Here are the links for those interested in the dozens of new policy resolutions passed by the GPC membership at our convention in Ottawa last month:  [pdf]  [doc].  Here is the link for our new constitution:  [link].  And here is a link to CPAC coverage of the GPC convention and leadership debates:  [link].

Adriane Carr has resigned as leader of the Green Party of BC [link].  I had the opportunity to work closely with Adriane when I served on the GPBC council in 2003, and I was always impressed by her energy, her passion and her committment to Green values. 

I think Adriane's forte was public speaking:  her performance in the 2001 televised leadership debates in the BC provincial election led directly to the GPBC winning 12% of the vote.  In my opinion, this was a watershed moment for the Greens in Canada.  Adriane and her team showed Canadians that the Greens were a viable alternative to the old-line, "grey" parties, and her election successes set the stage for the subsequent growth of the GPC and other provincial parties.

Well done, Adriane, and thank you.

UPDATE:  Adriane has joined the GPC as our Deputy Leader.  Congratulations and good luck!

Need more evidence that the impact of the Green Party in Canadian politics is continuing to grow?  Check out this Toronto Star article:  [link].  Liberal leadership candidate Stephane Dion mentions the Greens (and, indirectly, Elizabeth May) in the second sentence of his opening remarks, which preface a 3000-word Q&A with the Star editorial board.

Tom Axworthy has written an excellent article in the Toronto Star about why the Greens should be invited to the political table.  Here is the link.

Those of you who have read my roadmap essay [link] or my GPC task list [link] know that I think improving our internal processes and procedures is something that needs to be done now to ensure that the party has a solid infrastructure in place. The party is growing by leaps and bounds - we doubled our membership this year - and as we grow we need to work to keep our processes current and relevant in order to meet the increasing demands and expectations of our members. As such, during the recent internal election I kept track of things that I thought could be done to make the election better. Certainly a lot of things went right this year, and the party was able to successfully conduct a hotly contested leadership race. But I hope that these "top 10" recommendations, if implemented, will help to make our internal elections even better.

Click the link for the essay or on the attached PDF file for a formatted version.
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In their September 1 issue Maclean's quotes Elizabeth May as saying she is confident that David Suzuki will run for the Greens in the next election [link].  That would certainly be a coup of the highest order, and if anyone can pull it off I think it would be Elizabeth (she is a close friend of his).  My understanding is that David has been repeatedly asked by various Green Parties to run for office and has always declined.  David was the keynote speaker at our 2004 General Meeting in Bragg Creek, Alberta (near Calgary) and brought down the house with an inspirational speech.  David - Please tell us now is the time you will take this next step!

Some of you may have read my earlier post about the "State of the Party" poll I asked the old council to complete at our last in-person meeting in Ottawa in June [link].  The idea was to get a rough idea of how the party is doing in 16 key areas.

Prior to the General Meeting in August Jim Harris set up a two-day strategy session and invited a "who's who" of Greens from across the country to attend - provincial leaders, elected Greens, leading EDA reps, and so on.  I took the opportunity to conduct another SOTP poll and a little more than 30 strategy session attendees participated.

The quick and dirty summary is that these key Greens provided a snapshot of our progress that was slightly more pessimistic than council - on average the responses were about 1 point below the old council's perceptions.  Overall, the two sets of data tracked each other fairly consistently.  However, on two key issues - how the party is doing overall, and how well we did in the 2006 election - strategy session attendees rated things about 2 points below council.  Click the "more" link below for a chart with full details.

(An aside - when I was prompting the strategy session to complete the poll I joked that now was the chance to provide the new council with realistic data about how they thought the party was doing, since the old council ranked everything 10 out of 10.  A couple of people came up to me afterwards and asked if that was true.  It seems like the old council might have been viewing things with a certain rose-coloured tint, but we weren't quite that bad!)

As could be expected there was a fair amount of variance in the raw data for each question.  The most notable range were the responses to the question of how solid our policy was.  Of the 34 responses every single option from 1 through 10 was chosen, resulting in a standard deviation of 2.4.  I am happy to note that Elizabeth May is working to get a series of policy fora up and running, and I hope that these sessions will help to improve our policy across the board.  As I discuss in my roadmap essay [link] we are rapidly approaching a point where our ability to attract new members and win more votes will be tied closely to the strength of our policy and election platform.

I'd like to encourage the new council to conduct their own poll on these issues.  I also think it would be a very interesting exercise to conduct a party-wide poll by sending an email out to our members with a link to an electronic poll for them to complete.  Collecting this sort of information is helpful in analyzing our progress over time, and it can also be used as a resource in strategic planning discussions to help determine how and where we should focus our resources.

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