I very much agree with your comments!

Wow, Bill, I’m surprised you support a long membership requirement, since all it really does is limit the democratic choices of the members. Why not let each member set his/her own appropriate membership hurdle, instead of imposing yours of 2 years or someone else’s of 6 (really 9) months? (I say 9, because you have to be a GPO member 6 months before nomination, and nomination closes almost 3 months before the vote. To be a candidate in federal elections, you have to be 18 by the day of the election – you can actually get nominated while you are still 17, as long as you would turn 18 in time to be elected).

We should have a much shorter limit, then include length of membership in candidate bios. Each member can then decide for him/herself if the candidate has been a member long enough to be worthy of leadership. Contestants would be free to use length of membership as a comparative between each other (“I’ve been a member twice as long as she has”), if they feel that bolsters their case. Or perhaps they might run from the “outsider” slant – making a virtue of not having been part of a long-standing insider clique they are trying to overthrow. Both are equally valid positions to put before an informed voting membership.

Think what might happen in the situation where the party is being run into the ground by an incompetent leadership team. Would people who wanted to challenge it be willing to hold an ineffective membership for two years just to wait for the opportunity? Or will they go somewhere else that they can have an influence sooner? A pernicious clique could even seek to perpetuate itself by driving out challengers (in disgust) before they reach the 2-year hurdle. The longer the membership requirement, the more the opportunity for the bad to drive out the good.

We will only appreciate Frank’s role after he has left. You have to be able to knit all these high-maintenance activists together.

Sorry, I described Mike as a “team player” but the word I really wanted was “puppet”. Do you think the party leader should be a puppet, Bill?

Sorry John, but I believe that the leader of the party should be a “team player”. What would you rather have? A dictator who doesn’t care what the other members of the party want?

“Let Shreiner simply stand down, for now anyway. He should want to with all the controversy, and that would open up some space for other measures. What is a Green Party so obsessed with a leadership anyway?”

Party insiders had chosen Mike last year, because he’s a good team player. Which means he’s meek and will do whatever the insiders tell him to do. Sorry, Mike, the strings are showing.

I imagine they would have preferred, for appearances sake, to go through the motions of a vote, stacked in Mike’s favour, but nobody was willing to play :-)

If Mike had integrity, he would withdraw his candidacy tomorrow and call for a reset, and a more open, better publicized leadership race next Spring.

John Ogilvie