Please plan to attend as we’ll be reviewing activities from the previous year, electing a new executive, and discussing plans for the upcoming year. Memberships will be available at the door. You can also join or renew from the Green Party website. You must be a member for 30 days to be able to vote. Lapsed members (membership ended less than one year ago) can renew and resume voting privileges immediately.
Consider running for one these positions on the executive to help build the riding association, promote Green party policies and support your candidate:

CEO: organizes and chairs regular meetings, builds and guides the executive, oversees the operation of the riding association, ensures there is a candidate.
Financial Agent: maintains books, makes bank deposits and writes cheques, issues tax receipts, files annual financial report with Elections Canada, informs executive of Elections Act regulations re finances.
Membership Chair: maintains membership contact information using the party’s on-line database, plans membership drives, sends communications to members.
Fundraising Chair: plans and directs fundraising strategy.
Volunteer Chair: recruits volunteers.
Communications Chair: maintains contact list of local media, build relations with media, plans media strategy to increase the riding association’s visibility, writes media releases, oversees e-newsletter to members, helps write leaflets, manages website content.

If you’re interested or would like more information, please contact: Bryan Eelhart (current Financial Agent) or Rachel Barney (current CEO).
Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

Thank you,

Rachel Barney
CEO, Trinity-Spadina Electoral District Association
Green Party of Canada
rachel@trinityspadinagreens.ca

Bryan Eelhart
Financial Agent – Trinity Spadina Federal Green Party Association
T: 416 824 8334
E: bryan@trinityspadinagreens.ca

Website: http://www.trinityspadinagreens.ca
Donations: http://trinityspadinagreens.ca/contribute/

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Trinity Spadina Federal Green Party Association AGM Agenda

Date: June 11, 2012

Time: 6pm-8pm
Place: Lillian H. Smith Library, 239 College St. (just east of Spadina), Meeting Room A (in the basement)

6:00 PM – Call to Order
Appoint Chair
Appoint Recorder
Record Attendance
Approve the Agenda

6:05 PM – Annual Report from outgoing CEO and Financial Agent
CEO reviews previous year activities.
FA reviews Financial Report.

6:25 PM – Presentations from Executive Nominees
Each nominee will have 3-5 minutes.

6:45 PM – Voting and Counting of Ballots
Ballots Cast
Ballots Counted
Results Announced

7:15 PM – Discussion of Annual Plan, Budget and Goals
Opportunity for members to provide input.

8:00 PM – Meeting Adjourned
Announcement of the next meeting of the EDA Executive.

************************************************************************

Trinity Spadina Federal Green Party Association Status:

Current Executive: CEO, Rachel Barney
Financial Agent, Bryan Eelhart
Volunteer Chair, n/a
Fundraising Chair, n/a
Membership Chair, n/a
Communications Chair, Eddy Okun
Other, n/a

Last AGM: March 22, 2011

2011 Candidate: Rachel Barney, percentage of vote: 81%

Current Candidate: Rachel Barney

Party             Candidate        Votes   % Votes
Green Party       Rachel Barney    3,279   5.0%
Libertarian       Chester Brown    454     0.7%
NDP               Olivia Chow      35,493  54.1%
Liberal           Christine Innes  15,218  23.2%
Marxist-Leninist  Nick Lin         178     0.3%
Conservative      Gin Siow         10,938  16.7%
Total number of valid votes: 65,560
Polls reporting: 317/317   Voter turnout: 65,560 of 95,363 registered electors (68.8%)

That’s down from 9% of the vote last time. The Greens got clobbered at about the same rate all over Toronto — also cut in half in Toronto Centre, in Davenport, where Wayne had even managed to get a little press, in Danforth, where they ran a model campaign…. So it really wasn’t about us. It turns out that my post on misvoting (aka ‘strategic voting’) a couple of days ago left out the most important kind around here: NDP-Bandwagon Voting. Live and learn.

On the upside, of course, Elizabeth May won her riding. We now have a Green MP, and she’s going to be a great one.

It’s also lovely to bid farewell to the Bloc Quebecois. Welcome back, Quebec!

Still: this is still a horrible day for Canadian democracy. And not a great one for our little EDA either.

A large part of our national problem is, as we Greens have said all along, good old FPTP. It’s now landed us with a right-wing majority (a right-wing tyranny, I feel confident in predicting) which 60% of Canadian voters voted against as strongly as they could. Maybe this is what it will take to get electoral reform on the agenda in a big way. But I have to say right now I’m more sickened by my fellow-citizens than by our system as such. 40% of the popular vote for a government in contempt of Parliament? And the collapse of the Liberal Party, and its cannibalization by a particularly mindless incarnation of the NDP (see post on ‘Orange Mush’ below), is not good news for Canada either. As a nation, we are in all kinds of trouble right now.

As for Trinity-Spadina, well… We ran a pretty good campaign, I thought. I certainly enjoyed it. It was a blast meeting so many engaged, informed, independent-minded people, in all their fascinating diversity. Believe me, if you live in Trinity-Spadina you are surrounded by a more impressive, complicated, spectacularly varied community than you can easily imagine. And I encountered many, many voters who expressed strong sympathy with Green Party ideas — even if, in retrospect, there was often a little coyness as to who they were actually going to vote for. Anyway, I know I speak for the whole team in saying that our love of this fabulous multi-hood has only been deepened and enriched by the whole experience. So has our certainty that Trinity-Spadina WILL be a Green riding some day, and maybe a whole lot sooner than you think. (It’s a hell of a lot easier to imagine than, say, Berthier-Muskinongé going NDP.)

In any case, days like today are much easier to take if you can look in the mirror, shrug, and say ‘I did my bit’. And I’m betting you did yours too.

PS That’s the Tich Maredza band — excellent Zimbabwean afropop and highly recommended. We danced and so will you!

What gets called ‘strategic voting’ is likewise a species of misvoting. Actually several different species of misvoting get lumped together here:

1. American voting. This happens when people don’t really get the concept of a riding, don’t know anything about theirs, and vote based on national trends and expectations (eg ‘strategically’ voting Liberal rather than NDP in what’s already a safe Liberal seat). Mostly the fault of the media, who obsess over party leaders and national polling trends as if our system were in fact the American one.

2. Conformist voting. Nobody will tell you they’re doing this — they just give you a little smirk that says, Why would I vote for you, loser? Comes from watching too much sports, and Hollywood movies where the good guys always win. Closely related, but practiced by nicer people:

3. Magical voting. Here the thought-bubble says, ‘But I don’t want to waste my vote!’. Sorry, folks, but your vote is a drop in the ocean even if you live in Labrador or PEI, which I’m betting you don’t. True, in our FPTP system your vote in a sense goes to waste if you don’t vote for the winner — that is, it will not be represented in the makeup of parliament. And true, your vote is undercounted (not really ‘wasted’) if you live in a large urban centre. But these terrible features of our system — which the Greens are fighting to change! — are structural, and do not give you any reason to vote for one party rather than another. No vote is literally wasted, and your vote does not magically take on new efficacy if you vote for a larger party. It is what it is, and it counts for what it counts for: one. If you care about the direct causal powers of your vote, the most important is that each vote results in a $2 federal subsidy to the party it is cast for. So, which party do you think could best use those $2?

4. Panic voting. What people are mostly talking about when they talk about ‘strategic’ voting. Involves bits and pieces of all of the above in an ugly churn, somewhat like this:

Nice lady [as it usually seems to be]: I’m green, I support the Greens, really … but… we have to get rid of Stephen Harper!

Me [relieved]: Absolutely! And I have got GREAT news for you! The Conservatives are not going to win in Trinity-Spadina! You have three equally good ways to cast an anti-Harper vote! You can vote Green!

Nice lady [still dimly troubled]: But… we all have to unite…

Me: Yes! And I will form an anti-Harper coalition with anybody! And so I promise will any Green MPs! It’s Ignatieff who seems to have a problem with the idea of a coalition, so whatever you do please don’t switch to voting Liberal thinking it’s a vote for unity.

NL: But… but… [panic rises as she tries to figure out whether it's more 'strategic' to vote for Olivia Chow as the incumbent, or Christine Innes because she's from the bigger party, or Chow again because the NDP are more pro-coalition, or Innes because the Liberals are the anti-Harper compromise, or Chow because of the NDP surge. Eventual system crash, eyes glaze over and thought-bubbles grind to a halt.]

NL: But… I don’t want to waste my vote.

Me: [Beats head slowly against wall.]

Here’s the bottom line, NL, in case I failed to come out with it in person: if you misvote you are evading your responsibilities as a citizen, you are sending money to a party you don’t believe in, you are encouraging the people you do believe in not to bother trying next time, and all in an attempt to do what our system is absolutely designed to prevent you from doing, namely ‘strategizing’. So, really: please don’t.

It isn’t just the endless full-page four-colour photos of Jack Layton looking folksy — which, as I pointed out at an ACM, make the damn thing nearly impossible to print out without losing a cartridge. It’s the content. It’s full of vote-buying gimmicks which Layton et al. must know perfectly well are junk: getting rid of the tax on home heating fuel (pitched as poverty reduction, but of course a lot more money will flow to the energy-wasting McMansion owner), replication and outdoing of various Conservative boutique tax cuts and credits, and bribes of up to $4500 for any business that hires a new person. (It’s actually hard to find anything quite so silly in the Liberal platform.) Everything is targeted: when I saw that their defence policy emphasised the navy, I knew I could get the explanation by googling ‘shipbuilding unions NDP’.

Yet it isn’t a particularly lefty document, and it certainly isn’t an environmentalist one — on climate change, there’s nothing but mush, with a few vague references to cap and trade which Layton has already walked back from. In fact, it exudes a terror of seeming too lefty or in any way new. At the same time, no matter how hard the NDP works to make the right noises, they still pretty clearly don’t get how free enterprise works — as if entrepreneurs hired people on the basis of microscopic government bribes, rather than because the conditions are right for them to grow and gain market share and increase their profits. (At least the Conservatives don’t really *believe* that corporations need their pseudo-job-creating tax cuts — they just like giving them money.)

The sad truth is, this is what the NDP has learned from five years of growing Conservative power: a low opinion of the Canadian voter. Some decent core values are still lurking around in there, but in strategic terms they’ve come to share Harper’s view that we are a nation to be bought cheaply, with boutique tax cuts, targeted gimmicks and pseudo-centrist mush. And if this is the NDP’s long awaited breakthrough election, that dimension of Harperism will have been vindicated across the spectrum, and you can expect them to stick with it.  If you’re a real progressive, be prepared for bitter disappointment in any government they may end up involved in.

If you’ve looked at the major party platforms for this election, you’ll have seen that this election is all about us – or at least, about *some* of us. That is, it’s all about Families. So Michael Ignatieff is labeling his basket of boutique tax goodies the ‘Family Pack’ — channelling those deep political thinkers Tim Horton and Colonel Sanders. Jack Layton is promising to “give your family a break” and to “deliver for you” — by the sound of it, he’ll be going door to door with pizzas and a toolbox. And even Stephen Harper is ‘Here for Hardworking Families’. (For ‘Not-so-hardworking families’, I guess, see ‘Prisons policy’.)

You may at this point have a nagging question. Am I a Family? Who is this Family of which they speak?

I’m pretty sure I’m not a Family. I’m single, and like over one-quarter of Canadians, live independently. I do have a mother who lives across town, an aunt, and a boyfriend in Pittsburgh, but I have a nasty feeling that won’t be enough for inclusion in Stephen Harper’s Canada. (Indeed, there was not a word in any platform about tax credits for flights to Pittsburgh.) My gay friends have a hunch they’re not a Family either, despite being hardworking and cohabiting. People renting with friends, or living in complicated postnuclear households -– sorry folks, this election is not for you.

If you’re uncertain about your status, there’s a simple test. Families – let’s set aside the messy realities of Canadian society and call them Families™ — are being courted in different ways, but there is a common thread in the major party platforms. What unites Families™, evidently, is their demand for an answer to the burning policy issue of our time, what we may term the Great Question: Who will help me with my home renovation? Families™ are deeply concerned about tax cuts and tax credits, the more focussed on themselves the better — Afghanistan, aboriginal issues and climate change, not so much.

We may wonder what is really going on here. Whence the devotion to these reno-obsessed Families™, to the exclusion of the rest of us? Of course, if pressed I’m sure they would deny any exclusionary intent: even Stephen Harper’s public definition of a family probably tends to match that of whoever he’s talking to. (After all, this is a party whose English slogan is ‘Here for Canada’ and whose slogan in Quebec is ‘Notre Region au Pouvoir’.) But let’s remember where this ‘families’ rhetoric came from. It worked brilliantly for Ronald Reagan and then for both Bushes — remember Dan Quayle and his ‘family values’? –, before traveling north with the rest of Stephen Harper’s platform in 2006 (‘Stand Up for Families’). This is at heart right-wing American rhetoric – now spreading north like kudzu in reverse, along with tax cuts and contempt for the voters’ intelligence.

Perhaps the big parties – the ones that get to participate in televised debates — think that only Families™ care about politics. If so, they’re wrong – I’ve talked with many real live un-Families™ in my riding and no one yet has asked me the Great Question. Then again, maybe they just haven’t stopped to think how many people their supposed-to-be feel-good rhetoric excludes. There’s an implicit lack of faith here in Canadians as citizens — an assumption that there’s no longer any point in appealing to goods and values common to us all. (Maybe they think home renovation *is* the last value common to us all). This is where we in the Green Party are strangely old-fashioned. Of course we talk about families too, and as environmentalists we love home retrofitting more than anybody. But we also talk about – and *to* – Canadians, fellow citizens, and just plain people. We even like that quaint phrase, ‘the common good’. So we may not be competitive for the vote of this mysterious Family™, for which the deciding issue is the number of boutique tax credits it can squeeze out of each party. But then the Family™ does not speak for all of us. Or even for most of us. In fact, I like to think that it may not really exist at all.