The media has been buzzing with talk about the Roadmap to Renewal and supporting documents, and Liberal circles are also astir. This quick summary gives you the gist of the main proposals, and also some good links. Please pass this on to friends and neighbours – the more the merrier!
Continue readingTag: political reform
CuriosityCat: Liberal Riding Presidents: Please table this amendment to the Roadmap with Alfred Apps on your Nov 30 conference call
What you can do to help: The Roadmap is a positive step forward (with a few wrinkles), but is deficient in boldness in remedying the democratic deficit in our party. Please ask your Riding President to table the following amendment to the Roadmap resolutions with President Alfred Apps during his
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Liberals, forgeddabout Ibbitson & Have Your Say in January
John Ibbitson is the latest to weigh in on the Liberal Roadmap to Renewal, with the advice that those who don’t like the proposed changes should shut up and vote Yes at the January convention: All well and good, but there are more than a few influential Liberals anxious to
Continue readingCuriosityCat: My Forecast for the next 18 months
Based on events taking place right now, and on trends I think I have spotted, The Cat is going out on a limb with the following forecasts: Israel will strike Iran’s nuclear plants. Iran will retaliate with missile and other attacks on Israel, and on US citizens and interests in
Continue readingCuriosityCat: The Litmus Test for selecting the new NDP and Liberal Leaders: What will remove Stephen Harper
Two leadership races of enormous consequence are taking place in Canada right now: the overt race to select a new leader to replace Jack Layton, and the covert race to select a permanent leader of the Liberal Party. The electoral cooperation Pandora’s Box While many pundits and party members are
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Liberal Roadmap for Victory – lipservice to real member and supporter involvement
Just spent some time reading through the accompany (non-official) document released with the Roadmap, and came across some really jarring notes.They have really taken the gloss off the Roadmap for me, with a vengeance.The cover letter and the Roadmap a…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Fatal Flaw in the Liberal Party Renewal Plan Primary Election of new Leader
The devil is in the details, and Peter Wrightwater of the blog Paper Dynamite Online has just unearthed a major defect in the Liberal Primary Election plan which could have major anti-democratic consequences.He examines the proposed Electoral College w…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Liberals, let’s use the Two-Tier Primary system for electing our next leader
In an earlier post I mentioned the problem of raiding or hijacking which bedevil open primaries: your opponents might vote for the weakest Liberal candidate in the hope of reducing Liberal chances of success in the general election.Blunt Objects, in a …
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Primaries are Infectious: Ask MP Sarah Wollaston of Totnes, UK
In 2009 Dr Sarah Wollaston became the first candidate for election as an MP in the UK to be selected by the Conservative Party through an open primary.Danniel Hannan says this about the primary selection method:Once one party adopts open primarie…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Suggestions for a new Open Primary election of the next Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada
Bob Rae has opened the dialogue about how we elect our party leader, with a suggestion that we consider an open primary system of electing out next leader in 2013.Bob Rae and the LPC Primary SystemTo advance the dialogue, I would like to table a few su…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Hints of the Rae Revolution in Bob’s comments
Finally, a breath of fresh air seems to be blowing through the Liberal Party. With one speech, Bob Rae has thrown down the gauntlet to our party, daring us to think outside the nine dots, and to prune where pruning is needed, and open our arms wide to …
Continue readingCuriosityCat: The Arithmetic says that NDP MP Nathan Cullen’s electoral cooperation plan can succeed
It’s been a little over a week since Nathan Cullen launched his bid for leadership of the NDP with a bold plan to encourage cooperation between members of the three opposition parties in those ridings where sitting Tory MPs were vulnerable.Despite the …
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Why Wall Street is being Occupied – in two sentences
Banks and politicians should take the time to ponder this extract (my redlining) from an article by Adreas Whittam Smith in The Independent:How did some banks become “too big to fail”? Why did their reckless behaviour go unchecked for so long and is it…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: OWS – the next step: occupy the boardrooms of large corporations & the internet
OccupyWallStreet is spawning offspring at a healthy click, and I’m not talking about occupy some other city kind of spawning!A fascinating website named epolitics has a posting on two recent developements of the OWS, one of which is rather humorous, th…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Chantal Hebert misstates Nathan Cullens electoral cooperation idea
In today’s Toronto Star Chantal Hebert writes about Nathan Cullen’s idea for electoral cooperation between the LPCC, NDP and Green Party. She is of the opinion that the idea is doomed because it ignores human nature, really amounts to a quasi-merger pr…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Any one of the NDP’s Two and a Half Men would make a good leader & PM
The NDP now have three good candidates for their top job: The Fighter, The Dealer and The Visionary.Both Brian Topp and Thomas Mulcair have decades of experience in practical politics, with Mulcair on the hustings and Topp in the proverbial smoke-fille…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: The Reasons behind the Cullen Plan to Turf-a-Tory in 2015
Why would a young MP decide to join the race for leadership of the NDP, when he faces competition from veterans in the field, such as a backroom dealer, Brian Topp, backed by the party brass, and a seasoned politician , Thomas Mulcair, who fought and w…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Signs of Hope: Some MPs in the Liberal caucus support the Cullen Plan
In a wide ranging interview by Tim Naumetz in The Hill Times, Nathan Cullen, the innovative young NDP MP who has joined the race to replace Jack Layton as leader of the NDP, said that he has been getting some feedback from several sources in the other …
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Do Brian Topp & Thomas Mulcair have the right "leadership material" to head the NDP? MP Pat Martin says No!
Outspoken NDP MP Pat Martin is calling their leadership skills into question because of their ‘knee jerk’ rejection of the Turf-a-Tory Cullen Plan floated by NDP MP Nathan Cullen earlier this week when he joined the fray for leadership of that party:Na…
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Let the people speak: Some comments on the Walkom article on the Cullen Plan
I skimmed through some of 70 plus comments on the Thomas Walkom article on Nathan Cullen’s idea to Turf-a-Tory through electoral cooperation between the Liberal, NDP and Green parties before the 2015 election.This idea is starting to get legs (Walkom’s…
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