Liberals Planning Spring Election

Must be because now that we have set election dates in Canada, as of this week, the Conservatives can't call and election only the opposition can. And in my neighbourhood, Edmonton Strathcona, the Liberals have bought billboards for their candidate Claudette Roy which have sprung up like May flowers.

Unfortunately even though they advertise her web site on the billboards, this is what appears.

This site is under construction, please come back soon

And since they did so badly last time I guess they are going on the offensive, not against Conservative MP and climate change denier Rahim Jaffer but the NDP candidate Linda Duncan who is an environmentalist.

So much for the politics of compromise to build an environmental alliance
for the next election.

What is good for Elizabeth May in Nova Scotia does not apply to Linda Duncan in Edmonton Strathcona despite her being an environmentalist. Of course Linda doesn't believe Stephane Dion is the greenest candidate for PM, unlike May.

And Linda's website has been online for months now.

See:

• My Planet, My Party

• Liberals New Green Politics

• Canada's New Progressive Right

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Claudette Roy, NDP, election2007

May Daze

Could this article from the Hill Times be the real reason for the political stoning of Elizabeth May? Since this was published April 30 and the attacks on her Sunday Sermon, began May Day. Ooh, get it May Day.

May says Greens could expand sensational deal with federal Grits to other ridings

Green Leader May also says it's a world of hypotheticals but it's an open question for the future

H/T to JimBobbySez and Accidental Deliberations

See:

Year of the Pig and the Liberal Green Alliance

Charles Agrees With Elizabeth May

Green Nazi's


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Glass House Politics

This is what happens when you are a politician preaching from a pulpit.

The fallout from Elizabeth May's comments on Neville Chamberlain continues. It is all about religion and religious outrage.

The Conservatives began it in the House of Commons with attacks on the Liberals, quoting from letter's they received from the Jewish lobbyists complaining May's comments some how demeaned the importance of the holocaust. Clearly political support for the Conservatives disguised as faux outrage. Call it pay back for all the nice things Harper has said about Israel and his unconditional support for their war against Lebanon and the Palestinians

I am pleased to extend my warmest greetings to everyone marking Yom Ha’atzmaut, the 59th anniversary of Israel’s independence.
On Yom Ha’atzmaut, you have an opportunity to reflect upon the history of the struggle that led to the birth of the modern State of Israel on May 14, 1948. It is a time to remember the past while renewing your dedication to the challenges of the future. The Jewish people have always faced the task of building a nation of freedom and peace with perseverance and enduring faith. These qualities have helped Israel grow in strength and stature since its formation. Its very existence is a testament to the spirit of its people and the power of hope.
Canada enjoys close ties with Israel, and I know that our relationship will continue to flourish in the years ahead.
On behalf of the government of Canada, please accept my best wishes for a memorable and enjoyable celebration.
Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada

Not to be outdone in sucking up to that lobby the Liberals and NDP joined in throwing stones at May's glass house.

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said May should withdraw the comment, even though references to weak-kneed Chamberlain are often employed in commentary on environmental or poverty issues.

"We should not use it — for the very reason that in the spectrum of power, the Nazi regime is beyond any comparison," Dion said outside the Commons.

"So I’m uncomfortable with the reference to Chamberlain about anything else than what happened in the Second World War."

NDP Leader Jack Layton said May’s comment was "certainly not something we consider to be wise or appropriate," and added voters will be the ultimate judge.

A shame that, since this was clearly a political effort by the Harpocrites to divert attention away from the failure of the Tories green plan as well as their failures in Afghanistan to protect human rights. While abusing what May actually said.

Of Course the Harpocrites overlooked the fact that the same Jewish lobby that criticized her accepted her apology but gave a dyer warning to politicians who would usurp their right to be the sole arbitrators of the political implications of Nazism. Of course she never did compare Climate Change to the Holocaust, but never mind that small detail.

Bernie Farber, chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said the Green Party leader had telephoned the organization Wednesday to retract and apologize for her comments. The congress had written Ms. May a critical letter about her speech.

"This is probably a lesson for all politicians who are tempted to make comparisons with the Nazis in their speech. They are going to lose the argument every time," said Mr. Farber, adding he was impressed by Ms. May’s sincerity.

And now it has expanded into faux outrage from the Evangelical and Fundamentalist protestants as well for her comments about them too.

Mike Duffy Live: Debating the May controversy

You know the nice folks who are not political except for their lobby against human rights for gays and lesbians, their lobby to oppose a womans right to choose, their lobbying against child care, etc. etc.

"It is time for the Liberal members opposite to stand up against outrageous, hateful, mean-spirited comments by their candidate in Central Nova," Environment Minister John Baird said in Tuesday's question period. "It is inexplicable how they could not stand up against people who bash Christians and invoke Nazi-era atrocities."

But Mr. Harper, referring to a letter from Ed Morgan, the national president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, condemning the May remarks, said he lacks confidence in the Opposition Leader. He said Ms. May has "diminished the Holocaust, used the Nazi analogy that is demagogic and inappropriate, while belittling Canadians of faith.

Gee thats funny considering May is a Christian and she was speaking in Church. How that makes her anti-Christian well its your guess. The reality is of course that the terms; "Christianity and Canadians of Faith" are open to interpretation when used by the Conservatives. They are referring to Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants who make up their social conservative base.

By comparing today's approach to the environment to pre-war approaches to the Nazis, Elizabeth May shows insensitivity to context and history. Her comparison of Stephen Harper to Neville Chamberlain is both demagogic and inappropriate, revealing that the Green party leader is still too green to have learned to control her excesses of rhetoric. Further, her belittling of Evangelical Christians, characterizing their theology as "waiting for the end of time in glee," signals a truly dangerous mindset. The Green party leader, who is also an Anglican minister-in-training, demonstrated that she considers herself and her religion to be morally superior to another. And it doesn't matter that she ridiculed the beliefs of a branch of her own religion, rather than those of an altogether different faith.

Ms. May is not giving private lectures to her congregation now that she is running as Green party leader in alliance with the Liberals. She is being heard by a diverse public at large on an important policy issue. She should start respecting all of them.

Ed Morgan, national president, Canadian Jewish Congress, Toronto.

However as we can see those that live in glass houses and those professing in the House of the Lord should be cautious about throwing stones. Because the media is doing a good job of showing that the shoe is on the other foot when it comes to politicians using Neville Chamberlain against their opponents. Proving this is all a tempest in a tea pot that is the Glass House of Commons.

The glass house is getting crowded

Why are so many MPs so fond of Neville Chamberlain?

Preston Manning Invokes Chamberlain, Diminishes Holocaust, Insults Jews Everywhere

May appalled by Tory spin on her Chamberlain comment

Uncommonly nasty Commons

See:

Year of the Pig and the Liberal Green Alliance

Charles Agrees With Elizabeth May

Green Nazi's


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Year of the Pig and the Liberal Green Alliance

Remember this is the year of the Red/Golden pig in Taoist astrology.

The last time the Liberals did something stupid was in the year of the monkey and that ended up with a minority government under Paul Martin.

This year we have the marriage of the Liberals and Greens under Dion and May. As Hexagram 31 of the I Ching says for the year of the pig; Some that marry young women get fortunes through it.

Of course this does not say 'good' fortune, just fortunes. And some fortunes can be bad.

The Liberals may have bought a pig in a poke with their alliance with the Greens.


See:

Prince Charles Agrees With Elizabeth May

Green Nazi's


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Prince Charles Agrees With Elizabeth May

After all the Sturm and Drang in the media, the House of Commons and amongst bloggers, Elizabeth May seems to have found an ideological ally in Prince Charles;

Prince Charles is calling on the world to wage war against climate change, likening it to Britain's battle against Nazi Germany.

SEE:

Green Nazi's


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Green Nazi's

A case of pot, kettle, black.

There is something ironic in this....PM's climate stance worse than appeasing Nazis: Green leader

Oh yeah it's this;

This week Parliament heard one of its strangest speeches ever, the Green-Nazi speech. The author, Liberal Senator George Brandis, was attempting to condemn Greens leader Bob Brown for interjections he made during President Bush's recent address. Evidently inspired by newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt, Senator Brandis quoted from scholarly texts tracing the origins of Green politics right back to the German "Volkish" movement in the mid-19th century. It was a mystical, naturist movement that fused with the age-old hatred of Jews and just 80 years later gave birth to a vegetarian dictator called Adolf Hitler. Senator Brandis warned that just as Hitler came to power by manipulating free elections, so too "the sinister and fanatical views represented by Green politicians can grow and gain strength under the cover of democracy".


And this;
Ecofascism / Fascist Ideology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party


Or this;

Thanks for the Cheap Gas, Mr. Hitler!
How Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa perfected one of the world's most exciting new fuel sources.

The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regime.

Not to forget this;

Himmler's Horticulture

The Nazi story in Germany was a story of biophilia gone bad. A confused and desperate people--suffering from the Versailles Treaty, the loss of World War I, and economic depression--seized, for pride and identity, the imagery of their own blood and soil. It was impossible to spice up "superiority" with architecture (the Greeks and Romans were not Germans) or literature and art (the French and Italians were not Germans). So "blood" (the Teutonic tribes of yesteryear) and "soil" (the plants within the Germanic provenance) became the hooks on which to hang nativism, racism, and self-confidence. The future Germany was to be a pure landscape inhabitated by an untainted race.

Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, a major historian of the native plant movement in Germany, claims that native plants "became the landscape architect's swastika." He quotes Alwyn Seifert (a leading German landscape architect during the Nazi period) as saying "nothing foreign should be added, and nothing native should be left out." The ideological attention to pure bloodlines led Nazitime botanists to advocate a "war of extermination" against a foreign impatiens felt to be out-competing the "native" impatiens. With the invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler pressed Nazi policy-makers to complete the Reich's Landscape Law to force the exclusive use of native plants within its empire. Nature had been nationalized and became totalitarian and violently enforced. You are as your plants.

Can you be progressive and a Green Nazi?

Anarcho-Green Nazis

As long ago as 1989 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, was running front cover features on what it described as 'the greening of the brownshirts.' For many years former National Front activists have been setting up quasi-green organisations as recruiting fronts for their vile activities, but it is only more recently that the anarchist movement has been targeted as a potential vehicle for Nazi propaganda. Former National Front boss Patrick Harrington has even managed to get a letter published in the latest issue of the American journal Anarchy, in which he writes 'as a life-long vegetarian and pagan, I am genuinely interested in green issues... I do not see any contradiction between this and my other views , indeed I regard them as interlinked.'

A number of anarchists have been won over by this claim and it is these individuals who are most likely to succeed in getting it across to a wider public. The most notorious anarchist convert to National Front style racism is Richard Hunt, the founder of Green Anarchist and the driving force behind the magazine Alternative Green. Hunt vents his racism in anti-Irish rants with headlines such as Off Our Patch Paddy. Alternative Green has also run articles supporting the 'red and brown' united front fighting against democracy in Russia, and currently argues for tough immigration and deportation laws. More sinister still is Richard Hunt's claim that the population must be reduced by 75% if we are to have an ecologically sustainable society. Hunt doesn't make it clear whether he wishes to set up death camps or if people will simply be left to starve to death.

Could Elizabeth May and the Green Party end up like this?

Libertarian National Socialist (Nazi) Green Party

Why not? Like Paul Watson her politics are the new Third way and they represent the declasse middle class, the very base of fascism.

"We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops. HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men. The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth.

Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913. In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned. Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party. Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."

Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals. We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god. We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers".

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Dion, May, and Jack Layton

The Progressive blogosphere is doing its echo chamber over Elizabeth May's comments today on Question Period where she whined about Jack Layton not taking her phone calls.

"What The Hell Is Wrong With Jack Layton?"

So Jack Layton, Don't You WANT To Save the Planet?

Which is once again disingenuous blather, since she clearly stated that Mssr. Dion would be and should be the next Green, I mean, Environmental PM. Something Garth Turner agreed with her on.

Liberals won't run candidate against Elizabeth May; she reciprocates for Dion, touts him as best PM

She has been promoting the Liberals and slagging the NDP since January.

Since she is so enamoured with Stephane what would she have to offer Jack? That he would be the best Environmental leader of the Official Opposition? Gilles Duceppe might have something to say about that.

Since she is Leader of an unelected party with no official standing in Parliament what makes her think she should not be shuffled off to talk to Stephen Lewis?

Heck that's better than Miguel Figueroa of the other CPC; the Communist Party of Canada , gets. And he won a Supreme Court case for the rights of small parties. against Liberal election laws that stripped them of their right to run in elections. And they recently had their national convention covered in the MSM; Seeing red as way to change the world

And what the heck that would be solved with proportional representation, and democratic reform, something May and Dion have abandoned in this deal. And something the Liberals have abandoned doing anything about with NDP in this sitting of Parliament.

But then the real truth of the matter is that without Jack conceding the riding the chances are good that the NDP candidate can come up the middle and knock off Peter MacKay. And that's what pisses May off.

Federal New Democrats are set to name who will square off against Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May in the next federal election.

Louise Lorefice, a mother of eight and retired teacher from Antigonish, will be confirmed today as the NDP candidate for Central Nova at a nomination meeting in Plymouth.

The riding has been attracting national attention since Liberal Leader Stephane Dion announced his party would not field a candidate there, in exchange for the Greens not running a candidate in Dion's Montreal riding.

NDP Leader Jack Layton has dismissed the bipartisan deal as undemocratic and unfair to voters.

Lorefice, who has worked on NDP campaigns for a number of years, is a new face to the electorate.

New Democrat MP Peter Stoffer says former candidate Alexis MacDonald, who fell second to MacKay in the 2004 and 2006 elections, is concentrating on her work with the Stephen Lewis Foundation and is not running again.

See:

My Planet, My Party

Non Aggression Pact

Liberals New Green Politics

Canada's New Progressive Right


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Liberals, Dion, NDP, election2007

My Planet, My Party

This blog headline My Country Before My Party should actually read "My Planet Before My Party", since it is quoting this apocryphal tale by Paul Wells
about Dion and Charest;

Phone rings. Campaign headquarters, informing the minister of his schedule for the next day. Dion listens, impassive, then confused, then increasingly angry.

"Sherbrooke? You want me to campaign in Sherbrooke?" Jean Charest was the incumbent Progressive Conservative candidate in Sherbrooke.

"But our campaign message in Quebec is that people should vote for the candidate who's best positioned to beat the Bloc Québécois. In Sherbrooke, that's Jean Charest, not the Liberal. Don't make me campaign against Charest!"

I don't know whether he won that argument. His line of argument stuck with me. After the election, some Liberals were upset that Dion had, in general, been so reluctant to criticize Charest. One asked him a question about that in March 1998, at the cabinet-accountability bear-pit session at the Liberals' biennial convention. Hey, Dion, why so soft on a Conservative?

Dion stepped forward and prepared to make, maybe, three points. He ticked off his forefinger and began: "My country before my party." The hall erupted in a standing ovation. He looked surprised, shrugged, and went back to his seat.

It may be worth reminding everyone, because we seem to forget, that in 1997 Canada was still in a kind of free-floating national-unity crisis that began in the last six months of Meech Madness in 1990. Dion's reasoning was pretty damned simple: the country was in danger. One mustn't waste time fighting the reasonably like-minded.

So I was struck by the opening paragraph of the May-Dion communiqué yesterday: "The planet has reached its limit. The human-caused damage to our natural environment is devastating."

Though in nuanced Liberal language Dion could also say My Planet, My Party, as he has on other issues like the Anti Terrorism Act, Afghanistan and the Anti-Scab Legislation.

See:

• Non Aggression Pact

• Liberals New Green Politics

• Canada's New Progressive Right

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Liberals, Dion, NDP, election2007

Non Aggression Pact

This headline;Grit and Green leaders unveil non-aggression pact in NS reminded me of this headline; The Russians and the Germans sign a non-aggression pact. As it must have Jack Layton, who decried Dion's appeasement politics.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx

See

Liberals New Green Politics

Canada's New Progressive Right


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Dion, NDP, election2007

Liberals New Green Politics

A follow up on the Dion/May alliance announced today. Just how far are the Liberals willing to go with their new found principle of strategic voting?

Will the Liberals back down from running a candidate in Edmonton Strathcona, considering their poor showing last time, and the fact that the NDP candidate Linda Duncan is an environmentalist.

Will they also not run a candidate in Wild Rose where the Green Party ran second.

After all that would follow Cherniak's dictum; "This is about the Liberal Party doing what is right for a truly progressive Canada. The symbolism of running a candidate in every riding is somewhat meaningless in comparison."

Dion is not running a Liberal against the Green Party Leader in exchange the Greens won't run against Dion. Oh be still my beating heart like they stood a chance in his riding. Being so principled will he offer the same deal to Layton and Duceppe?


And the cynical could see this whole affair as a hastily constructed way of distracting from yesterdays Liberal bad news story on Belinda Stronach.




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Dion, NDP, election2007

Canada's New Progressive Right

With this announcement it is clear that Liberals have taken Gerry Nicoll's advise and moved to the progressive right. May and Dion the new Red Green Tories. A match made in Antigonish.


Globe and MailGreen leader to get free ride from Liberals
Globe and Mail, Canada - 2 hours ago
At the time of Ms. May's announcement it was rumoured that she already had a deal with the Liberals -- the party wouldn't run a candidate against her and ...
Liberals staying out of May vs. MacKay ChronicleHerald.ca
Liberals agree not to run candidate against Green leader CBC Nova Scotia
Green leader gets helping hand from the LiberalsThe Daily News


See:

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

May Day For MacKay

Shameless

Corporatism

Elizabeth May Catholic Grrl

PC=Liberals

No Room for Red Tories

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay

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NCC, National Citizens Coalition, Gerry Nicolls,
Harper, Canada, Progressive Conservatives, Joe Clark, Red Tories, PM, politics

Liberals The New PC's

So suggests Gerry Nicolls who recently was fired from the National Citizens Coalition. It seems he is uber disappointed in the new Authoritarian Government of Harper the autarch. As result of his criticism of the Harpocrites, the invisible hand of the government reached out and touched the NCC which in return gave Gerry the boot.

Now Nicolls is suggesting a revival of the old Progressive Conservatives under the New Liberal Party of Dion. This of course has upset some Liberal bloggers, but frankly considering Dion's flip flops on issues like the war in Afghanistan and the Anti-Scab legislation, well if it walks like a PC and quacks like a PC it probably is a PC.

And think of it, if the Liberals became the new PC party Elizabeth May would join in a heartbeat and dissolve the Green Party into a new Progressive coalition with the Liberals.

The Progressive Conservative Party was cannibalized by the Alliance Party. The loss of the adjective “progressive” was more than grammatical. The heart was torn out of Canadian politics. The loss of the traditional, principled Progressive Conservative counter-weight to the ethically flexible Liberals has cost this country dearly.

After all the Progressives who came out of the PC's are now going Green.

See:

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

May Day For MacKay

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay


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Elizabeth May and Red Tories

Nice to see confirmation of my post about Elizabeth May choosing to run against MacKay.

“As a former Progressive Conservative, I am delighted that Elizabeth will be running in Central Nova, against the person who destroyed the party of Confederation.”

And as I said; Red Tories can be progressives too.


See:

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay


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May Day For MacKay

Guts, chutzpah, strategic genius. All these terms apply to Green Party Leader Elizabeth May who announced on CTV Question Period this morning that she is running in Central Nova, Nova Scotia, Peter MacKay's riding. It was announced on the Atlantic TV network of CTV last night.Love satellite TV, makes Antigonish as close as St. Albert.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May speaks with CTV's Question Period on Sunday, March 18, 2007.

Green Party leader to take on Peter MacKay

Updated Sun. Mar. 18 2007 12:20 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

The leader of the federal Green party has declared her candidacy in the Nova Scotia riding currently held by Conservative MP Peter MacKay.

Elizabeth May made the announcement Sunday afternoon on CTV's Question Period in Antigonish, which sits in the northeastern Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova.

May is facing a steep battle in her effort to unseat MacKay -- Harper's minister of foreign affairs who has represented the riding since 1997 and whose father Elmer held it from the early 1970s to the early '90s.

"Are you crazy?" Question Period co-host Jane Taber asked the Green Party leader, adding why she wouldn't run instead in B.C., or a vacant London, Ont. riding, where polling shows she would have a significantly better chance of victory.

Crazy as a Fox. This is a brilliant political play. Her high profile as Leader of the Greens offsets their poor showing in this riding last election. It forces out Mackay to actually return home and fight for his seat.

No longer the other 'leader' of the Conservatives, Peter MacKay the quisling who as the last leader of the Progressive Conservatives destroyed that Grand Old Party by merging with the Republican-Canadian Alliance of Harper.

He lost the leadership bid against Harper, then he lost his girl friend and leadership opponent Belinda Stronach. As Foreign Minister he has been a loser, a puppet on the strings of Harper. He is toast.

May always spoke about her intentions to go back to her Maritime roots, and sure enough she has followed through. She will make MacKay work to win his riding, that means he will spend more time at home then on the road.

She will unite Liberals, NDP, and yes progressives who are conservative behind her. And by running against MacKay she can make the Green Party stand out on issues other than the environment. As she did in her very successful London, Ontario by election bid.

Yes I have been critical of May, because I don't think she is a socialist. Though she is a progressive and a social democrat, more so then many in the Liberals. She is an advocate for the Distributism of Rev Dr. Coady of the Antigonish movement.

"I'm from here and I want to run where I'm comfortable," she added. "I want to represent a region that I care about, and this place where I'm standing, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, is known for the Antigonish movement -- a local economic development approach that was about sustainability -- before they used that world. "I want to take that message nationally and relaunch the Antigonish movement."

As I said here before the Antigonish Movement is a form of distributism, developed by the left wing social reformers in the Catholic Church. It is their version of the Social Gospel as advocated by CCF founder J.S. Woodsworth and members of the NDP like out going Bill Blaikie.

These six principles were later endorsed by Dr. Coady.

• The Primacy Of The Individual
  This principle is based on both religious and democratic teaching: religion emphasizes the dignity of human beings, created in the image and likeness of God; democracy stresses the value of the individual and the development of individual capacities as the aim of social organization.
• Social Reform Must Come Through Education
  Social progress in a democracy must come through the action of citizens; it can only come if there is an improvement in the quality of the people themselves. That improvement, in turn, can come only through education.
• Education Must Begin With The Economic
  In the first place, the people are most keenly interested in all concerned with economic needs; and it is good technique to suit the educational effort to the most intimate interests of the individual or group. Moreover, economic reform is the most immediate necessity, because the economic problems of the world are the most pressing.
• Education Must Be Through Group Action
  Group action is natural because people are social beings. Not only are people commonly organized into groups, but their problems are usually group problems. Any effective adult education program therefore, must fit into this basic group organization of society. Moreover, group action is essential to success under modern conditions; you cannot get results in business or civic affairs without organization.
• Effective Social Reform Involves Fundamental Changes In Social And Economic Institutions
  It is necessary to face the fact that real reform will necessitate strong measures of change that may prove unpopular in certain quarters.
• The Ultimate Objective Of The Movement Is A Full And Abundant Life For Everyone In The Community
  Economic cooperation is the first step, but only the first, towards a society that will permit every individual to develop to the utmost limit of her/his capacities.

Distributism has both a left wing and a right wing in Canada. The Antigonish Movement was its left wing, Social Credit, also a form of distributism, was its populist right wing. As a Catholic alternative to socialism when in the hands of right wingers it degenerated into Corporatism.

What they share in common along with the old CCF and the United Farmers of Alberta, since all these movements began in the 1920's, is that they are advocates not for the working class but for producer movements.

They are advocates for farmers and fishermen's cooperatives,their class arises from the peasantry but in North America became a producer class, neither workers nor businessmen, but a section of the petit-bourgeoisie that were landowners, or owners of their own means of production such as fishing boats. What they and the CCF and other forms of Cooperative Socialism is that arose from Proudhonism and the idea of a cooperative commonwealth, producer, and worker cooperatives as an alternative economy to big corporations and banks.

Distributism then fits well within the current Green Party ideology that melds a social moral and political progressivism with a classical liberal utilitarian economic agenda. Where the old Antigonish movement and other forms of progressive producer movements advocated for that class, the Green Party appeals to the later industrialized mass base of Canadians who do not identify themselves so much as workers but as consumers and citizens. If you read the Antigonish statement in this light, it is the core of Elizabeth May's ideology, if not the Green Party's.

With this she can appeal to fiscal but socially progressive conservatives, to Liberals and Dippers. And she can effectively challenge Peter MacKay who is the scion of the old family politics of Central Nova, having been coroneted as the local MP after his father.

She challenges that old Conservative family compact, and their failure to deliver the goods for Atlantic Canada. As she so correctly pointed out, not a single Conservative slush fund give away announcement in the past two weeks has been about Atlantic Canada.

She can make social issues the focus of the Green Party campaign, and this will make her run against MacKay formidable. A serious challenge and it will give her and the Greens much needed national news coverage. Already in her interview today she challenged the Conservatives on their attack on social programs, as well as their failure on the environment, and their warmongering foreign affairs policy.

I would say that if there ever was a case for Strategic Voting, this would be it. Yes I know heresy, however while the Green Party vies for popularity with the NDP between elections, they have not been a serious threat to the party in elections as they have been to the Conservatives as we saw in the London by election when May ran .

For this pragmatic reason I believe May will seriously challenge MacKay. And as she showed in London she has the election machinery to do it. Beating him is a long shot but a strong second place is worth the run. She knows that, and has made a strategic decision that benefits all progressive voters in that riding , regardless of party affiliation.

There is another riding that the Greens should focus on and encourage strategic support for; Wild Rose in Alberta where they came in second place last election. With a national mobilized campaign and priority publicity the Greens will focus on taking on the big blue machine in Alberta, garnering them more publicity.

Elizabeth May put Atlantic Canada in play today, and that will mean that forgotten region of Canada will get more coverage in the weeks, and months to come, including when we have an election. On that day, Central Nova will be in the news daily and not just as an after thought.

See:

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay


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