuls who are vying for support in vote-rich
Ontario.
 But
those rules could make signing up new members cumbersome and bureaucratic,
and going online won't speed things up either. In fact, the Liberal
Party's ability to recruit online may be undermined by the membership rule
changes.
Sayej said improving the online application
is being considered but for now the status quo stays.
"Right now it's not the process.
We like to encourage people to go through the riding association first,"
said Sayej.
But there may also be another motive.
"I think there are still some problems
in the (online) membership area at present. You need to satisfy two conditions:
the first is secure identity and the second is a secure channel," Alcock
said.
"You need some sort of transaction
process that allows you to state with some certainty that person X is indeed
person X."
Even if Alcock's two conditions are met, it
is unclear how the Liberal Party could proceed with online memberships given the
mandatory processing delay required under the new rules.
Aurčle
Gervais, director of communications with the Liberal Party of Canada, said the
federal party would like to get out of the business of forwarding the membership
forms to the provincial associations altogether.
"We would prefer that the requests go
directly to the (provincial associations) and not have to come through us,"
he said. "It just adds a bit of work on our part."
So while Liberal party insiders decide the
future development, if any, of Internet membership, people who choose to get
involved online will have to live with the status quo, which means waiting.
"If someone from Ontario sends in the
request for a form (to the national office) we just forward on that request to
(office) in Toronto.," said Gervais. "What happens to that
request, and how it is handled is up to the provincial wing."
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