Calgary Federal Politics

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by gantenbein

Although when British MPs do go against the party line, they face the foul-mouthed wrath of Malcolm Tucker!

NSFW - Language
• Video Link

[Radley77]

Originally Posted by RyLucky

The Green party should emphasize ecological economic models - build a green economy (Public Transit, incentives to green industries, consumer tax breaks on local low-carbon products).

They need to reform their May-style environmentalism - Green's need rethink their foreign policy, Oilsands are here to stay, development of resources must continue, etc.

A strong part of this model is a sense of local autonomy and local benefits that would appeal to much of the country, besides only the Gulf Islands. I don't mind the title "tory-hipsters".

Haha: I'm fond of the moniker "tory-hipster." There is a medium sized demographic of about 25% or so that I think would fall into this category in Calgary. Has two kids, is in a skilled trade or has a bachelors degree in science or arts, tries to shop locally when possible, hangs out on the weekends in dog parks or hikes instead of church. Socially aware. Cares about the environment but isn't an ideologue. Small-c conservative, hates government red tape and desires e-government. Doesn't play nice with Wildrose libertarians.

[Bigtime]

Holy crap, most of that eerily describes me!

[suburbia]

Losers need to answer tough questions ...

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Lo...188/story.html

Pollster Janet Brown said the numbers prove the centre-left parties need to find a way to unite to win in the city.

“This was the best opportunity they ever had (in Calgary) to put a progressive candidate over the top, and they couldn’t do it this time because the vote was split by too many opposition candidates,” she said Tuesday.

“The left really has to look at where they are and say, ‘Can we ever win government again if we don’t bring ourselves together?’ ”

But after a sometimes bruising campaign, there was little appetite among the campaigns for greater co-operation.

Locke said Tuesday that polls consistently showed him in second place and the only viable alternative to beat Crockatt, but the other opposition campaigns didn’t rally to his side.

[Full Mountain]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

Holy crap, most of that eerily describes me!

Minus the kids, me too!

[sync]

Describes me too minus the chillins.

[lubicon]

Describes me except for the very last part.

[fusili]

The thing that many people following this election do not understand is that, save for a few individuals, almost no one on the Turner campaign was a member of the Green Party. I would guess less than 20%. A few office staff were, but for the most party, the campaign staff and volunteers were either non-partisan, or came from parties other than the greens (we had several ex-Liberal candidates working on the campaign).

So it is really funny when the Liberal campaign attacks the "Greens" for the election loss. Most of us would have been on their team if the candidate selection for either party was different.

[Bigtime]

^^^ Bingo.

[MalcolmTucker]

You don't get to work in a campaign for a party, and say you're not a part of them. That is not how it works. The candidate was for the green party, and the volunteers volunteered for the green party. Inherrently you endorse green policies, and the green leader. You can't be like, oh it would be no different if we ran as a independent.

It would be a world of difference. Parties are parties and it is their interest for themselves to win, I don't think anyone can argue about that. But the belief that because you hadn't been green before but choose to be just now somehow removes you from being part of the problem of reconciling our voting system, with the evolutions of parties and voter preferences is ludicrous.

The Green Party, it will be interesting to see if it can survive in the current form. I don't think it will once public financing trickles down to zero. They have shown a historic inability to raise money.

[fusili]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

You don't get to work in a campaign for a party, and say you're not a part of them. That is not how it works. The candidate was for the green party, and the volunteers volunteered for the green party. Inherrently you endorse green policies, and the green leader. You can't be like, oh it would be no different if we ran as a independent.

It would be a world of difference. Parties are parties and it is their interest for themselves to win, I don't think anyone can argue about that. But the belief that because you hadn't been green before but choose to be just now somehow removes you from being part of the problem of reconciling our voting system, with the evolutions of parties and voter preferences is ludicrous.

The Green Party, it will be interesting to see if it can survive in the current form. I don't think it will once public financing trickles down to zero. They have shown a historic inability to raise money.

Good ol' Party politics. If you volunteer for a campaign you automatically endorse all their policies and leader? That is ridiculous. I do not support all the policies of the green party, nor everything the leader says or thinks. I find it absolutely ridiculous and quite frankly condescending that if I choose to support a party that I am completely incapable of disagreeing with them on one point or another.

So, in your world, I have 5 parties to choose from, and that's it? I can't agree with some policies from one party, and others from another party? Once I choose my party, I have to endorse their entire platform despite any individual thought or opinions to the contrary? I have to wait until the party caucus to change a policy for me to support it, and also, it has to be done behind closed doors?

So unless I accept every policy wholeheartedly of one party or another, I have nowhere to go?

No wonder people feel disillusioned with politics.

[MalcolmTucker]

Individuals can think differently for sure, but being differently thinking greens does not make you not greens. Supporters are by definition partisan - to then call out other people for being partisan is just a little much. Everyone is equally guilty of wanting their own team to win above others, pointing the finger at one party as somehow embodying a worse version of that ... these hipsters have a high opinion of themselves.

[fusili]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Individuals can think differently for sure, but being differently thinking greens does not make you not greens. Supporters are by definition partisan - to then call out other people for being partisan is just a little much. Everyone is equally guilty of wanting their own team to win above others, pointing the finger at one party as somehow embodying a worse version of that ... these hipsters have a high opinion of themselves.

My point was that several in the Locke campaign criticized the green party for the election loss, and said they would not "cooperate" with the Greens ever again. I just thought that was funny considering most of the Turner campaign would have been working with the Liberals had the candidate selection for both parties been different.

[MalcolmTucker]

With the videos of Turner that came out, I would guess that it is likely he would never have been green lit to run as a liberal nomination contestant.

[fusili]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

With the videos of Turner that came out, I would guess that it is likely he would never have been green lit to run as a liberal nomination contestant.

I was referring to if a stronger liberal candidate had decided to run.

[Cage]

Chris Turner's commentary piece in the Globe and Mail online. Took the liberty of pasting the entire article as the Globe has a new online service thats particulary poorly thought out (hint it gets defeated once the cookie gets removed).

.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/comme...rticle5750547/

In the final days of a hotly contested three-way race in the Calgary Centre by-election, the talk in some circles turned to the possibility of co-operation between progressive parties. Liberal candidate Harvey Locke’s campaign, in particular, used every tool at its disposal to urge Calgarians not to “split the vote.” Liberals and some other commentators directly pressured my campaign for the Greens – which some polls indicated was in the third-place spot but gaining fast – to throw our support behind Mr. Locke.

Knowing we still had a serious chance to win and that the time for co-operation was long past, we stuck to our game plan. In the end, the Conservative candidate won with just 37 per cent of the vote in this riding; Mr. Locke finished second with 32 per cent, and I came third with 26 per cent.

A clear majority of Calgary Centre voters wanted a non-Conservative Member of Parliament this time around, but instead wound up with another loyal Conservative backbencher. From some angles, this by-election might appear a textbook argument for electoral co-operation, a portrait in microcosm of the circular firing squad that has hobbled Canadian progressives at polls across Canada for years.

I’d like to offer my qualified dissent from this cynical view of the contemporary Canadian electoral process. The Calgary Centre by-election offers three key lessons for Canadians concerned about vote-splitting: 1) co-operation among the Liberals, Greens and NDP presents the potential for electoral breakthroughs in many ridings; 2) the time to negotiate such cooperation is well before the election campaign itself; and 3) the heated talk about vote-splitting fails to acknowledge that the single largest constituency in this by-election and many other federal campaigns was actually non-voters.

Let’s consider each of these in turn.

The potential : This is the simplest electoral math. Even in Stephen Harper’s backyard, 63 per cent of voters cast ballots for non-Conservative candidates. If the parties could work together to identify key ridings and respective strongholds, and then agree ahead of time on a single candidate under a single banner – perhaps through some sort of joint nomination process – the opportunity for victory is obvious.

The timing: Once party nominations have occurred and staff has been assigned, strategies and platforms established, signs and literature produced, it’s not just logistically difficult but fundamentally undemocratic to insist on co-operation. This is for the simple reason that every vote counts and every voter remains entitled to a free choice on the ballot. Once the race is on, there’s no putting the horses back into the barn.

What’s more, the presumption that a strong third horse in the race splits the vote is often ignorant of the facts at street level on the campaign trail. This was certainly the case in Calgary Centre, where my campaign saw a huge gain in momentum throughout the latter half of the campaign – not by eroding Liberal backing (which remained steady at around 30 per cent throughout the campaign), but by capturing substantial wedges of support from disaffected Conservatives, NDP voters looking for a better chance at backing a winner, and unaligned voters. My campaign did not split the vote in Calgary; we built our own coalition on the Green Party’s broad, moderate platform.

Non voters: This is, to my mind, the real untapped opportunity for a breakthrough in Canadian politics. In Calgary Centre and beyond, the most common affiliation among eligible voters is “nonvoter.” My campaign resonated most powerfully among Calgarians who saw real value in backing a candidate and a party unconnected to the entrenched political divisions in parliament today. In Calgary Centre, 10,201 voters out of an electorate of 94,000 chose the new member of Parliament. If any campaign had been able to fully engage the majority who didn’t vote at all, it could have won in a landslide.

That’s the true lesson of the Calgary Centre by-election: The majority don’t have any horse in the race at all.

Chris Turner was the Green Party candidate in the Calgary Centre by-election this week.

[suburbia]

retracted.

[Rusty van Reddick]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

You don't get to work in a campaign for a party, and say you're not a part of them. That is not how it works.

Oh, shut up. It's because of bullshit comments like this that I unfriended you on facebook.

The Libs committed election fraud with their fake ROI poll as far as I'm concerned. How the actual results of GPC 26 and NDP 4 magically predicted to be GPC 17 and NDP 14 on the otherwise "valid" ROI poll (which was, again as if by magic, correct about the CPC and LPC numbers- actual 37/33, predicted 37/32) was possible is- impossible, actually.

Their (the LPC) internal polls- and yes we heard about them but were in no position to release the numbers-showed CPC 33 GPC 31 LPC 29 the day before the convenient ROI poll, from a company run by a huge LPC backer who'd been on CBC to throw cold water on the Forum results and declare it a "two party race" when it clearly wasn't AND managed to not mention the 110% GPC poll surge.

The Forum poll that was never released showed a tight race- we'll never know the numbers because the Forum president is also an LPC shill and "didn't like the numbers." This from an employee at Forum and I don't care who knows this, now.

The ROI poll results destroyed our momentum. The numbers were played with- I don't know how, but know that it takes seconds to diddle with quantitative results to suit an agenda from a pollster who had a massive conflict of interest and never reported it- which can actually constitute an indictable offense (and yes, that means prison time). ROI can now just say that there was a typo and they really meant CPC 37, LPC 32, GPC 27 (not 17), NDP 4 (not 14) and he'll perhaps cover his ass, but there is no question- none, zero- that the numbers were wrong and I believe deliberately so.

[suburbia]

Originally Posted by Rusty van Reddick

Oh, shut up. It's because of bullshit comments like this that I unfriended you on facebook.

The Libs committed election fraud with their fake ROI poll as far as I'm concerned. How the actual results of GPC 26 and NDP 4 magically predicted to be GPC 17 and NDP 14 on the otherwise "valid" ROI poll (which was, again as if by magic, correct about the CPC and LPC numbers- actual 37/33, predicted 37/32) was possible is- impossible, actually.

Their (the LPC) internal polls- and yes we heard about them but were in no position to release the numbers-showed CPC 33 GPC 31 LPC 29 the day before the convenient ROI poll, from a company run by a huge LPC backer who'd been on CBC to throw cold water on the Forum results and declare it a "two party race" when it clearly wasn't AND managed to not mention the 110% GPC poll surge.

The Forum poll that was never released showed a tight race- we'll never know the numbers because the Forum president is also an LPC shill and "didn't like the numbers." This from an employee at Forum and I don't care who knows this, now.

The ROI poll results destroyed our momentum. The numbers were played with- I don't know how, but know that it takes seconds to diddle with quantitative results to suit an agenda from a pollster who had a massive conflict of interest and never reported it- which can actually constitute an indictable offense (and yes, that means prison time). ROI can now just say that there was a typo and they really meant CPC 37, LPC 32, GPC 27 (not 17), NDP 14 (not 4) and he'll perhaps cover his ass, but there is no question- none, zero- that the numbers were wrong and I believe deliberately so.

Didn't Brian Singh's "I'm not a Green" poll suggest 70% for Turner. Not scientific, of course.

[Rusty van Reddick]

Originally Posted by suburbia

Didn't Brian Singh's "I'm not a Green" poll suggest 70% for Turner. Not scientific, of course.

That wasn't a poll and was never represented as a poll. Look up "poll."

The Libs lies and their use of faked data to try to instill voting panic and to invoke "vote split" is the story here. I'd voted Lib in every federal election, I volunteered for them, but they've lost my vote forever because I saw this corruption firsthand- it was unbelievable. To know that their internal polling proved that their support was flat and then to used invented numbers from what claims to be an objective polling firm with the express purpose of discouraging voting from a viable party- it's worse than what the CPC did in 2011.