General

Green Party Blues

Does Liz May really need this sort of hassle? Are these the battles the Greens should be fighting?

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NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 1st, 2009

GREEN ACTIVIST AUTHORISED TO RUN AGAINST ELIZABETH MAY

VICTORIA — Today the Green Party of Canada officially authorised grassroots activist Stuart Hertzog to stand as a nomination candidate against party leader Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

“I’m pleased that the party’s Campaign Committee has bowed to the inevitable and allowed me to challenge their preferred candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands,” Hertzog said today.

The federal Council of the Green Party of Canada had decided that it would make getting the party leader Elizabeth May elected as an MP the primary goal of its upcoming election strategy.

Hertzog believes that this policy not only is strategically short-sighted, it also goes against the party’s consitutionally-protected principle of Participatory Democracy, in which those most directly affected by an issue must have a vote in any decision about it.

“The party’s new and powerful Campaign Committee, on which Elizabeth May and her campaign manager John Fryer both sit, has devised and imposed self-serving and draconian rules on the party’s grassroots candidate nomination proces,” Herzog explained.

“These rules, the timing element of which the campaign Committee has now revised three times, give this central party committee total control of who can become a Green Party candidate.

“The Committee is also surreptitiously attempting to get all Green Party Electoral District Associations (EDAs) to adopt a modified constitution that removes the power of the EDAs to decide who shall be their candidate, and transfers it to themselves,” Hertzog continued.

Hertzog believes that this is not participatory democracy but the same type of ‘top-down,’ autocratic, political power game practiced by all the conventional political parties.

“In attempting to be just like all the other parties in the belief that this will get a single Green MP elected, the Green Party of Canada has thrown out its principles in its bid for power”, Hertzog
said.

“Using the kind of repressive, anti-democratic, manipulative politics that the Green Party was intended to oppose, will not change Canadian democracy by one iota,” Hertzog concluded.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Stuart Hertzog (250) 384-6507 [email protected]

Web Site: http://greenpolitics.ca
Twitter: greenpoliticsca

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