Should the Green Party be asked to a Leadership Debate

Machjo

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 19, 2004
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Elizabeth May is the leader of a legitimate political party that's running candidates in 308 seats and got a million votes in the last election. In any system of proportional representation the party would have had seats in the House. Seems like a no brainer to me: of course she should be part of the leaders' debates. Besides, she's bloody minded and entertaining and we all know she's never going to be Prime Minister so she can say whatever she likes, the debates would be improved by her candor. It's always refreshing and enlightening to me to hear what people who have nothing to lose have to say on the issues of the day.

1. We're not a pro-rep democracy but a constituency-based one.
2. Seeing that the national televised debates do not even pit candidates of the same riding against one another, those debates are more for entertainment than anything since we can't actually compare candidates of the same riding. After all, the party leader might be good, but not the local candidate, or vice versa.
 

Cliffy

Standing Member
Nov 19, 2008
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1. We're not a pro-rep democracy but a constituency-based one.
2. Seeing that the national televised debates do not even pit candidates of the same riding against one another, those debates are more for entertainment than anything since we can't actually compare candidates of the same riding. After all, the party leader might be good, but not the local candidate, or vice versa.
And if it is just for entertainment then why not let her in? Sounds like she is entertaining at least.
 

Machjo

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 19, 2004
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And if it is just for entertainment then why not let her in? Sounds like she is entertaining at least.

Seeing that the media decide these matters, and they're privately owned, it's really not a government decision. Maybe for the CBC which is government owned, but even then its mandate is to be apolitical so even the Prime Minister has little say who gets in. I have no qualms about letting May in, but in the end it's the media who decide. Should the government pass a law to make the decision based on some clearly defined criteria? Seeing that they're not even debating among candidates of the same constituency, it's really irrelevent anyway, so no I'd say keep official government out of it. But again, I personally have no issue with May being in.
 

taxslave

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 25, 2008
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She'll finish a distant second to my mother-in-law.
Does your mil flap her yap on TV every chance she gets? Be tough at beating ellimay at irritating.


I doubt I will watch the debate anyway. Last time was a waste of air time.
Harper and Iggy are the only ones with any chance of forming a government so if we are going to be subjected to a debate it should just be the two of them to keep it short.

Elizabeth May is the leader of a legitimate political party that's running candidates in 308 seats and got a million votes in the last election. In any system of proportional representation the party would have had seats in the House. Seems like a no brainer to me: of course she should be part of the leaders' debates. Besides, she's bloody minded and entertaining and we all know she's never going to be Prime Minister so she can say whatever she likes, the debates would be improved by her candor. It's always refreshing and enlightening to me to hear what people who have nothing to lose have to say on the issues of the day.

Now there is a good reason not to have pro-rep. Helps keep the nutbars out.
 

SLM

The Velvet Hammer
Mar 5, 2011
29,151
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London, Ontario
I didn't watch the debates last time but, from what I'm gathering here, I can expect lots of yelling, name calling, and rude interuptions.

If I wanted to see that, I'd just watch Question Period.
 

P Rob P McQueen

New Member
Mar 14, 2011
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Why shouldn't Elizabeth May be included in the Leader Debate? She is the closest to knowing what democracy is. Anyone that thinks Harper or Ignatieff are democratic just think back to the long gun registery vote. Now I don't care about the registry in itself, only, didn't Harper and Ignatief force their Members to vote against the wishes of the constituents. You know, those people that pay the Members to represent them in Parliament.
 

JLM

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 27, 2008
75,301
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Vernon, B.C.
Why shouldn't Elizabeth May be included in the Leader Debate? She is the closest to knowing what democracy is. Anyone that thinks Harper or Ignatieff are democratic just think back to the long gun registery vote. Now I don't care about the registry in itself, only, didn't Harper and Ignatief force their Members to vote against the wishes of the constituents. You know, those people that pay the Members to represent them in Parliament.

Then God help the others..................Democratic people do not butt in when others are talking and shout them down. :lol:
 

P Rob P McQueen

New Member
Mar 14, 2011
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I think that Elizabeth May should be included in the leaders debate. She will stir the pot like no other leader.
 
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Omicron

Privy Council
Jul 28, 2010
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Then God help the others..................Democratic people do not butt in when others are talking and shout them down. :lol:

My take on it was that she was just trying to out-Canadianize the Canadian style of a leader's debate.

I have my fair share of family, friends and associates stateside, and I remember the first time I watched a leadership debate with two US cousins.

They were appalled.

You've seen US leadership debates. They're so formal and orchestrated.

The one we watched had Ed Broadbent always butting in on the Liberal and PC leaders.

I read about a provincial leadership debate in either Newfoundland or Nove Scotia. They were having an open-air debate on a platform. It got so heated the bigger hopeful pushed the other one off the state, and when the other tried to climb back up, the big candidate .on stage kept stomping on his fingers.

Canadians think they have no identity, but to see the look on my cousins' faces that evening, Canucks might as well be from Neptune.

In any case, personally I think any party capable of running a candidate in every riding *and* have a popularity rating greater than 3.3% (and important number for sociological reasons) should be allowed on the podium...

But, the decision was made by a non-elected *committee*... and you know jolly-rational *those* things' decisions can be...
 

damngrumpy

Executive Branch Member
Mar 16, 2005
9,949
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kelowna bc
The Green Party is really a self serving movement, designed to get their leader
elected. They will sacrifice their entire agenda for one Member.
If you think the Tory Government would be a disaster with a majority, think of the
Greens with a majority and an agenda they would ram down your throat.
I have little or no use for a movement, who thinks we can feed the world with the
back yard garden in urban Canada. Everything would be designed for organics
at the expense of the food industry. Can you imagine the food shortages we
would face?
The Greens have no concept of global reality, and they are arrogant enough to
think they can they can stop climate change. The world has experienced climate
change since time began and it will go on for millions of years yet as long as we
don't get hit by space junk.
No she does not meet the original rules, you must have elected members in the
House and if she does get a member or two next time round so be it. The rules
have been around for years and keeps the ding dong parties from taking up
space that can better be used by others.
 

JLM

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 27, 2008
75,301
548
113
Vernon, B.C.
The Green Party is really a self serving movement, designed to get their leader
elected. They will sacrifice their entire agenda for one Member.
If you think the Tory Government would be a disaster with a majority, think of the
Greens with a majority and an agenda they would ram down your throat.
I have little or no use for a movement, who thinks we can feed the world with the
back yard garden in urban Canada. Everything would be designed for organics
at the expense of the food industry. Can you imagine the food shortages we
would face?
The Greens have no concept of global reality, and they are arrogant enough to
think they can they can stop climate change. The world has experienced climate
change since time began and it will go on for millions of years yet as long as we
don't get hit by space junk.
No she does not meet the original rules, you must have elected members in the
House and if she does get a member or two next time round so be it. The rules
have been around for years and keeps the ding dong parties from taking up
space that can better be used by others.

There was a very interesting article in the Reader's Digest about the fallacy of organic garden several years ago. You hit the nail right on the head, Grumpy. Organic gardening in a sense is like "perpetual motion"- you have to add something to it to keep it going.
 

mentalfloss

Prickly Curmudgeon Smiter
Jun 28, 2010
39,817
471
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I have little or no use for a movement, who thinks we can feed the world with the
back yard garden in urban Canada. Everything would be designed for organics
at the expense of the food industry. Can you imagine the food shortages we
would face?

Actually grump, it's supposedly not that bad at all. I don't fully support the organic movement myself, but there is some truth to the overall global benefit. In developed countries, the yield appears to be roughly 92% of conventional farming, which isn't enough to get anyone worried.
---

A 2007 study[18] compiling research from 293 different comparisons into a single study to assess the overall efficiency of the two agricultural systems has concluded that
...organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base. (from the abstract)
The researchers also found that while in developed countries, organic systems on average produce 92% of the yield produced by conventional agriculture, organic systems produce 80% more than conventional farms in developing countries, because the materials needed for organic farming are more accessible than synthetic farming materials to farmers in some poor countries.

Organic food - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

--

Don't kill the messenger.
 

Omicron

Privy Council
Jul 28, 2010
1,694
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Vancouver
The Green Party is really a self serving movement, designed to get their leader
elected. They will sacrifice their entire agenda for one Member.
That's bizarre. I don't know where to begin. Are you saying the other party's don't do whatever they have to do in order to at least make sure their leader gets a seat in the house?

I'd be curious to hear specifically which agenda items you think they're sacrificing to get May elected.

I know someone who's running as a green candidate, and he never talks about her. He's just focused on his riding, trying to get the constituents to read the policy statements and vote by candidate and not leader. He's a graduate of the London school of Economics, and he's green because he's super-conservative, but he believes in sustainable economies... he hates "bubbles", and he tells me the greens are the only ones with an anti-bubble economic model.

The only "conservatives" who truly hate the green plan for the economy aren't really conservative - they just mask as conservative - which are the Wall-street gargoyles who feed off a system of first setting up the conditions to create a bubble, then they foment the conditions to inflate the bubble, then they bail just before it pops which they can know the timing of because it's their bubble, at which point they've scooped billions out of the economy without having done any real work while tens to hundreds of millions of others loose their homes and life savings.

Such meddling with the economy was enabled by the massive deregulation of the economy done under the auspices of Reagan and then Bush, and don't kid you're self if you think Clinton didn't played along in the interim, and it's actually quite a cute trick in a purely theoretical sense... it's just a little soft-shoe dance using primary-school arithmetic and high-school level equations for exponential expansion, but you can't do it if pesky regulations are in your way.

Someone should make a Facebook app in the form of a game for kids to play at being the one to take over all the money in the world using those techniques... call it Bubble Master or something. The kids will think it's just a game, and won't notice they're being taught how the goldmaniac-sackers created this recession, and how those gargoyles can still do it again as soon as things level out in about five years, because Obama is doing *nothing* to reverse those toxic deregulations.

If you think the Tory Government would be a disaster with a majority, think of the
Greens with a majority and an agenda they would ram down your throat.
Me-thinks you don't know what the green agenda is. In some respects it's far more conservative than anything you're going to find among reformists.

Nothing about the reformist agenda bugs me very much except the part where they'd let deregulation go even more extreme, and I don't think it's because they're in the back-pocket of the Wall-street gargoyles... I think it's because they simply do not know the details of how the economy can be twiddle with a bit of arithmetic, and an application of high-school exponential grown curves to toxic financial instruments.

In don't think the reformists are in the back-pocket of Wall-street gargoyles... I think they're being *played* by those gargoyles.

I have little or no use for a movement, who thinks we can feed the world with the
back yard garden in urban Canada.
It's not just that, but... since you bring it up...

Did you know that the largest per-square foot consumer of fertilizer is lawn grass?

Do you have any idea how much food we could grow with that much fertilizer if we converted our lawns into gardens?

Frankly I think it would make for more interesting neighborhoods. Lawns are boring, and nobody uses them for very much.
Everything would be designed for organics at the expense of the food industry.
Organics would hurt the food industry?!? Prithee how?

The only sector affected would be the pesticide manufacturers, and I know they wouldn't care, because it is the pesticide sector which is investing the most in genetically modified crops not needing pesticides.

I am of course speaking of Monsanto. In the beginning they sold pesticides. When they saw that people don't like spraying pesticides if they don't have to, they started developing crops capable of surviving without pesticides, such that they are now saying, "Fine, here's a crop that does not need pesticides, but you have to buy the seed from us".
Can you imagine the food shortages we would face?
Nope, because I know some things about north American climate and geography which evidently you do not, which is that yes, we're a net food exporter, but in fact we're still growing at less than 27% of capacity if things were tuned up a bit.

And in fact, in the future, the biggest food shortages are going to come from loss of topsoil and genetic variety as a byproduct of the way the corporate farms do things.

If we get back to growing food sustainably we'll be able to *keep* growing it, and it will be healthier.

The only catch is it's more labour-intensive to grow healthy organic food sustainably.

Aww gee, we sent all the manufacturing jobs to China... now what are the layed-off assembly-line workers going to do? Gosh China has a large population that needs to eat. Perish the thought any self-respecting assembly line-worker would debase himself so much as to consider working on a farm growing healthy food and selling to food-hungry China the surplus of what's left after he's fed his family.
The Greens have no concept of global reality,
What concept of "global reality" are the Greens unaware of? That the population is expanding and we're not growing enough food in a sustainable manner to feed everyone?

and they are arrogant enough to
think they can they can stop climate change.
No they're not. If you read their policies, you'd know they know we've lost control of that one, and so they're offering plans for how to manage relocation's of the mass population-movements north that are going to happen. Places like Fort Smith are going to boom.
The world has experienced climate
change since time began and it will go on for millions of years yet as long as we
don't get hit by space junk.
And as long as the world doesn't get hit with a bump in atmospheric CO2 and methane triggered by a new species with a fascination and technical propensity for burning up billions of years of accumulated hydrocarbons in a century.

No she does not meet the original rules, you must have elected members in the
House and if she does get a member or two next time round so be it. The rules
have been around for years and keeps the ding dong parties from taking up
space that can better be used by others.
Those "rules" didn't come from the House. In case you didn't notice, Harper has NO issue sharing the podium with her in a debate. Those "rules" came from an unelected committee of broadcasters.

Which *mean*... tum da da dumm... an enterprising independent media team could call up the leaders, tell them the people want a full leader's debate, set up some space, organize a time, record it, and put it on YouTube... and the broadcast-committee can blow itself.
 
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TenPenny

Hall of Fame Member
Jun 9, 2004
17,467
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63
Location, Location
No she does not meet the original rules, you must have elected members in the
House and if she does get a member or two next time round so be it. The rules
have been around for years and keeps the ding dong parties from taking up
space that can better be used by others.

There are no established rules, the broadcasters negotiate with the 4 main parties each time.

That's according to the broadcasting consortium that sets them up - they admit there are no established rules. At one time, you had to be an officially recognized party in the House, which meant having 12 seats. This was dumped when the PCs only had 2 seats.

The rules are completely flexible, which makes it more ridiculous that people are defending excluding the Green Party.
 

Omicron

Privy Council
Jul 28, 2010
1,694
3
38
Vancouver
There was a very interesting article in the Reader's Digest about the fallacy of organic garden several years ago. You hit the nail right on the head, Grumpy. Organic gardening in a sense is like "perpetual motion"- you have to add something to it to keep it going.

Yes you do have to "add" a little bit.

To maintain balance, you return to the soil all the elements you extracted when you picked and ate the food - saving some seeds - which means returning your excrement back to the soil in a safe, post-echoli decomposed form, and you put in some seeds.

It's now balanced, but you're right, nothing will happen unless you add something...

You *add* energy from the sun.