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Ontario Greens pick new leader
November 15, 2009 - 11:56am
Okay, so there wasn't that much picking involved:
Toronto businessman and entrepreneur Mike Schreiner is the new leader of the Green Party of Ontario.
Mr. Schreiner was the only candidate running to replace outgoing leader Frank de Jong.
He was confirmed to the position Saturday evening at the party's leadership convention in London.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontarios-greens-pick-mike-s...
The businessman and entrepreneur has found his natural libertarian home, prepared for him by the ongoing conservative, Jim Harris.
Did you read what sort of entrepeneur he is George?
Clearly he's evil!
Mike has been an active member of the Green Party of Ontario for the past six years, developing the 2007 election platform, serving as GPO Policy Coordinator from 2007 to 2009. He is 40.
But he did not run in the 2007 election. A resident of Toronto, he followed John Tory to Haliburton- Kawartha Lakes- Brock to run in the by-election in March, and had a little more luck than John Tory: while Tory drove his party's vote down from 24,273 to 14,576, Schreiner took a fourth place 3,475 to a third place 2,352 as every party but the Liberals lost votes.
I wonder why he didn't run in 2007?
"I’m going to propose that we do a Community Engagement Program where Constituency Associations go out into the community and do something like support the local BIA or organize a Buy Local campaign or a Clean Up The River campaign."
Not so different from from Andrea Horwath said.
John Ogilvie was the Green Party candidate in 2007 in Carleton--Mississippi Mills, and ran for Deputy Leader in 2008. He is not impressed:
Isn't it remarkable what you can find on Google?
FM:
"Did you read what sort of entrepeneur he is George?"
I'm going to rush right out and sign on, FM, confident that Harris is not working the strings.
Thanks for the links. My immediate question was: Who is this clown?
The reports of him being a 'successful entrepreneur and businessman' led me to try to find out what his great success was at, and all I can come up with is Local Flavour Plus (or Local Food Plus, depending on the source) - a non-profit. And apparently not a particularly successful one, as I've never heard of it before, and it's based right here in Toronto. I have a hard time acknowledging the ability to suck up to the government for grants and funding as entrepreneurialism and business acumen.
Mike Schreiner is also supposedly a 'food consultant', but it seems that his only qualifications as such are from growing up next door to Dorothy and Toto on a farm in Kansas. That's correct - on top of his dubious record of 'business' success, he's a Yanqui trader.
...and he expects to be funded by public subsidies in his new job, too.
I don't think that parties get any public subsidy in Ontario. The official parties in Queens Park get money, but there is no money per vote as there is federally - so unless the Ontario Greens manage to elect at least 8 members in the next election, they don't get one red cent.
There's nothing quite so pathetic as watching NDPers desperately digging for dirt on Green Party leaders. I'm sure any minute now, somebody will discover that his cousin's wife's uncle (who was a mechanic doncha know) once fixed Preston Manning's car; thereby proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this guy is a neoconservative shill whose sole motivation is to woo gullible voters away from voting NDP. After all, everyone knows there are only two kinds of people in the world - neoconservatives and NDP supporters.
Assure me that Jim Harris and henchmen are not background figures here, their ilk have gone to feed elsewhere, and I will take it all back (well, that part of it).
Those who know me can vouch that I have pretty solid NDP credentials.
I say this because I want to point out the criticisms of Mike Schreiner are way off base. I know Mike personally. He is a progressive guy who has channelled his energy into environmentally positive business. He is not a Harris clone, nor an eco-capitalist. Mike is a very sincere and passionate guy. His loyalty to the Greens is misplaced as I have told him personally, but he is sincere in his beliefs and frankly his misjudgements and misunderstanding of the NDP and links with worker organizations.
Local Food Plus (which started as Local Flavour Plus) is in fact a very successful model that links primarily institutional food buyers directly with local farmers. It would be no wonder that many people have not heard of it. It is not a direct consumer/farmer link organization. That doesn't mean the work is not important or successful. In fact the organization has grown to the point where it has spread beyond the Ontario borders.
There will be lots of solid ground on which to critique a Schreiner led Green party. Mike's dependency on shallow political rhetoric without much substantive grounding on a number of issues comes to mind immediately. But denigrating good organizations like Local Food Plus or the sincere work Schreiner himself has done will only turn off people. Schreiner is well-spoken and somewhat charismatic, but let's not delude ourselves that he could hold a candle to the kind of leadership we can expect from Andrea Horwath who I am convinced will move the NDP quite far forward in the next election because her substantive grounding is much deeper and more innate.
Thanks for the insight, BA. Keep working on the guy. : )
Who's digging for dirt?
When a party chooses a leader, one would think that at least the politically-obsessed would have heard of him once or twice. I consider myself amongst the politically obsessive. I'd never heard of him. So I googled.
And everything I found made the press releases seem at minimum overblown, with descriptions that, to be kind, stretched the truth. Not what one would expect when a party has coronated a leader.
BTW, it wouldn't bother me at all to be proven wrong. So please, if you can, go ahead.
As much as 75% of political party donations are tax-deductible. We'll all be paying Michael Schreiner's salary as leader of the Green Party of Ontario.
They still need to get those donations in the first place and these days, the Green party (federally and in the provinces) is pretty clearly going no where other than off a cliff. Its hard to get people to give money to a dying party. Schreiner's salary for a year would probably eat up most of the GPO's entire fundraising for the year.
.
The Green Party of Ontario actually does better, by about any measure, than the GPC. But thats a pretty low bar to clear.
From the budget figures I remember, a full time salary for the Leader would be one-third of the budget- which just isn't feasible.
My guess would be that if Schreiner says he will be full time Leader, its on his own dime- probably with the expectation that he can bump up the fundraising enough for a salary. No individual in the GPO, like the party as a whole, has yet to achieve an outcome anywhere near what they think themselves capable of.
I'd just like to point out that my criticisms were not of Schreiner himself, but rather the way the Green Party chose to present him (which seems to be only tenuously related to reality).
I had no knowledge of Schreiner prior to reading this thread, and still lack any sense of him as an individual.
What's weird is how this new-GPO-leader business has been off radar to the mainstream print media; other than the Sun, I don't seem to recall it referenced anywhere this weekend and today...
I was more reacting to the criticisms of his involvement with Local Food Plus and the contention that it was not a successful enterprise. There will be lots of ground on which to critique the Greens in Ontario - the comments around LFP though are just simply wrong.
In what way? Are they not a non-profit? Do they not collect grants?
Local Flavour Plus (or Local Food Plus, depending on the source) - a non-profit. And apparently not a particularly successful one, as I've never heard of it before, and it's based right here in Toronto. I have a hard time acknowledging the ability to suck up to the government for grants and funding as entrepreneurialism and business acumen.
You are wrong on several counts - one there is little if any government funding that I am aware of.
It is an extremely successful organization that has now grown to the point were it is doing some national work. As I said it matches institutional food buyers with local farmers. Most intitutional food is bought through very large companies. who source their food from where ever it is cheap. LFP works to make the connection between local farmers and large food buyers easier for all involved. There is also a certification process that ensures the standards under which the food is grown. Because you haven't heard of an organization is a pretty poor way to judge whether it is successful or not, particularly if you are neither an institutional food buyer or a farmer. As I said there will be lots of room for critique of a Shreiner led GPO- attacking and misrepresenting LFP as some sort of government suck tank is not legit.What portion of an institutions's food does the province expect to be purchased from Ontario growers? (And I take it institutions means mostly long term care and hospitals?)
Zero per cent is required. That is one of the reasons an organization like LFP was created.
I approached Mike as soon as I discovered he was going to be acclaimed about the idea of Greens and New Democrats working together rather than continuing vote-splitting. What I received in response was the same anti-union, pro-business, "we aren't leftists" I get from my other friends in the Ontario Greens, Frank de Jong and Jim Harris.
He may be a nice guy, BA but his rhetoric regarding unions, vote-splitting and the need to build coalitions is absolutely indistinguishable from the past 15 years of Green politics in this neck of the woods.
Content issues aside, "working together to not be vote splitting" would be the kiss of death for Greens.
Its not just that Greens, NDP [and Liberals] are "too disinclined".
This is the real elephant in the room that May does not want to mention, instead giving her disengenuous jag about the NDP being hopelessly partisan.
Cant change my user name so you're getting the real deal here - google me and you'll see my results from 1990. I actually became disheartened DURING the election and was quite happy when the NDP won! I discovered that when a party can't win, they run a kid. Now I chose to run with free will but it was obvious that the red greens were being squeezed out - when somebody is showing up to the office in their BMW but parking around the back out of view, there is a problem...and the little flim flam I was supposed to pull on my taxes to get my deposit didnt work either so I had to suck it up as an underemployed kid. On the pro side I got to say whatever the hell I wanted. That would NEVER happen now.
Well I eluded to that in my posts. My concern is not whether he is a nice guy or not (Lots of nice people in other politicial parties) but whether or not the NDP or more accurately NDP partisans on babble were being correct in stuff being used to critique the new Green leader. The issues you raise are germiane and fair game in my book and when I was talking about 'progressive' I was thinking more in terms of social issues, not economic or anything else (not that it was clear in my post, only my head).
I have not disputed your claims of 'success' for this organization - though since it is still rather 'young' (less than 4 years of operation), I hope that your standard of 'success' includes an allowance for this, as I have made.
I will dispute your claims about government funding however. Not only are they directly funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, but also by the Trillium Foundation, Vineland Centre, and Friends of the Greenbelt, all dependent on government funding themselves.
How is it that someone won a provincial party leadership role by acclamation?
Usually there's a huge convention, several candidates wooing delegates, lots of speeches, floor-crossings, candidates withdrawing to support others candidates and taking their supporters with them (or trying) and so on.
This guy just had to sign his name and he's the new leader? NOBODY else wanted the job?
Mike is explaining it as follows:
"He said that at a party event he attended in August, there were two other candidates, but they bowed out after considering what the job entails." (http://www.mykawartha.com/news/article/162115--schreiner-leads-green-party)
This is not a reality-based response, unfortunately.
The GPO is - like all parties - full of overly-high-self-esteem people like myself, and a leadership race would have been very interesting. The PCs tripled their membership during their recent leadership campaign, and the NDP probably did likewise.
When the party staff - exec director, CFO, president and secretary - all make it clear that they want one candidate elected, well, smart people don't waste time running. Even if it would have given the race an appearance of legitimacy.