The Young Greens of Canada are looking for active Green Party of Canada members (there is still time to join the party) under 30 years of age who are looking for an opportunity to lead.  The Young Greens Council elections have started and candidates must submit their application by midnight next Sunday (February 21st, 2010).

All positions are up for grabs and the YGC is hoping that each of them is contested.  This is a critical moment in the young life of our youth wing as the last original councillor will not be seeking a 4th term leaving huge shoes to fill.

Mark MacKenzie is the GPO candidate in the Ottawa-West Nepean by-election.  I've known Mark for a while now as he's a prominent Green in the Ottawa area.  I like Mark's three election strategy he's taking in the riding.  There's this by-election, the next federal election and the 2011 provincial election in a short span of time.  Mark is planning on running in each of these and building off the canvassing efforts of the previous campaign.  Hopefully our results in OWN will show substantial growth over the next couple years.

Mark recently pointed out that polls (at least individual polls) can be pretty meaningless.  This also extends to seat projections that change based on microscopic variat

There have been two Ontario by-elections since the 2007 general election.  In each of these by-elections the voter turn-out was far lower than it was in 2007.  In HKLB the turnout dropped by 34% or to put it another way only 66% of people who voted in the general bothered to vote in the by-election.  Even in a by-election with provincial implications only 39% of voters showed up at the polls.

After reading through the leadership race motions I get a feeling that we may be on the right track. Three of the four motions transition us from a fixed leadership term to a variable term. There is a question about the threshold of support the leader must achieve to avoid a contest. Steve Kisby suggests 50% where Richard Tyssen suggests 60% and Rob does not specify. Personally I think 50% is fine however if we wanted to raise the bar I would use 2/3. I also like the 2 year review in the event that we go more than 2 years without an election (like the 90s). Richard has another good idea.

So the Green Party of Canada receives a per vote subsidy based on the number of votes we received in the previous election.  The party receives the subsidy from Elections Canada quarterly and has been sharing this revenue with EDAs through our Revenue Sharing Agreement (RSA).  The amount transferred quarterly to EDAs is based on the number of current members in the riding, the performance of the candid

So there's a new HD poll out.  My first impression is that I like the new green look but now on to more substantial observations.

So this survey was conducted over 2 weeks with a sample size of 1,000 per week.  Nationally HD has us at 9% (not bad) with the Libs and Cons tied at 32% (hopefully keeping us from a spring election).

Regionally we are sitting at:

Whenever I bring up a poll result that is particularly positive those who champion the idea that the GPC is in an awful state bring up the fact that it's just one poll and we shouldn't read too much in to it.  You know what?  They're right, one poll doesn't really mean much.  Of course they are guilty of it too.  They post polls with more negative results with the same glee I post polls with mo

So on the 25th of January, 2010 on the Report on Greens blog I responded to a commenter by saying:

"If you want to discuss a blog post on davebagler.ca comment there. While at RoG lets focus on the issues being discussed by RoG. Of course maybe I'm just overly sensitive. Hell when John Shavluk called the World Trade Centre the Jewish world bank headquarters I thought he was being anti-Semitic."

First I should point out that this comment was in reply to comment regarding my views on antisemitism.  I was admitting to being perhaps overly sensitive about antisemitism.  So in the next sentence I give an example of how I might be overly sensitive.

I said:

I thought John was being anti-Semitic.

I might also be OK with it if you prefer to interpret that as me saying:

Yesterday's release of Vision Green reminded me of something. It gets lost in the frivolous law suits, staff changes, scorched earth campaigns against the leader, and federal council members with the press on speed dial.  It's that we quite simply have the best vision for Canada.  Our policies on nearly every issue facing Canadians are second to none.