Green Party at a political crossroads [The Star]
Practising what they preach [The Chronicle Herald]
Liberals will run in all ridings, including the one where May lost; Ignatieff [CP, via Metro]
Ignatieff will run Liberal candidate against May [CTV]
Go west, young woman [Rick Anderson, The Globe and Mail]
May says Obama’s success among Canadians can help Greens in next election [CP, via Metro]
May: Greens not wilting [The Chronicle Herald]
Elizabeth May’s 2009 Convention Speech [Green Party, YouTube]
They’re working on a Green dream [The Chronicle Herald]
Greens mull Quebec ‘mystery’ [The Star]
Greens more united than ever, standing behind leadership: May [CP, via Metro]
Elizabeth May to tilt at Central Nova windmill again. [Not an Official Green Party Canada Site]

I’m glad to read that the people who attended the convention are, for the most part, feeling energized and motivated. That being said—and I mean this constructively—I do think there are a few key things that the federal Green party must do if is is to have a future beyond the next election.

Of the above links, Rick Anderson’s analysis is probably the most worth reading for anyone trying to understand where the party’s at, and where it needs to be. He points out that on the one hand, the Green party has a great set of policies that should appeal to a wide group of Canadians:

I had long thought, and still mostly do, that the Greens have a winning formula in their unique combination of practical environmentalism, fiscal responsibility and democratic reform. Those are three potent appeals, each worthy in itself, and rarely found in combination.

Arguably, all the other parties are less credible on all three of those topics than ever before.

On the other hand, he notes that what the party stands for is pretty much a mystery to most Canadians:

[The Greens have] welcome changes you could come to believe in… if you knew they were available. I don’t know about you, but I had to visit the Green website to read about [their economic stimulus plan].

Anderson is generous to blame this mostly on “the media’s preoccupation with political games and manoeuvring and tactics and day-to-day process stories” at the expense of “substantive issues of relevance to voters.” However, while that criticism of the news media is well placed, it would be foolish for Greens to get distracted by it. The Green party must earn attention and support in spite of the obstacles facing it, not use those obstacles as excuses.

The three biggest challenges as I see them are as follows (and are discussed prominently in the above articles).

First is the need for elected Green MPs. The Toronto Star reports that Elizabeth May “[admitted] that she did not view winning her riding as a priority in the last election.” She wasn’t the only one. Those of us who were advocating for a focus on electing MPs in the last general election sometimes felt like we were banging our heads against the wall. The party must realize and act on the importance of electing members under the current voting system (even while we work for change to that system). Otherwise the party’s credibility will be increasingly questioned.

Second is the widely held belief that Elizabeth advocated that Canadians vote for other parties in the last election. (I say “belief,” because Elizabeth denies that she did this. Either way, the perception is what’s important.) This needs to be repudiated in the strongest terms. There is a time and a role for partisanship, and it is the primary role of all party leaders and candidates to advocate for their party’s platform and for their own election, especially during election campaign periods. To send mixed signals to the contrary distorts election results even more than they already are distorted by our antiquated voting system.

Finally, the party must get serious about messaging and marketing. Too many Canadians still don’t know or believe that the Green party has policies on all major issues, and that those policies are often consistent not only with what various experts think (on environment, economy, crime, etc), but are also consistent with what most Canadians think and value. Ultimately only the party itself is accountable for how they’re perceived, which means that a lot of work needs to be done to communicate Green policies in compelling, inspiring, and easy to grasp ways.

In all three of these areas the party is now playing catchup. I’m not yet prepared to say it’s a lost cause as some others have, but no one should underestimate the enormity of the challenge. Before the last general election I had said privately to a few people how critical I thought an electoral breakthrough was in order for the party to maintain credibility and momentum. Since that breakthrough didn’t happen federal Greens now have to hope for a rare second chance, but it will require addressing the above three issues (among others) quickly and aggressively.

ACTION ALERT: CBC kicked me out of the Next PM contest. Help me expose this injustice.

Hi friends,

I just received the shocking news that CBC has disqualified me from the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister contest. They say it is because I ran for Parliament in 2006, but when they asked me to enter the competition in November (yes, they recruited me) I raised this point with the producer and asked if it made me ineligible. The producer told me (in writing) that I was “good to go.”

Until today, I was a front runner in the contest. Thanks to your support, my entry video got more votes than any other contestant. I devoted all of my free time to this competition over the past two months. My campaign team and I spent over 200 hours researching policy, filming videos, organizing online and encouraging people to vote for me. My efforts paid off and I was slated to become the Web Winner next week when voting closes, meaning I would have automatically advanced to the semifinals.

Another contestant has run for Parliament yet has not been deleted from the CBC’s website, like I have. There are 31 additional contestants whose videos are either too short or too long to comply with the entry rules and, according to the rules, should be disqualified too. I don’t think these candidates should be kicked out and I don’t think I should be kicked out either. CBC let us enter this competition, allowed us to spend two months of our lives on it, and they should let us finish it. I have asked CBC if they will disqualify these other candidates and they refuse to answer me.

The intent of the Next Great PM contest was supposedly to encourage youth political engagement. This outrageous treatment of a contestant who has poured her heart and soul into the contest sends an opposite message: “get involved, get kicked out.” I am appalled that our publicly funded broadcaster sees fit to backtrack on its word. I am also shocked that major sponsor Magna, run by former MP Belinda Stronach, would accept this. Ms. Stronach has had to fight every step of the way to climb to the top in politics and I can’t imagine that she would support this treatment of a young Canadian who loves politics and simply wants to make a difference.

CBC and Magna chose to disqualify the wrong young Canadian. I am launching a major campaign to draw attention to this abuse. I feel utterly crushed that my efforts have been for nothing and I refuse to just quietly go away. I will be retaining counsel and intend, if necessary, to pursue legal action against the CBC for unfair disqualification. Lawyers cost money and this is going to be difficult for me to take on financially, so if you want to contribute to my legal fund, write to me. I feel it’s the only way to hold CBC accountable.

Please help me expose this injustice by contacting CBC and Magna to tell them their actions are reprehensible. Write to:

seema.patel@cbc.ca (Seema Patel, Senior Producer)
matthew.barrington@cbc.ca (Matt Barrington, Producer)
ht.lacroix@cbc.ca (Hubert Lacroix, CBC President)
mary_gittens@magna.on.ca (Mary Gittins, Magna)

Copy your emails to me (cflbchk@mta.ca) so I can track support!

Thanks for standing with me.

Camille

Last year, Torontoist readers voted Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty, et al. the number one villain of the year. Since then, their governance has gotten even worse. Even if you sympathize with the Harper government’s policy objectives, it’s hard to support the way they’ve gone about accomplishing them. Despite expressing respect for the will of Parliament while in opposition, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have done everything they can to obstruct Parliament from functioning properly in a minority situation, to the point of breaking their own fixed election date law for pure political advantage. In other words, this government has given the opposition parties no shortage of fodder.

And yet that opposition has failed, repeatedly and consistently, to offer an alternative that catches the imagination of voters. The Liberal Party, for example, was specifically mocked for their reluctance to vote against the government (perhaps most memorably in a flashy Rick Mercer musical number). In the election that ultimately took place anyway the Liberals received their worst result in recent memory, while the New Democratic and Green parties also failed to make any significant inroads.

With such a vacuum of popular political options another smaller or newer political party might have found its niche (as Québec Solidaire recently did in the Quebec provincial election), but none of the nineteen registered Canadian political parties offered anything that caught the public’s attention.

This failure is mostly due to communication and political problems rather than policy ones. It’s not that the opposition parties haven’t had any good ideas—they have—but rather that they’ve been completely unsuccessful in communicating those ideas in a compelling way. This impotence was epitomized by the year-end coalition debacle, where the opposition leadership allowed perfectly legitimate and potentially exciting democratic cooperation to be successfully characterized by the prime minister as some kind of separatist coup.

As a result, the highly objectionable government of Stephen Harper has been allowed to continue to exist essentially without opposition. To be clear, only the Conservative government is responsible for their actions, but that doesn’t mean the opposition parties can be left off the hook for their failure to perform. No matter what party or ideology is in government, our democratic system relies on an effective opposition to function properly. Here’s hoping for better in 2009.

Elizabeth May’s itinerary for Wednesday, September 24th 

Green Party leader Elizabeth May will continue her cross-country whistle-stop train tour on Wednesday.  She will spend the morning traveling through Northern Ontario before making stops in Sudbury and Parry Sound. She ends this leg of her tour with a large rally in Toronto. The whistle-stop tour will start out from Toronto on Friday for the next part of her tour.
12:30 PM – 12:55 PM (EDT) – Ms. May’s whistle-stop tour will make a stop for a rally in Capreol, Ontario at the VIA rail station.

1:21 PM – 1:31PM (EDT) – Ms. May will meet with supporters and the public when her train stops in Sudbury Junction at the VIA rail station (10km north of Sudbury).

4:17PM – 4:27PM (EDT) – Ms. May’s whistle-stop tour will stop for a rally in Parry Sound. She will meet with local candidates, supporters, media, and the public at the stop.

5:49PM – 5:59PM (EDT) – Ms. May will meet with supporters, candidates, and the media when her train stops for a rally in Washago, Ontario.

8:00PM – 11:00PM (EDT) – The western leg of Ms. May’s whistle-stop tour will end at Union Station in Toronto. After getting off the train Ms May will immediately take part in a large rally at the Hockey Hall of Fame. (30 Yonge Street)

Toronto Green Party Candidates welcome Elizabeth May with rally on Wednesday

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, will be joined by Toronto-area candidates and supporters at a rally on Wednesday to celebrate the successful Western leg of her cross-Canada whistle-stop train tour.

Ms. May’s train will arrive at Union Station at 8PM. Upon arrival she will walk to the Hockey Hall of Fame to address a rally of supporters and the general public. Ms. May will be available for media at the rally but only for a photo-op at Union Station.

When:
8 PM – 1 AM, Wednesday, September 24th

Where:
Arrival: Union Station, 65 Front Street West, Toronto
Rally: Hockey Hall of Fame, 30 Yonge Street, Toronto

For the Reform party, having one seat was good enough to earn Preston Manning an invitation. For the Bloc, creating a party mid-Parliament was enough to earn Lucien Bouchard an invitation, even though no one had ever cast a single vote for his party and his candidates were only running in one province (on a promise of breaking up the country, no less). The Greens have an MP (who came to his new party in the same way that Bloc MPs came to theirs), have national support and are running candidates in every region of the country (more than the Reform party could say).

So what’s the difference between us and those other new parties that came before us? Was this decision made because our leader is a woman? Or because unlike the other parties, we haven’t traditionally spent money to advertise on the same networks that made the decision? I’d hate to think those were motivating factors, and I don’t really believe they were, but I’m hard pressed to come up with any other key distinctions. The only thing I’m left with is that we’re more of a threat than those other parties were, or perhaps that our opponents are more cowardly than theirs.

On day one of this election campaign, Elizabeth May began by saying that democracy itself was more important than any one party. On day two, 5 unelected and unaccountable people met in secret and decided to spit in the face of the nearly 700,000 people who voted Green in the last election, the over 1 million people who say they intend to do so in the next election, the 80,000 people who have signed a petition demanding our inclusion, and the 80% of Canadians who—regardless of whether or not they support the Green party—understand that we have earned our right to be heard.

We will fight this decision. Not just for ourselves, but for all voters who deserve to know all of their options before they make up their minds.

Finally, I can’t help but feel a special amount of shame for Jack Layton. He claims to support fair voting. He has repeatedly run on a platform that argues the Greens deserve at least 12 seats. And yet, today he’s happy to hide behind a voting system that he otherwise decries as unjust. He supports fair voting when it suits him, and ignores it when it doesn’t. That is the definition of a hypocrite and an opportunist.

When each party kicked-off their election campaigns on Sunday, Elizabeth May led supporters in a chant of “vote, vote, vote.” Meanwhile, NDP supporters across the river from Parliament Hill were chanting “Jack, Jack, Jack.” I guess we know where their priorities are.

Ben Wicks Pub

424 Parliament Street (west side, between Gerrard and Carlton)

7:00 p.m.

I will not be running in this election. It’s too soon after the by-election for me to neglect my family, job, and friends to the degree that would be necessary, and I’m not willing to do a halfhearted/part-time job either. I’m confident this is the right decision for both myself and the party but it has been a difficult one to make, especially knowing that this is likely to be a very exciting, positive, and historic election for the Green Party of Canada.

After tonight we’ll have a solid candidate who will build on the excellent momentum we’ve established. I’ll be there to help them do just that.

All are welcome to the meeting tonight. It’s expected to be relatively informal.

One NDP blogger reacted to this news in the following way:

And I guess the near dead heat of the NDP and Greens shouldn’t go unacknowledged on an NDPers blog. To that I offer this, I greatly doubt the Green’s could sustain these numbers in a national election. However, it behooves the NDP to start giving some attention to a party that seems content on allowing the mis-conception that they are somehow equivalent to the NDP on the political spectrum.

To the first point, it’s true that in the past we’ve had difficultly pulling our vote out in numbers that some pollsters have predicted. That’s less true today, however, for two reasons. One, our party is better organized than it has ever been, with competent riding associations and experienced campaign managers establishing themselves in increasing numbers every day. That helps with the problem we’ve had of not “getting out the vote,” something the NDP excel at. Two, we’ve now passed a threshold of support where people consider us a serious party capable of electing MPs, as opposed to just a protest vote. That helps with the problem we’ve had of people entering the polling booth intending to vote green, but changing their mind at the last second for “strategic” reasons. If you don’t believe me, witness the results of the Ontario provincial election. Right up until polls closed bloggers and pollsters were predicting the provincial Greens would only pull 4%, maybe 6%. When the ballots were counted, however, we’d topped 8%, achieving the high numbers we’d been polling at.

To the second point, hopefully the author will be happy to learn that I am not content to allow any misconception that we “are somehow equivalent to the NDP on the political spectrum” to exist because, of course, we’re not. If we were, there’d be no point.

In fact, if people in general were under the impression that we were equivalent to the NDP, then it seems to me they’d be more likely to support the NDP for the oft repeated reason that “they have a better chance of winning.” (Note to any NDPers thinking of making this argument at my doorstep: if I wanted to blindly vote for the party with a good chance of winning, I’d vote Liberal.) No, quite the opposite is true: our support is as high as it is because people recognize that we are different from the NDP in many of the ways that we’re different from all of the status quo parties. (In short, and without trying to start a debate, we move beyond the old left/right spectrum and approach problems from a pragmatic, holistic perspective, while remaining the only party to acknowledge that there are limits to growth.)

Does that mean I’m cheering for the NDP’s demise, secretly hoping to wipe them off the map completely? Absolutely not. The NDP have a legitimate and important role to play in Canadian politics; I just can’t understand why they’re not playing it. If I were to offer some unsolicited advice, it would be as follows. Be true to yourselves. Stand up for traditionally “left wing,” socialist principals. Put away the focus groups and the talking points, the negative tone and the overly partisan rhetoric. Let Layton be Layton: think back to his excellent work as a city councilor in Toronto, when he was committed to getting things done instead of “getting things done,” if you get my meaning. That, in my opinion, is a recipe to get your supporters excited and believing in your party again.

Whatever you do, stop trying to become the new Liberal party. Please. We’ve got one of those already, we don’t need another one.

GREENS SEEING RED

NDP Leader Jack Layton‘s dalliance with the Tories on the issue of Senate reform is raising eyebrows among Green party members.

They wonder what happened to Layton’s insistence in the last election that bringing in proportional representation should be a top priority for the minority Parliament. Proportional representation is a voting system that gives seats in proportion to the parties’ total popular vote across the nation.

But when Harper and Layton talked recently about parliamentary reform, it was the Senate – not proportional representation – that was Layton’s priority. Layton is proposing a national referendum on the future of the Senate and Harper offered his tentative support for the idea.

Yesterday, Layton was in Calgary to “shore up the support of Western Canadians in the NDP’s bid to hold a referendum on the future of the Senate.”

So what about proportional representation?

“Since Parliament can realistically only deal with one democratic reform issue at a time, Mr. Layton’s out-of-nowhere proposal to abolish the Senate is at odds with the NDP’s traditional support for reforming our voting system,” Chris Tindal, the Green party’s democratic reform advocate, said in a statement. “What has happened to his priorities and his promises?”

For Immediate Release
November 8, 2007

TORONTO – NDP leader Jack Layton’s abrupt decision to support Stephen Harper by making the Senate his democratic reform priority raises serious questions about the NDP’s commitment to Proportional Representation, Green Party of Canada democratic reform advocate Chris Tindal said today.

“Since Parliament can realistically only deal with one democratic reform issue at a time, Mr. Layton’s out-of-nowhere proposal to abolish the Senate is at odds with the NDP’s traditional support for reforming our voting system,” Tindal said.

“It’s an open secret in Ottawa that Mr. Layton’s goal is to displace the Liberals and become leader of the opposition under the current First Past the Post system. During the 2004 election campaign, Mr. Layton made electoral reform a priority. Since then, we’ve heard almost nothing from him about fair voting. What has happened to his priorities and his promises?”

Fair Vote Canada, a multi-partisan organization that advocates for electoral reform, insists that the necessary discussion about the future of the Senate must come after citizens have determined how their MPs are elected. “At the federal level, the first and most urgent priority is beginning a citizen-driven process to determine the best electoral system for electing MPs,” said a July 2006 statement by FVC. “Job one is to create a truly representative House of Commons and legitimate majority government.” Under the current voting system, majority governments are often elected with less than 50 percent of the vote, leading to “false majorities.”

Tindal said that even if Mr. Layton’s proposal for a snap referendum on abolishing the Senate was constitutional – and it isn’t – it is both premature and too narrowly defined. Instead, he should immediately reaffirm his party’s commitment to Proportional Representation and push for a federal Citizens’ Assembly to explore that issue.

The Green Party recognizes and supports the need for Senate reform but believes it must explore all options and happen within the context of public involvement and study, and not until after citizens have had a chance to reform the federal voting system.

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