More Green Party Perspectives

"The conservative positioning of the party under Harris may also explain its unusual approach to policy development. Members can comment on party policies on a website but those policies are actually determined by the national office. There has bene no formal policy convention, nor does the party rely closely on the expertise of environmental organizations. 'We pretty much get asked by all the parties to comment on their environmental policies, certainly by the NDP and the Liberals,' says May [meaning Elizabeth May, ED of the Sierra Club]. Leading up to the 2004 election, she told Harris: "If you want a more detailed, robust platform, feel free to ask in the coming months.' We never got any pickup on that [offer].' But when the Sierra Club came out with its report card favouring the NDP, says May, Harris called them NDP hacks." (Although Dobbin goes on to note that many people support the policies, and that they are helping mainstream the party.) Or the following: "In the end, however, questions surrounding policy didn't matter much in the election, because many of the candidates (and voters) weren't aware of Harris's revamped platform anyway. At least a third of the candidates, says Pollesel, didn't even live in the ridings in which they ran. And like some candidates, Marc Loiselle from Saskatoon, who ran in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, says he was 'not that familiar with actual Green policies'. When he did speak publicly, he put forward what he thought the party's policies should be, not what they actually were. Not only were policies not that important, neither was political experience. Recalls Pollesel, who had worked for half a dozen MPs and was the most experienced organizer on the election team: 'It was so off-the-wall. You had a policy director who didn't know anything about policy, a leader who doesn't have a clue about politics, and a media guy who doesn't want to talk to the media. It was the antithesis of everything a real party should be.' (Pollesel eventually filed a complaint with Elections Canada listing fourteen violations of the Elections Act.) That was certainly my experience in this riding, where our Green candidate (who lived about 5 hours away but had worked in the area) often said "It looks like their platform says..." and read straight from the little platform document during our public forums. Meanwhile, there is a response to the article by someone who seems to be a prominent member of the party online, including comments by users afterwards: Murray Dobbin's "article" in the latest issue of "The Walrus" is a depressing exercise in non-objective research, flawed analysis and an inability to understand a new political movement. Since it addresses the whole "raison d'etre" of the GPR, it behooves me to respond to "Green Party Blues" in some detail. http://www.greenpartyreview.ca/articles/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=11&blogId=1

Note: http://www.greenpartyre...