Archive for Participatory democracy

This a follow up to volunteering in a Green campaign. I like to warn people, potential volunteers, that I live for politics. The ones that aren’t totally put off often ask why.  My very simple answer is that its fun and it lets me connect with my community on a level that I don’t usually have a chance to do.

When I first started working on political campaigns over 20 years ago I did it because I burned with a passion for politics. Like a lot of people just out of school I wanted to make a difference in my community and I thought the best way to do that was to get the people elected that I felt could make a difference. All of us who engage in the political process want that same thing. Having recently come to the Greens from one of the old line parties I have reconnected with that passion.

But what makes it fun you might ask. Working on election campaigns is about connecting with your community and hoping to make a difference. It’s about meeting people in your neighborhood and talking to them. Trust me, they are more interesting than you can imagine and they all have opinions worth hearing.

Going door to door canvassing for your candidate is not just about getting your candidate the vote, its about connecting with your neighbors and finding out what they need from politics and from the parties that lead them.

Asking someone if they will put a sign up is not just about your candidate its about your neighbors showing what they think about how they want their world to be and how they think that can come about. It’s about each of you, the canvassers and the electors, showing they care about their communities and displaying their hope for the future.

This year at some point we’ll be going door to door again to get our candidate, Charles Battershill, on to the minds of everyone in the riding and bring the message from the Green Party of Canada and our federal leader Elizabeth May into the minds of our neighbors.

Hi, I’m Barbora Grochalova, posing as the youth coordinator on the Toronto-Danforth executive. I’m a first year student at York University’s Faculty of Environmental studies, and I can’t choose my courses for next year because there are too many things I would like to get into. My Rally for Kyoto stint is [temprorarily?] over, so I just immersed myself in another issue, fair voting systems. Check out the Fair Vote Canada website.     Read more »

Here are some pictures and a video from today’s Rally for Kyoto in Nathan Phillips Square.  It was cool, but still — perfect weather for a bear suit with a lot of fur yet no wind-breaking ability.

I see this web-blog as a “Green Town Square”. So I propose to use it to consult with people as to what they wish my platform to be!

So many problems of our time are related to misuse of resources and one-dimensional thinking about human potential, the meaning of “success”, of community and society, and the foolish imagining that we are separate from nature. In particular, vested interests have created doubt about global warming this last decade to extend their way of life, their jobs, their non-sustainable mode of producing goods and of making their profits. We should have been taking decisive action. The Green Party knows that we can have good jobs, clean energy AND treat other people and other species ethically.

We have so much more to lose by asking “what’s in it for me?” or “how will what I take for granted be changed?” We in the rich countries assume just because we can pay for x, y and z, that we are entitled to it. We assume that our lives are worth more than those of people on the other side of the city and the planet, those who also indirectly bear the costs of our entitlement-based behaviours. It’s human nature to be threatened by change. But if we don’t see the bigger picture — yesterday — the changes we’ve unleashed will accelerate and could overwhelm us.

Many issues come up in talking with people in Toronto-Danforth. In this space I’ll begin to share a few ideas so we can think together about what is so important that we, the people, will force the political and economic elites into taking sensible action now!