What an exciting day! The Catch 22 Campaign’s first ever online endorsement process wrapped up a couple of hours ago. Based on the best available research, the Catch 22 team recommended to our supporters in Saanich-Gulf Islands (SGI) that our campaign support Green Party candidate (and leader), Elizabeth May as the candidate best positioned to defeat incumbent Conservative Gary Lunn. We used our online group to facilitate the discussion and provided a 48 discussion period to get as much local input as possible before closing the discussion. The local group has overwhelmingly supported our team’s recommendation making Elizabeth May our 6th endorsed candidate (see the featured groups).
Since we opened the discussion, we’ve seen a flurry of new members joining the site from SGI. We now have more than 40 people who have signed on to the online group making it Catch 22’s largest online group for now. The next step is to identify co-ordinators who will help take the Catch 22 message across the riding. Stay tuned.
Over the next few days, Catch 22 will be rolling out the recommendations / endorsements in all of the targeted Conservative ridings we’ve identified. We hope to complete the process by April 9. We are using the online groups in lieu of live meetings where it’s not feasible to quickly pull one together. Live meetings were held in Ottawa and Vancouver this week where campaign team recommendations were supported by local groups. Local organizing is starting to get off the ground. If you think you can pull together a live meeting in your riding this coming week, please let us know and we will either be there in person or via phone or Skype.
In week 2 of the campaign, we will also be unveiling our list of the 20 most vulnerable opposition MPs who we are adding to our list. The combined list of 60 or so targeted ridings will then be compiled into a single Catch 22 voting guide which will be released in Week 3 of the campaign.
Literature development is almost complete for our first piece of literature.