Federal Green Party polling update (2017/Aug/15)

Another week, another Nanos weekly tracking poll, plus two others from July that I tripped across recently. This week has the federal party at 5.45% Canada-wide, with the average being pulled up by:

– Continue reading “Federal Green Party polling update (2017/Aug/15)”

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The abject failure and amazing success of the “beachhead strategy”

Ah, the beachhead strategy. The idea is to put almost all your resources on a single riding to earn a beachhead in a legislature, from which to grow from. It’s the political equivalent of D-Day in World War II. The BC Greens tried and failed with it multiple times for then-leader Adriane Carr (2001 and 2005 especially come to mind), and it never did work for the party. I was more involved with the 2009 STV referendum campaign than the BC Green provincial campaign so I’m not certain whether a beachhead campaign was attempted for leader Jane Sterk, but it looked like it from the outside looking in. For 2013, Jane Sterk specifically repudiated the beachhead strategy and instead went with a strategy of focusing on supporting a team of strong candidates across the Greater Victoria region, and was rewarded with a seat in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, a riding that would have been an unlikely pick pre-election for the party to put all its resources behind.

But all of this was after a beachhead strategy had Continue reading “The abject failure and amazing success of the “beachhead strategy””

BC Government announces the first three ways it intends to fight Kinder Morgan

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks on Kinder Morgan. Firstly, there was a softening of language around Kinder Morgan from the NDP government, noted and bemoaned by Andrew Weaver in late July. That was followed up by media speculation about upcoming pain points between the government and the Greens on resource and energy issues, and pointed out how striking it was that Horgan has met Trudeau multiple times without bringing the topic of Kinder Morgan even once.

So it’s with no small amount of surprise that I read that Continue reading “BC Government announces the first three ways it intends to fight Kinder Morgan”

Ontario Greens nominate Guelph candidate and promise to engage in a “beachhead” strategy

The Ontario Green Party has nominated a candidate for the upcoming Ontario provincial election in 2018 (and I’ll now add it to the list of upcoming elections on the site). A CBC article suggests that the Ontario Greens intend to run candidates province-wide, but to focus most of their resources on Continue reading “Ontario Greens nominate Guelph candidate and promise to engage in a “beachhead” strategy”

BC-PR detailed summary

Jean-Pierre Kingsley, an esteemed former head of Elections Canada, proposed a hybrid electoral system called Rural-Urban PR (RU-PR). His proposal is one of three electoral systems promoted by Fair Vote Canada, and when both Jean-Pierre Kingsley and FVC recommend something I sit up and listen.

I really like RU-PR, and would wholeheartedly embrace it as our electoral system provincially and/or federally. However, there may be those who would prefer a system that was simpler to explain (perhaps noting that the simplest to explain PR system may be the most likely to win a referendum). I therefore created a variant of RU-PR that I call British Columbia Proportional Representation, or BC-PR for short. This proposed made-in-BC system is uniquely tailored to BC’s electoral map.

Continue reading “BC-PR detailed summary”