Liberalist FAQ English

Download the  Liberalist User Agreement form,  fill it out and e-mail a signed copy to assistance@liberal.ca or fax it to 1 613 235 7208.

You will also need your riding president, certified candidate, official agent or a Liberal Party of Canada staff member to approve your application. For more information, see How to request an account.

This depends on what your role is on the campaign.

If you are a candidate, campaign manager, technology administrator or an organiser (volunteer coordinator, canvass chair, etc), then you will require a Level 3 account.

If you are a local campaign office worker, receptionist, correspondence writer, a candidate’s personal assistant or frequent volunteer, you will require a Level 2 account.

If you are a canvasser, data enterer, phone banker or are new to the campaign, you will require a Level 1 account. For more information on the account request process, see How to request an account.

If you have already set-up your account, simply visit http://my.liberalist.ca and enter your username (first_lastname) and then your password.

No. The training schedule is available here and anyone can register provided they provide the necessary information for registration. This is a great way to encourage your volunteers to sign up for Liberalist as our training sessions will show them some of the concrete actions they can take for your campaign team.

The Liberal Party is undergoing a period of renewal to make the party more accessible to the grassroots.  We want as many grassroots members as possible to have an opportunity to learn how to use Liberalist to ensure that our local campaigns can prepare themselves well in advance of an election. Rest assured, nothing contained in the publicly accessible support material is considered sensitive.

You have to wait until either your Riding President or Candidate has validated you. If you have not received an email confirmation from us in the 72 hours after they validated you, check your e-mail’s junk mail folder, as your spam filter settings may have flagged the e-mail as spam.  If you still cannot find the confirmation, send an e-mail to assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance.

Visit http://my.liberalist.ca/ForgotPasswordWizard.aspx and follow the instructions.  Remember your username is firstname_lastname. If that does not work, send an e-mail to assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance.

You will be able to find the date and time of the next training  here.  Virtual trainings are conducted regularly in both official languages and at varying times to accommodate the different regions.

Yes, all of your updates and data from previous campaigns is accessible to you.

Voter Activation Network, the creators of Liberalist, have a proven track record of keeping data safe, secure and private through several election cycles - including the 2008 cycle, when it was used extensively by the then-rival Obama and Clinton campaigns in every single Democratic primary contest without any data integrity issues. Clients also include many organizations concerned with membership data privacy, particularly the AFL-CIO, the first time its political
organizing membership data was supported by an outside company.

Liberalist's servers are located on the island of Montréal, and have a back-up system in triplicate so should any unlikely event occur, the entire database can be restored up to a day, two days, four days and as far back as four weeks.

All data from ManageElect has been shared with Liberalist.  If you cannot find particular information that you believe was held in ManageElect, or if you used a different data management system, e-mail assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance.

Liberalist contains only information collected by the Liberal Party of Canada for federal purposes.  Contact your provincial party for all enquires regarding access to provincial voter file systems.

If you are looking for the results from previous elections to target specific voters and want to see the election results, visit the Elections Canada website and search for past election results by the name of your riding or the candidate during those elections.

If you are looking for a detailed map of your electoral district and polling divisions, you can request them from Elections Canada by calling 1-800-463-6868.

Liberalist only contains information that has been collected by the Liberal Party of Canada. Demographic information that has been entered in ManageElect or Liberalist can be found by creating a list with the demographic criteria like age or activist codes relating to cultural background or language. If you are looking for demographic information that has not already been obtained through canvassing, you can obtain all available demographic information about your electoral district by consulting the census on the Statistics Canada website.

If you would like to further refine your search you can, Add People, Remove People or Narrow People.
Once you have created your initial list you can refine the list by keeping only a certain people from your initial search. To keep only the individuals that correspond to a new search on your list, click Narrow People, then enter the new criteria and click Search.
To remove people off your most recent list, click on Remove People. Now add the new search criteria for the individuals you would like to remove from your list and then click Search.
To add people onto your most recent list that did not correspond to your previous search criteria, click on Add People then select the criteria for the individuals that you would like to have added onto your list. Then, click search.
You can continue refining your list using the Add People, Remove People and Narrow People functions until you are satisfied with your final list. See Saving My List to find out how to keep this list for future reference.

During the election period, the costs of accessing Liberalist will be included with the riding services package.

Scroll to the very bottom of the e-mail and try manually cutting and pasting the link into the address field of your web browser.  If that does not work, e-mail assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance

My Voters, also called the voterfile, contains the complete Elections Canada list of all registered voters in your riding. The voterfile is used to create lists of voters and to capture information about voters.

Shared Contacts contains anyone you, your campaign, or other campaigns add to this section. They do not have to be a registered voter, nor do they have to be a resident of your riding. Shared Contacts is used to house information about volunteers, activists, supporters, donors, staff and anyone who wants you to communicate with them from around the country. It is here that you reach out to your volunteers and manage your campaign’s activities.

You will need a computer and an Internet connection.  Liberalist is web-based, so you do not need to download any database software.  However, only Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 3.0 are supported browsers.  Liberalist will not run effectively using either Safari or Chrome.  You can download Firefox here.

If you plan on printing canvass sheets, you will need a laser printer (NOT inkjet). You may also wish to purchase a barcode scanner, although this is optional.  If you use dial-up or live in a rural area, check to make sure that the Internet accelerator function is turned off when printing.  Internet acceleration compresses web graphics to improve the connection speed, but this can render the barcodes unreadable.

Yes, you may use an Apple computer.  However, you will need to use Firefox instead of Safari as your browser when you print.

You can log onto Liberalist and use the Quick Look Up function to look at individual records on your blackberry.  It is also possible to add voter information on E-day.  Liberalist is supported by Internet Explorer and Firefox on PCs and/or Macs.

Activist Codes (ACs) allow you to ‘tag’ information about voters and further develop the profile of any given individual. Activist codes help describe a voter based on factors such as language preference, cultural background, occupation, etc. Applying activist codes to voters will help you later on when you want to begin more targeted messaging or pull lists of particular demographics or constituencies. For more information on activist codes, click here.

No, all activist codes are created and managed centrally.  This is to maintain consistency and data integrity over the long-term.  If you cannot find an activist code you feel you need, you can request to have that activist code created by e-mailing assistance@liberal.ca , by calling 1 866 574 5131 or  by submitting a support request here.

If you used ManageElect in previous campaigns, you can find your old sign lists in archived Activist Codes.  For more information see Creating a List on Liberalist.

If you used ManageElect in previous campaigns, you can find your old volunteer lists in archived Activist Codes. For more information on creating a list, click here.

You will need to use the reports button in the menu bar in My List. For step by step instructions on printing a canvassing sheet, click here.

Data follows individual voters with their VAN ID regardless of where they move because Liberalist is a person-centric data management system. The ‘Poll 999’ found in ManageElect is no longer necessary.

You can request an export in the menu bar in My List.  You will be prompted to provide a summary of the use of this export and the criteria of your search will be reviewed before approval. However, for canvassing, phone banks, volunteer and sign lists, events and mailing lists, you can use Liberalist to perform most functions without having to leave the system. E-mail assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance.

It is very likely that the print set up was not configured properly before you printed the barcodes. When you print a list it is always important to check the page set up to see that there are no footers or headers, format portrait and that the margins are .25 inches (6.35 millimeters). Also, you should check under Print Preview that your print size is set up for 100% and not shrink-to-fit. If you are still unable to read your bar codes, it is very likely that the print quality of your printer does not have a high resolution to print the codes. Laser printers have a higher print quality than Inkjet. Try sending your list to a different printer. Be sure to check all the same print set up before printing your canvass sheets.

A barcode scanner is optional, but strongly recommended. To purchase a handheld barcode scanner, you can contact Extreme Barcode at 1.866.398.7227 or by e-mail at marvin@extremebarcode.com and request the Metrologic MS5145 with USB interface at a price of  $117.00 CAN.

For step by step instructions of using a barcode reader, click here.

The Electoral List is updated by elections Canada every November 15th, 72 hours after the writ drops and 72 hours after receiving updates during the Electoral Period.

Membership data currently is updated in Liberalist frequently.  However, for the most up-to-date membership, request a list of your members from your provincial or territorial association.  You can find your PTA’s contact information here.

If you used ManageElect in previous campaigns, yes, our data has already been shared with Liberalist.  However, if you used a different data management system, e-mail assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance with adding your data to Liberalist.

No. Due to membership rules outlined in the current Liberal Party constitution, you are not allowed to export any membership information.

Liberalist is our campaign voter information management system. CRM is the tool Liberal Members' staff uses to manage communications with constituents. Partisan data and functions such as Virtual Phone Banking are made available through a Liberalist account (firstname_lastname). Constituency support activities like Casework can only be accessed with a CRM account (firstname.lastname).

To request a parliamentary account for casework, constituency communications and parliamentary business, contact Nadya Wilkinson, Support and Training Coordinator (Liberal CRM) at WilkinN@parl.gc.ca.

Liberalist does not allow its administrators to prevent only the membership list from being exported. Therefore, to comply with LPC by-laws all exports must be approved centrally. We recommend requesting your export 24 hours before it is needed whenever possible.

E-mail assistance@liberal.ca or call 1 866 574 5131 for further assistance.  Our hours are 9h to 17h EST, Monday to Friday.