Whither the E-May Party?

Meanwhile she plays the spoiler in SGI

She won't even get close to displacing him.

And no, there is usually not 62k thrown into a riding when it is a nominiation for candidates.

pretty phoney yawn ;)

Gimme a break, remind. ALL the parties parachute in organization and if you add up the air fares, the staff wages dedicated to the effort, subcontracts, communicatiins (phones, cells, etc ...), etc ... 62k is probably paltry.

It's really tiring when so-called progressives would rather back a tory and deny reality just to smear May or any other green (or should I say non-NDP?).

It wasn't a phony yawn. It was quite sincere. I argue all the time that there is no legitimate left. Self-righteous, bull-shit threads like these underline my theory. And for the record, I think May is a lousy candidate and has done very poorly for someone who has spent so much time in front of the media. She is naive, contradictory, and in the last election failed to develop any election strategy for after the debates.

But I'd still rather see her in parliament displacing a tory. I know, I know, it is the uniform, the faith, the loyalty, the colors, the family, whatever ...

You see, for there to be a left, there would have to be an opposing idea, an opposing vision. And there is not one. There is no overarching cause. It is all petty politics and we, collectively, as progressives, the Left, lack the courage and the brains to break free from a political strait jacket that sustains a socio-economic system that buys our loyalty with gadgets and television.

A pox on all houses.

I read it. Did you?

Quote:

Now, in a complaint Hertzog said he filed Thursday, he alleges the party's federal council illegally transferred $62,000 from a special fund it set up to get May elected – after it decided this spring that winning a seat for the leader would be the priority in the next campaign – to the electoral district association, and that it is being used to finance the nomination campaign

To get her elected. He alleges its illegal and he alleges it's being used for the nomination battle and I wouldn't doubt some of it is being used for that but there is nothing, yet. to suggest it is all being spent. Give me a break.

And if you're so sure that Lunn has the seat sewn up, then there really is no risk of a Green MP so what it is the big concern other than being good NDP stalwarts by bashing May?

P.S.

Quote:

"You obviously can't imagine any other party in Canada where the leader would be even contemplating running in a riding where someone would say – just to make a point – the nomination would be contested," May said

Can you imagine another party where the leader would contest a nomination? More likely the guy is an asshole for not just stepping aside.

Okay. So where, besides the allegation of a disgruntled would-be candicate without the good sense or common decency to stand aside for the party leader, is there any evidence such spending occured? Oh, right, there isn't. But why should that matter she's Elizabeth May and therefore satan.

Frustrated Mess wrote:

Okay. So where, besides the allegation of a disgruntled would-be candicate without the good sense or common decency to stand aside for the party leader, is there any evidence such spending occured? Oh, right, there isn't. But why should that matter she's Elizabeth May and therefore satan.

The party yesterday disputed the amount of money and its purpose.

"Not one cent of the money has been used for anything," said John Fryer, May's campaign manager in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

Fryer said the money from the fund to get May elected is being held in Ottawa and has not been touched. He said the party lent the riding association $50,000 as seed money to mount its campaign after May wins the nomination.

What the campaign manager is quoted as saying, there's the spending.. Sounds  like the central Green Party has a chunk of cash, at least $50,000 "seed money" to provide to the local Green riding association if it nominates Elizabeth May. If they don''t nominate May, nothing?

Frustrated Mess wrote:

And if you're so sure that Lunn has the seat sewn up, then there really is no risk of a Green MP so what it is the big concern other than being good NDP stalwarts by bashing May?

I think it's because her presence in a riding splits the centre-left vote and makes it more difficult for the NDP.  Look what she did in Central Nova last year - even without a Liberal candidate running she couldn't beat the Conservative and bumped the NDP down to 3rd from where it had been 2nd in previous elections.

I think people are also finding it ridiculous that she is running around from province to province in every election finding a new seat to run in.  Serious candidates do not do that.  She is beginning to lose credibility and is going to look ridiculous if she doesn't stop it.

It is here 3rd, having run in London North Centre (maybe third province lucky). 

ghoris wrote:

Whoops! Forgot about London North Centre, you're quite right FM. (Obviously her run there made a big impression on me!)

I still think she should have run in Saanich-Gulf Islands in the first place. ;)

Yes - it is her 3rd attempt in a 3rd different province.  That is why I used the expression "running around from province to province" above.

But yes you are right that Chretien, Mulroney, Clark and other party leaders have run in more than one seat historically, but not usually in THREE different provinces AND the difference is that they WON the seats they ran in.

John Turner is the only former Prime Mininster who represented three different ridings in three different provinces that I'm aware of:  St. Laurent-St. Georges (Quebec - 1962-1968), Ottawa-Carleton (Ontario - 1968-1975), and Vancouver-Quadra (B.C. - 1984-1993).

An accomplishment that Elizabeth May(Day!) will never achieve.

"Hi John, what do you mean by "new hope" for the GP?"

Hard to see if John is at the centre of it.
Nor if he means Eliz. stepping down because of justified fatigue to be replaced
by the outgoing GPO head.

EMay is no Sir John A. and this is 2009 not the 1870s.

Meanwhile the shady green sheninagans in SGI are now front page news in the local paper. Finally the media is waking up to investigating what a bunch of charlatans May and her sycophants are. Hopefully this will all contribute to voters in SGI having an even more negative opinion of her in the election when she comes in fourth!

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Rival+Green+complains+Elections+Canada...

So May's campaign manager only gets to access the funds, not the riding association, eh.

Wonder if she really is selling her house in Ottawa? Seems to me doubtful, as if she wins, where is she going to live? ;)

.

janfromthebruce wrote:

The new guy is anti-union/labour and May, where does she sit? There seems to be a strong anti-union sentiment running through the Green party.

Which is why I don't believe they grab NDP votes. The NDP is all about unions working to further enviromental shift, the greens are ready to distory anything that gets in their one issue way. There needs to balance.

Uhm, MUN Prof., I wouldn't ask you actually read anything, but the guy who said that ran for the NDP in BC (so why doesn't he represent the entire NDP?) and is now seeking the Green nomination contesting E. May. So again, how does one disgruntled NDP/Green represent the entire party?

This is why I have such low regard for political debate and disprespect for political party members. Why let facts get in the way of a great smear campaign. And so easy too. Just quote one of their own on the way out the door.

Yes, the EVIL greens left the Holy NDP and the RESPONSIBLE greens stayed. Thanks, I assume they wore white hats and black hats for easy identification. So typical ...

Well they were wearing black hats, weren't they. Sheesh!

remind wrote:

Pundantry from across the country is always useful, thanks fm, for knowing sfa about what went on and giving me a chance to state;

A small part of the environmentalists in BC left the NDP, and the larger part stayed. For example, those who did not agree with tree spiking, as a means to draw attention to clear cut logging stayed, those who cared not for the life of other peoples left. No environmentalist was declared enemies of BC, but the tree spikers sure as hell were declared enemies of positive environmentalist action, and indeed of people who worked in the forests.

The industrial unions were not against environmental policies, just as they are not now, hell, I know of 100's who went out in protest of clear cutting, both at Clayoquot Sound and at the Carmanah Valley sites, as well as fighting for Princess Royal Island to become protected.

To add to remind's comments, you have to situate this in the time just after Meech Lake and Charlottetown and the rise of the Reform Party, alongside the corporate citizens' on-side groups, set up by big PR firms and funded by MacBlo and others, to target union members and persuade them that the environmentalista and first nations were costing them their jobs (and not the appalling record on reforestation of the tree-farm licence holders like MacBlo).

Plus, as remind indicates, a number of environmentalists were advocating ouotrageous tactics like tree-spiking to advance their causes, and BCTV could be counted on to publicize those efforts well out of all proportion so they seemed even more frequent, designed to stir up the anti-environmentalist sentiment even further.  Harcourt sensibly tried to steer through all this to get communities talking about Land and Resource Use Planning and get away from the valley-by-valley conflicts, but some environmentalists were not prepared to live with all the trade-offs, and it's also true that Glen Clark probably played to the populism of the trade unions quite a bit more than Harcourt.

But you folks are forgetting that Hertzog was also much more recently urging alliances with the NDP through his website MajorityCoalition.ca.

They are not baseless, per se, just do not contain the bigger picture, so that some like yourself are left  out in the cold not knowing actualities, and thus base their empty premises upon.

I was replying to Ottawaobserver,  remind. I'lllet you know when I want a pamphlet, thanks.

Frustrated Mess wrote:

Yeah, okay, so Herzog doesn't have a lot of credibility having made charges, that posters here imply are unfair or baseless, against the provincial NDP. And yet when he makes charges against, May, well, isn't that a halo of credibility hovering over his head? You see my point?

It wasn't my purpose in that intervention to defend the BC NDP from Hertzog's charges, so perhaps you misunderstood.  I was trying to enrich the context for understanding the climate in which the BC NDP and its Green Caucus parted company around that time.

Was it so necessary to take a swipe at remind in the meantime?  I mean we can tell you're generally "Frustrated", but no need to take it out on people specifically.

jimmyjim wrote:

David Young wrote:

John Turner is the only former Prime Mininster who represented three different ridings in three different provinces that I'm aware of:  St. Laurent-St. Georges (Quebec - 1962-1968), Ottawa-Carleton (Ontario - 1968-1975), and Vancouver-Quadra (B.C. - 1984-1993).

An accomplishment that Elizabeth May(Day!) will never achieve.

 

 

John A MacDonald Represented 5 different riddings in three provinces.

Wasn't that in the days when party leaders in Canada frequently stood as the candidate in two or three different ridings in the SAME federal election?  That's illegal now, isn't it?

I'm no fan of Elizabeth May and her crew largely because instead of acting responsibly within a first-past-the-post system, they act as though we already have PR and the under-representation of progressive voters caused by Green vote-splitting is everyone's responsibility but theirs.

It is for this reason that I see the Saanich-Gulf Islands candidacy as good news. It looks to me like the beginning of the Greens recognizing that they have to play with the hand they are dealt. Hopefully, the next phase is to put genuine, as opposed to token pressure on other progressives to find ways to pool our votes so we don't keep getting hosed by the forces of capitalism.