Is Jagmeet Singh poised to become NDP leader?: Hébert
(The Star Toronto Raptors)

Of the four candidates vying for the NDP leadership, the numbers suggest that only one can hope to win on the first ballot.Jagmeet Singh’s campaign has claimed credit for enrolling 47,000 of the 124,000 members eligible to vote for the next leader.If the bulk of them do vote over the next two weeks, all could be in place for a first ballot win on October 1.While that amounts to an organizational challenge, the fact is that it should be logistically easier for Singh to get his vote out than for his rivals.That’s because his support is more heavily concentrated that that of Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton and Guy Caron.Connecting with large pockets of members in the GTA and the larger Vancouver area is presumably more straightforward than reaching out to a lot of smaller ones spread out across the country.It also helps that Singh’s political base — again in contrast with his three rivals — is located in Canada’s most-populated urban area.Angus holds a northern Ontario riding. Ashton’s seat is in northern Manitoba and Caron hails from the Lower-St-Lawrence region.Under the NDP formula of one member, one vote, the edge that comes from being familiar to a large pool of potential support is particularly valuable.Some New Democrats — especially but not exclusively in Quebec — lament the fact that the leadership vote is not weighted to reflect the demographics of the country.The NDP may not have a shot at winning government unless it can win seats in Quebec but anyone can become its leader without showing well in a province whose party ranks are thin.Among the three main parties, this is a feature unique to the NDP.The party brass — under Tom Mulcair’s leadership — had four years to fix the leadership election formula in a way that better reflects the electoral reality of Canada and it did not.The outgoing leader probably did not expect the issue of the leadership to resurface as soon as it d ...