Fraudulent or fake political party memberships such as British Columbia's Liberal cat are "endemic" of a system that encourages mass member drives and allows parties to police themselves, observers say.
The story of Olympia, a cat registered as a Liberal in advance of this month's leadership vote, prompted a flurry of cat puns and even a satirical website. But experts say it exposes genuine problems with how parties pick their leaders, who can then become premiers and prime ministers.
"It's absolutely endemic," Akaash Maharaj, an expert in party politics at the University of Toronto, said in an interview Sunday.
"I'm unaware of a single leadership race in any major political party anywhere in the Western Hemisphere where these sort of things do not happen."
Olympia's rise and fall within the Liberal ranks surfaced last week in media reports, which revealed the feline friend of a senior Christy Clark campaign volunteer had been signed up as a party member.
Clark's campaign officials immediately dismissed the membership as a prank by a friend, and insisted they had no part in it. The membership has since been revoked.
The controversy then hit rival George Abbott, when he admitted a website called Kitties4Christy was created by a contractor working for his campaign. Abbott denied knowing anything about the website in advance, and ordered it taken down. He also insisted he wasn't involved in the cat's membership.
For all the bad cat puns that have followed the story, Maharaj said the case raises serious problems that aren't unique to B.C. or the province's governing Liberal party.
"It's not unusual, and in fact it's going to become more common now that memberships can be applied for, paid for and validated electronically," said Maharaj.
Maharaj said the only jurisdictions that have been able to curb membership fraud are those where regional or national elections regulators oversee the process.
That doesn't happen in Canada, and Maharaj said that should change. He said Elections Canada and its provincial counterparts should start regulating leadership and nomination contests.
"We tend to think of the democratic process for Canadians as being an exercise that's conducted at a general election, but Canadians can only choose amongst options that have already been selected for us," he said.
"If that foundational process is not properly scrutinized, then no matter how well a general election is run, it can potentially be based on a lie."
It's not difficult to find allegations of membership fraud cropping up in Canadian leadership races.
When the newly formed federal Canadian Alliance held a race to choose its first leader in 2000, one of the candidates admitted his campaign was linked to 700 memberships issued to people who had never heard of the party.
In B.C., the Opposition New Democrats, who are in the midst of their own leadership race, faced complaints about irregularities with members that were signed up before the party's Jan. 17 signup deadline.
The New Democrats also faced problems during their 2000 leadership race, when bulk membership drives prompted allegations that 1,300 new memberships were fraudulent. Some people whose names appeared on the party's member roster didn't sign membership cards, including a 15-year-old boy.
And in 1993, when B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell was elected Liberal leader, there were thousands of PIN numbers for the party's one-member-one-vote system that were never used, said political scientist Norman Ruff.
Those "phantom" PIN numbers raised questions about whether they could have been connected to fake memberships, said Ruff.
"On the positive side, the parties use a leadership contest to try to revitalize the party, partly to bring in some money but also to improve people's identification with the party," Ruff said from his Victoria-area home.
"But on the negative side, the Liberals are talking about thousands of new members. These aren't people that are coming forward on their own accord. These are being conscripted, and that leaves it open to abuse."
As the fallout from Olympia the cat continued Sunday, Abbott spent the day explaining his campaign's involvement in the Kitties4Christy website, while calling for a debate about what he called the "serious" issues related to the membership process.
Abbott said he was confident the party was looking into its membership system, and he said he didn't know whether outside oversight is the answer.
"We are electing the most important political office in the province, and it is important that we have a very strong or clear sense that there are good voter verification processes in place," Abbott said in an interview.
"I do think we should be open to ideas on how to improve voter verification systems. ... Some people have suggested that Elections BC could look at this. I don't know whether that's the right step or not, I haven't formed any conclusions about that."
