Monthly Archives: May 2017

BC Election: Green Has the Balance

As of tonight the recounts are fin­ished, the final results are in, and BC offi­cial­ly holds a Lib­er­al minor­i­ty gov­ern­ment along with an enor­mous tech­ni­cal win for the Green Party.

The chance of an elec­tion turn­ing out exact­ly as this one has is infin­i­tes­i­mal­ly small, and yet it’s hap­pened. We’ve made history.

The Comox-Courte­nay rid­ing, which denied a major­i­ty for the Lib­er­als, went to the NDP by an ini­tial mar­gin of 9 votes, lat­er con­firmed as 13 votes dur­ing final recount, and final­ized as a 189-vote NDP lead once the absen­tee bal­lots were tallied.

With the Lib­er­als hold­ing 43 seats in the Leg­is­la­ture, the NDP hold­ing 41, and the Green Par­ty hold­ing the remain­ing 3, this puts the Greens in the unprece­dent­ed posi­tion of being the ful­crum on which any gov­ern­ing mat­ters will stand.

The priv­i­lege of being in such a posi­tion essen­tial­ly lends the Greens a huge mega­phone. Being the decid­ing vote on leg­isla­tive work brings a stronger bar­gain­ing posi­tion when it comes to doing good for this province, our res­i­dents, and our shared envi­ron­men­tal lega­cy. It also brings enhanced oppor­tu­ni­ties to build a stronger polit­i­cal track record and can­di­date port­fo­lio, shape the par­ty into more of a house­hold name, and hope­ful­ly secure addi­tion­al seats in future elec­tions if all goes well.

It’s not easy being green, but it’s an amaz­ing time to be Green … so con­grat­u­la­tions, fel­low Green vot­ers and par­ty mem­bers, wear it well!

This post also would­n’t be com­plete with­out heart­felt thanks to every sin­gle per­son who went out and vot­ed, regard­less of affil­i­a­tion. Being part of the polit­i­cal process is absolute­ly vital to the health of our democ­ra­cy and the progress of our future, and if ever there was a time to be remind­ed of the pow­er of the indi­vid­ual, 2017 has tru­ly show­cased this in the most amaz­ing of ways.

The Ongoing US Trump/Russia Media Flap

Here’s a fair­ly lev­el-head­ed expla­na­tion of the Trump/Russia cov­er­age that’s par­a­lyzed the news cycle for the past few months, cour­tesy of Michael Tracey from TYT:

It’s impor­tant to note that whether or not the Trump/Russia sto­ry has legs, we’ve long since passed the point where irra­tional nar­ra­tives became ends and pur­suits in them­selves, and peo­ple have large­ly cho­sen to see what they want to see come out of this situation.

If there’s one thing 2016 taught us, it’s that the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem and elec­torate are, large­ly, no longer ratio­nal actors. They’re in a bad place and they want to burn some­thing down because they’re under­stand­ably pissed off at the sta­tus quo. The oth­er side of the coin is most aren’t ter­ri­bly con­cerned with how they go about doing it, or what cor­ners they cut when giv­ing it thought.

Con­tin­ue read­ing

BC Provincial Election, Tuesday May 09

Get ready, get set, go vote! Your local polling sta­tions will be open today from 08:00–20:00.

It’s impor­tant to make your­self heard in an elec­tion, not only because cur­rent media stud­ies sug­gest a close­ly con­test­ed elec­toral race, but also because each par­ty diverges from the oth­ers in its own view of ‘com­mon ground’ as well as unique pol­i­cy decisions.

Please take some time today to read fur­ther, get to know the par­ty plat­forms, and make a choice on who you’d like to support.

Full plat­forms of the major par­ties can be found here:
Green Par­ty
New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party
Lib­er­al Party

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