The Green Party has a great new Leader in Elizabeth May.  She brings extensive skills, credentials and passion to her new role.  It was clear when she spoke at the convention after winning that the delegates were fully behind her.  And by winning 65% of the vote on the first ballot she left no doubt that the party as a whole supports her as well.  I think we have an exciting few years ahead with Elizabeth leading the way ...

I applaud David Chernushenko's campaign as well.  It was great for the party that we had two very strong candidates running for the leadership.  We've already doubled our membership this year to 9000, in large part as a result of the leadership race.  I was very glad to hear at the convention that David is going to remain actively involved and I loved his line that the other parties calling to court him to run for them can "save their dime, and save their time" since he is committed to the Greens.  Of course, phone calls these days are $0.35 but who's counting.

Jim Fannon did not fare that well with only 29 votes (less than 1% of the 3000 or so cast).  I know he was disappointed with the result.  However, it seems clear that the party is rapidly maturing.  In 2004, John Grogan ran a "protest vote" campaign that was weaker than Jim Fannon's, and I believe he still won 10% of the vote against Jim Harris and Tom Manley.  I think Jim is a personable guy who has a role to play in the party, but my feeling is that he is still trying to figure out exactly what that role is (along with the rest of us - what a speech on Friday night!)

And let's not forget our fourth candidate NOTA (none of the above), which won 14 votes.  This could have been the surprise of the evening.  I would have thought that everyone voting could have found someone to like between Elizabeth, David and Jim.  Could the party have hand-picked three more dissimilar candidates to run for the leadership?

For those who haven't heard the official internal election vote results are posted on the GPC website [link].  I wanted to congratulate all winning candidates and, in particular, I wanted to congratulate Melanie Ransom for running an excellent campaign and winning the Party Chair council position. 

I finished second, 305 votes behind Melanie after the third and final round of voting (note that the GPC uses a preferential ballot for its internal elections).  2955 votes were cast for Chair.  I talked to Melanie at the convention after the voting results were announced and told her I would be willing to work with her to follow up on and/or help transition to the new council some of the pre-election council activities and campaign objectives I had been working on, if she and council are interested.  I had tried to make sure that much of this work would be useful for the party regardless of who won.  During the convention I also made a lot of notes about various things that I'm planning to write up and post here to the blog in the coming weeks.

I am going camping at Lake O'Hara this long weekend (near Lake Louise here in Alberta) and this will be a nice change from the 5 days of GPC meetings.  I'll start following up on the above activities when I return.

My understanding is that the new council will be having their first meeting the weekend of September 10.  Congratulations again and good luck to all winning council candidates with their term.

At our June council meeting in Ottawa councillors did a short exercise to take a "State of the Party" snapshot. Each councillor was able to rank from 1 to 10 (where 1 is bad, and 10 is good) how they thought the party was doing in 16 different broad areas. The idea was to do a sort of poll where the results that would help to indicate where the current council thought we were doing well, and where we thought improvements were needed.

If this poll was conducted by the new council on a regular basis then I think it will help the party to analyze how we are doing over time. I think it would also be useful to regularly poll members with the same questions. Low polling results by all groups would indicate obvious problems. Discrepancies in the results would indicate other possible problems. For example, if council thought we were doing well in an area and members thought we were poorly than it might indicate something to look into. In addition, I think this information will be valuable when it comes to our strategic planning efforts.

Councillors weren't asked to provide written input but certainly that would be another useful exercise for both councillors and members. Mike Nickerson did something like this in Ontario and I thought the results were useful and interesting. But again, the advantage of the "snapshot" view is that the responses can be given quickly and the results can help to provide a high-level overview at a glance.

Click the link for the results ...   more »