/life/sabbatical/Finding Leverage
One of my goals for my leave was to find leverage: places where I could make a disproportionate impact, by helping the right group of people with the right goals at the right time, where they needed the things I could bring to the table.
I think I found it. Yesterday's by-election put the Green Party nearly tied with the NDP in three of the ridings. It probably squished expectations for an imminent election. And it looks like it helped push the Liberals towards Green Tax Shift.
The campaign was a blast: I met a tonne of people, knocked on many hundreds of doors, said "Chris Tindal" twelve zillion times, and jumped in on election day to help repair a logistical problem. Elections Canada was beta-testing a new system for reporting who had voted to the campaigns (I didn't even know this happened) and it caused a knock-on effect on the paperwork required for scrutineers to get that information.
The whole thing was hugely educational, both as a citizen and as a partisan. I learned how elections work from the inside, which is great -- this was one of the best-run Green Party of Canada campaigns ever, as I understand it, and differed in scale but not kind from the Liberal campaign, at least as far as I could see: they had organized lunches for scrutineers, and plenty more of them, and we ordered pizza and didn't have as many volunteers heading out, but it was a full-blown election machine, and that was great to see.
Here are some photos from the Victory Party. There's some good neutral analysis over here. And there's some good commentary on the campaign machine.
I feel like I have a second lease on my leave -- the last few weeks have been pretty campaign focussed, though "full time" isn't quite accurate, since I've been keeping up with some other stuff. But now my time is suddenly re-freed, which is nice.
Comments
Josh wrote
Seriously? Victory party? Come on.
Yeah, big gains. Yeah, good movement from the Liberals on carbon tax policy. But any closer to actually electing an MP? I doubt it. I just don't get which ridings the Greens think are up for grabs. If all they can do is take votes from the NDP (which seems to be what happened last night), then they've gotta be looking at NDP seats, and that looks like a pretty tough fight to me. Do they really think they're gonna unseat Layton or Chow in downtown Toronto? Or any of the labour supported NDP MPs in the rust belt or the prairies (reminder: those guys didn't get elected because of their environment platform)?
Maybe there's more of a chance in BC, or somewhere in the territories, but the Vancouver results from last night don't seem to show any movement there.
I just don't get it. Maybe if we were in a Liberal majority situation, and there were enough seats to go around, but as tight as the House is, I can't even see a repeat of last night's performance in a general election.
Meh. Blowing off steam. Too much irrational Green-boosting in the media today.
-Josh
Rob wrote
I think "Victory Party" is half tongue-in-cheek. *shrug*
I don't think that 2.6x multiple from two-years ago and three near-ties with the NDP is fodder for "irrational boosting." Maybe we won't get an MP any time soon, though that seems unlikely; the point is that the GPC is changing the political spectrum in Canada. If what the party achieves is to pull a major party (presumably the Liberals) far towards sustainability and other Green values and gets hurt because of it, I wouldn't see that as a failure -- though I do think there's substantially more to the Green Party than that.
I agree the party needs to do more to pull from not-the-NDP so we don't get stuck in that situation -- pulling from all parties is important both directly (more votes) and indirectly (less fear of voting strategically away from Green).
Josh wrote
Yeah. It'll be very interesting to see if they can keep up even a 15%-level of support in Toronto-Centre (or similar ridings) in a general election.
-Josh
