Meaningful Membership
As the party begins to set the tone for development over the next four years, it will be critical that Elizabeth May, our lone MP for now, is supported with whatever resources are needed to maintain a strong front face to the party.
Success on any stated goals of building on this victory, however, will be highly contingent on bringing deeper meaning to the word membership. Making this happen will be a critical role for Federal Council over the next four years. If elected President, I would look forward to the challenge of including this as a priority.
I offer no criticism of how Council has been operating in the past. The objective in the last few years was clear and transparent to the members of the party and the general public. Get the Leader elected. We opened up a permanent office in the riding and staffed that with several full time people. I completely supported that effort. But the objectives of the next four years will be infinitely more complicated to plan and achieve and, in my view, will require a different relationship between Federal Council, Staff and the membership.
Recently, the party has functioned in a way that I would characterize closer to an NGO. You send money and then good people working at that organization lobby for you, and you get back to your busy life. It is difficult to find an active local EDA (riding association) website that is updated regularly with items of interest to the voters in that riding. There is little or no expectation for anybody to really get going on any grass roots political action that is of interest to their fellow citizens’ everyday lives. Yes, there are resolutions passed every couple of years at our Biannual General Meeting so that is something to build upon. Since our days of being a fringe party are long past, we must be active across the country all of the time, not just in a ramp up for an election.
As mentioned, any political action organized by the central party, such as the recent asbestos campaign, are very competently handled by paid staff. What is missing is coordinated action with local riding associations so that members can actually feel part of a growing national organization. This is not easy to do, but critical for the next level of growth for the party. Yes we are asked to share these national actions on Facebook and Twitter but it seems clear to me that there are serious limits to this centralized model.
Our website needs to evolve so that it includes celebration of the many competent, skilled and active people in our party making a difference locally and regionally. Certainly we do not have the money to hire staff for this. But I believe that there are many in party now that would be thrilled to take part in maintaining this sort of feature on the website. Volunteer resources can be corralled to make such features a permanent and vibrant side of our front face.
This is just an example of what we need to do to make membership more meaningful. I believe that we not only can do this very effectively, but we must.
There is no easy road to facilitating such action, but it is imperative that meaningful membership become the culture of the party if we are to attract and keep tens of thousands of additional members. We will need all of these in fact if we are to reach official party status in the near future. A full dozen MPs are required for official party status in the House of Commons.
Membership and Federal Council
The suggestion has been made that Federal Council is transparent. I would reiterate that I no hold criticism about anybody’s specific actions or decisions and I certainly don’t want to dig up any old wounds. My intention is to encourage you to encourage Federal Council to evolve and I am offering my candidacy in this light.
I am about as active as a member can be, but before I decided to run for President, I could not list the various committees that there are in the party. Nor did I have any idea who is on them, nor did I have any idea of where to click to find such a list. I wouldn’t have known how to ask to join a committee and I wouldn’t know who to ask. I could have made some educated guesses or I could have asked somebody who would probably know, but mostly this is because I have been around for long enough. Again, I offer no criticism to those on Council currently because with a narrow objective of electing Elizabeth, transparency of Federal Council and connection to the membership was not imperative. But it will be critical now or we will most certainly stagnate.
I attended the recent Federal Council meeting on Sunday August 16th, as all members are invited to do, but I was the sole observer who did not have a current or future role with the Federal Council. The lack of apparent interest from the members is not because it's summer as this is usually the case. If elected, I would be personally on the phone asking EDA presidents to come and observe how the governance of the party is conducted. In my view, they are a key connection between what is going on federally and the rank and file membership.
At this meeting, the chair of one of the most important committees of the party mentioned that he was stepping down from the role of chair of this committee, but that he would remain on that committee. He is not currently an elected member of council. The chair of this particular committee is, however, a non-voting member of council (they can vote in straw polls) as per the bylaws of the party, so this person normally attends all of the Federal Council meetings. I assume that his stepping down must have been announced previously to somebody somehow because he mentioned that only one name had been brought forward to replace him as chair. This name brought forward happens to be somebody who will be acclaimed onto Federal Council in this round of elections.
I would hope that the party would be able to find good competent people outside of elected members of Federal Council to join and chair important committees. But since there has been no announcement to the members or to the EDAs about such positions opening up (that I am aware of), I find it hard to justify calling the operations of the Federal Council transparent. It is certainly not a surprise that people are not stepping up when they don’t understand how Federal Council operates and what positions are open.
When we truly open up the governance of the party to be inclusive, we will unlock powerful and competent resources. Any move towards greater transparency will provide a solid basis for an increase in membership and funding, and will ultimately be reflected in our electoral results.
Action Orientation
There are thousands, thousands of people across this country who want to see change, serious change in our society and are ready to do something about it. The reasons are many. It might be to see the elimination of corruption at the political level, or waste at the government level. Perhaps they have done the math and know that we are far too dependent on oil and that we need to dramatically and quickly increase our reliance on renewable resources and energy. Maybe they are frustrated with all of the things that Health Canada approves that are no good for our health. The inequities of society stare them in the face every day, perhaps. There are so many reasons that people look to us for hope.
How do we open the doors of our party so that these people are comfortable and enthusiastic about being a member of the Green Party of Canada?
We have to have a multi-faceted approach to building the party and operating it on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis, coast to coast to coast. Elizabeth May is a Leader with a vast array of knowledge and connections and who represents my political views in many ways. I am thrilled to hear her handle the issues and I am seriously relieved that our voice is finally in the House and starting to have an impact.
The governance of this party needs to build on this breakthrough. That is obvious but the question is how.
What I am hearing from those that I have spoken to is that we need to modify our current model of governance towards one that takes advantage of the tremendous professional volunteer resources available in this party. We need to create procedures whereby local riding associations (EDAs) can be trained and guided in areas of communication and local action. We need to provide media training for EDA Presidents, Candidates of Record, Shadow Cabinet Members, and any other official spokespersons of the party. All actions must be properly vetted beforehand but there is a tremendous power out there waiting to be released.
Many EDAs are valiantly holding themselves together with monthly meetings but they really don’t know what to do. When I first became a federal candidate in 2009, we put out press releases regularly on issues of local concern. Always, we either copied or involved the Shadow Cabinet member and double checked in Vision Green that we were always on message. I was surprised to realize that I was one of the few in the party that was doing this on a regular basis.
A columnist in the Ottawa Citizen picked up on one of my press releases on the Nortel situation, which was the biggest issue locally. He quoted me a couple of times and this culminated in a flat out endorsement for me in the 2010 provincial by-election that I ran in. (Ironically, he is now the PC candidate himself in that very riding for the upcoming provincial election, even though he said that I was the sort of grey-haired businessman that the Conservatives would love to have as a candidate.....).
I do not want to be victimized again by the broadcast consortium four years down the road. We need to empower local riding associations to establish connections with the local media, with the intention of having regular and ongoing contact. This is a method of communicating with the public that is open to us now and will be at the next election as well.
Federal Council and Staff, along with the Shadow Cabinet need to facilitate involvement at the local level on federal initiatives. Federally, we need to support qualified local and regional actions started by the grass roots. Start by getting our message out with community and small newspapers and work your way up. Four years seems like a long time from now but will pass by quickly if we don’t start getting our message out locally now. The next election could very well be all about the debates. I for one, do not want to roll the dice that we will be invited. The only thing that I would be sure of is that Elizabeth May would be fantastic.
Regional Organizers
We will have federal funding progressively cut over the next four years, as will all political parties. Compensating for this will understandably dominate a lot of the activity of Staff and Federal Council.
The organizing staff, those connected directly to the EDAs (the local governance of the party) was cut down to barebones minimum as the party dealt with a debt hangover from the 2008 election and concentrated resources in Saanich-Gulf Islands to maximize the chances of getting Elizabeth elected. Again, no criticism of these decisions at all. Some of the Organizer positions that had been dropped were once again filled just before the election as the party debt came under control.
The Ottawa area had an organizer briefly, then we were tacked on with another region. This, again, was all a question of budget and resources. But when we had a regional organizer, it was a huge help. When we lost our organizer, it became unclear as to who was keeping track of the email list, an attempt at a regional fundraiser fell through and a successful bus ad purchase ended up with a several misunderstandings.
If we create a volunteer position of Regional Organizer (two per region, one of each gender would be my suggestion) we will go a long way towards getting EDAs the tools that they need to be effective hubs of membership activity. This would have to come with a detailed role description; expectations clearly defined; training; a wiki system of easy tools to use whereby peers can empower peers, etc. If we can add this level to the organizational structure, we will begin the process of giving better direction to EDAs as to where they fit in with the party as a whole in between elections. Paid organizers would then facilitate the volunteer organizers.
This was an effective model for myself and Jeanie Warnock who were the Eastern Ontario organizers for the Green Party of Ontario from 2007 to 2009. We kept an up to date list of who was active, organized quarterly regional meetings, and held campaign and riding association training sessions. We had a full complement of provincial riding associations. Some were barely alive, some met regularly and some were actually active in the community. It is no coincidence that our division, one of six in Ontario contained one third of the membership. Members want to be active. Members in a political party want to learn how to be more politically effective. They do not want to sit and cheer others doing the work for them.
There are a few members that have taken advantage of our efforts to be grass roots and have been excessively vocal and have used this party inappropriately as their personal soapbox. There is always the concern that if we open things up too much and get too many people involved, somebody is going to embarrass us. With proper protocol in place, proper training, and proper follow-up by trained regional organizers, we will have lots of highly competent people that are ready and able to implement a positive front face to the party. They will drown out anybody who thinks they have the best intentions, but end up being a detriment.
Having a regional level, (about 15 ridings might be about right – that is how many Jeanie Warnock and I had) will also improve the quality and quantity of candidates for federal council, and for general elections and by-elections. For the record, I would be in complete support of running a full slate in 2015. This will not be a drain on federal resources, but a boost, if most of the EDAs are taking care of the candidate search themselves. Good ones will have contests and defeated nomination contestants from one riding contest can be invited to run in another riding where there is a need in the region.
Federal council is now being reduced from 22 voting members to 17. In this round of elections, we have only one more candidate than positions up for election. It’s a big leap from member to Federal Council. Any successful organization has various levels. You get active locally, then you help out regionally, then those that have shown enough skill take on district and eventually national roles. The existence of a regional level is implied in the constitution but must become a reality soon in my opinion.
If elected, I would seek those that can help get the regional level functional and effective. I will emphasize that President has only one vote on Council and then, only in the event of a tie. Reaching consensus with as many members of Federal Council as possible is a key part of the role of President. Regardless of the results of this election, if a regional level of support for local riding associations is something that you would like to see, contact your provincial or territorial representative about this and let’s get going on it.
True Democracy
I personally believe that our message of True Democracy was heard loud and clear by the public and they responded in part by giving that other party a shot. A Wave will be ours in due time if we get right the definition and practice of meaningful membership. I ask for your vote in order to help bring this to its potential in the Green Party of Canada.
