The ONDP has sent out a release calling Eco Fees a “fiasco”. It isn’t. It’s not perfect and their are some real issues to address, but its a baby step in the right direction towards taxing “bads” instead of income. A while back I differentiated the Green Party of Ontario stance on the HST from the ONDP and the PCs by putting forward the idea that we provide thoughtful opposition, I think this falls into the same category.

Sorry I seem to have forgotten that I'm a blogger.  Anyway I've been rather busy on some other web projects that have unfortunately taken away my writing time.

I meant to blog about this earlier, a little while back Mike Schreiner and co swung through Ottawa for the weekend and held a well attended policy forum at the University of Ottawa.  There were two rooms and two groups one focused on local food policy (I think, since I wasn't in that room) and the other focused on reforming the GPO constitution (that's where I was).

For those of you who would rather watch paint dry than here about party governance I will just say that the constitutional resolutions that came out of that and other meetings are very important and will allow the party to function more easily.  It really moves the constitutional ball down the field, I just didn't realize how far the ball had to go.

Yesterday I wrote that the GPO distinguishes itself from the other opposition parties by providing thoughtful opposition.  I cited the various opposition positions on HST as an example.  Today on his blog Steve highlights another great example of this.

Tension between Toronto and the rest of Ontario?  Easy just have Toronto succeed, or at least that's what one Conservative MPP suggests.  That tension is a real problem in Ontario but Murdoch's solution (which I do believe is titled Cutting Off Our Nose to Spite Our Face) is far from thoughtful.  The PC's simply do not provide a realistic alternative to the Liberals.

On Sunday John posted a blog putting forward that the GPO might leaning too far to the "blue-green" side and suggested we move a bit back towards "tree-hugging".   I think his point is important, we need do distinguish ourselves from our competition.  In an effort to ensure that we are taken seriously and not simply written off as the granola-munching fringe we have perhaps made ourselves look very much like PCs.

However I think we can distinguish ourselves from the them without becoming more "deep-green".

Last night the Green Party of Ontario took some important strides in the ridings of Leeds-Grenville (LG) and Ottawa West-Nepean (OWN).

In 2007 we were 3rd in LG with 7.18% of the vote.  We led the NDP by only 86 votes (we had 2,907, they had 2,821) with 40,462 or 54.9% of voters participating.  Last night we extended our 86 vote lead on the NDP to 700!  With a voter turn out that dropped down to 36.9% every party last votes.  However we lost the least number of votes or second least proportionally depending on how you want to look at it.

So the GPO is hiring an executive director and I think that's great.

Right now David Scrymgeour is the CFO of the GPO and while I have blogged about leadership clique issues in the past there is no denying that he has most real political experience and expertise than just about anyone else in the party.

OK in the first post I talked about building the GPO at the provincial level. In the second post I talked about building the GPO at the CA level. In this post I just want to talk about the importance of visibility in local media.

The GPO seems to think that it's the Toronto Star or nothing but each CA can make a large impact by getting press in their local media.

In my last post I suggested a few priorities for the Green Party of Ontario to build at the provincial level. In this post I hope to provide a few suggestions on how we can build at the CA level. I happen to believe building at the local level is more important than at the provincial level but even if you disagree you have to admit strong CAs produce strong results.

First if you live in a riding with out a CA, start one, its the obvious first step. Second if you live in a riding with a CA but don't involve yourself much between elections, get involve and help prepare for 2011.

That's the key question isn't it? How can we be competitive in 107 ridings by the 2011 provincial election?

The GPO wont be forming the next government in Ontario but how can we ensure that we affect the outcome in each riding in the province? We can win a few seats, in fact I believe we will win at least one, maybe more if we play our cards right.

It might be a bit of stretch to presume that I know what the top priority for the new GPO president should be, but I have an idea, and I'm pretty sure I'm right.

We need to get the GPO membership filed into a relatively sophisticated database. I recommend CiviCRM. It's free and the GPC has been using it for years. I installed CiviCRM on my web server and in under an hour I had imported the Ottawa Vanier members.