Full Disclosure: I'm Running In The Election

That makes me the first candidate officially in the race, since the contested Conservative nomination won't be decided until this Saturday. My nomination meeting is in Grande Prairie, at Muskoseepi Park Pavilion Auditorium, this Sunday at 3 pm, although now it's more of just a formality and a chance to rally early support. I still feel it is a great way to put my money where my mouth is and possibly actually get to Ottawa and make decisions about Canada, rather than just try to pressure our reps to stick up for this country. Last time I about doubled NDP support in the riding, meaning I have a great opportunity to build on that this time. Also, with our incumbent Conservative MP Charlie Penson deciding to retire (incumbents are notoriously difficult to beat), and other previous candidates not running again, I am the only returning/incumbent candidate, giving me a great chance to actually WIN. For more info about me and my candidacy you can see http://www.electsusanthompson.ca . And here is a one time shameless self promotion: please note that I will need as much support as I can get, including both volunteers (one thing I need a lot of help with is opposition research on the other candidates, which can be done online) and donations. I work as an agricultural reporter and I will be continuing to do so until the actual elecion call, which is fine with the editors just as long as I stick to topics that aren't a conflict of interest (mainly people-centric lifestyle stories). I'd also like to keep working on Vive, such as by continuing to help post stories, and working on building our potential blogger coalition, until an actual election call (which could come this week, next week, or not until very late this year). In the past, my candidacy has led to calls of bias on this site, but I want to assure everyone that I started Vive well before I became involved in a political party (they asked me to run the first time BECAUSE of Vive), and since then we have built a board of directors to make all decisions, a board comprised of individuals with varied political leanings in order to prevent bias (Catherine Whelan Costen ran for the NDP provincially, but is running federally for the CAP; other board members, such as Jesse, Dr C, and Milton remain unaffiliated and uninvolved with official party politics). That's also why we have more than one moderator to post stories (and we will continue to post both NDP-supporting and NDP-criticizing stories), and our new system of global moderation of comments to be fully launched as soon as it's ready should also help prevent any bias there. In any case where there may be a conflict of interest, such as if this site does any activism around the election, I will remove myself as much as possible and we will make decisions meant to avoid such conflicts. Last time I ran I didn't do any moderating of posts during the course of the actual election either, which is quite possible this time around. But I welcome any questions, comments, and suggestions.

Note: http://www.electsusanth...