Wednesday 23 March 2011

Ready to Rumble?

If you are one of those 'nobodies' who desperately want an election in Canada, here are some non-party ways to get involved.

One of them is Catch 22 Harper Conservatives campaign.
Our strategy is to focus our efforts in those Conservative-held ridings where voters have the best chance of defeating the incumbent. We are in the process adding additional ridings as it becomes clear where we can best focus our campaign. For details about the criteria we considered in selecting these ridings see "Riding Selection".

Catch 22 has begun to identify opposition-held ridings that are vulnerable to a Conservative take-over. On Feb 28, we added our first defensive campaign - Edmonton-Strathcona. [Linda Duncan, NDP]

Each riding has a group that you can join to discuss the local campaign, and a riding profile with MP information, demographic data, election results, news, maps, links and more! If you are unsure of your riding, you can search by postal code at Elections Canada.

Check the Riding Selection to see if your riding, or one near you, is on the list. In Ontario, I'm gratified to see that four cabinet ministers are targetted: Diane Finley, John Baird, Peter Kent, and Julian Fantino.

Then there's another group that began -- and continues -- as a Facebook group, Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper, aka CRUSH. You might remember them as that 'radical anti-Stephen Harper group'. Membership has been hovering in the 5,900+ range for months, but lately and unaccountably *cough*, zoomed up to more than 6,100. There is also a website now.

And there's another one, launched recently, called Leadnow.
Leadnow brings generations of Canadians together to take action for our future and hold politicians accountable.

Leadnow was founded in 2010 by a group of young people who care about a wide range of issues and wanted to create a new way for people to participate effectively in our democracy.

Our founding objectives are to deepen our democracy, strengthen our communities, advance social justice, extend economic opportunity and protect our planet. We'll build an independent community that works together to help set the political agenda, take effective action on important issues, and shift elections.

We're inspired by a new model of political and movement organizing that uses technology as a tool to help people organize themselves and strengthen their voice. This model was pioneered by organizations like MoveOn (USA), GetUp (Australia), 38 Degrees (UK), and Avaaz (Global), mobilizing over 10 million people around the world. We hope to bring some of the best of these organizing techniques to Canada, while we adapt them to suit Canada's unique character.

Ooooh, 'shift elections'. I like that.

And finally, a video producing entity called Enough Harper, where I snaffled this HarperGraph,'Conservative Priorities', today.



Enough Harper also has a YouTube channel, with two videos, both of which have appeared here. (I saw another vid there this morning -- reason for starting this post -- but it's gone now.)

Anyway, here's one of the earlier ones.



Time to act. Or at least donate. Or support. Or something.

Let's take our Canada back.

1 comment:

Beijing York said...

Great round-up, Fern.

A colleague in Arizona just put me in touch with a progressive friend of his who wants to help the NDP in this election. I directed him to progressive bloggers and I will give him these links but I honestly don't know who he should talk to about the upcoming election. He's experienced with online election campaigning.

Last time I got directly involved in a campaign it left a bad taste in my mouth.

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