Town Hall Meeting on Democratic Renewal
Author: alla | Date: July 17, 2008 | Please Comment!On Monday night, I co-hosted a Town Hall meeting with Laurie Blakeman, MLA – Edmonton Centre.
Held at the Glenora Community Centre in Edmonton, we had a lively turn-out of 125-150 people who eagerly participated in discussion about ways to invigorate politics in Alberta.
On the panel, we had Joe Anglin, a well-known landowner rights advocate and former Green Party candidate; Les Brost, a political commentator, and Ken Chapman, a political consultant and blogger. They were joined by Sarah Arthurs, a Calgary-based psychologist and community facilitator.
There was some good coverage in the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun. Have a look at the following links.
“Time to dump party labels, says MLA”
“Opposition supporters push for change”
9:11 pm on July 17th, 2008
Thank you very much for setting up this townhall meeting. It was good to see other people with similar concerns about the state of democracy in Alberta. Perhaps a “new” party is not the way to go at this time, but rather an opposition organization that would never actually hold power, but could strongly influence policy. A “go to” organization which would provide the structure and be the gathering point for citizens who have serious concerns about the conduct of the government or its policies. Rather than have a particular political ideology be based on a set of values a la Green Party and be completely self-sustaining (no government money). This would be a very fluid organization, gaining support not from one group of people with a particular political ideology, but from different groups of people who come together over a common concern. Just because people are conservative doesn’t mean they don’t have concerns about the environment or social justice and these conservatives (the progressive conservatives) currently have no political home.
A problem that we have in Alberta is that the Conservative party is not really a conservative party, it is an umbrella party. Many of its members (including MLAs), if not the majority, really have no idea what conservative ideology is. They joined either for opportunistic or pragmatic reasons – a shortcut to power. I attended a few forums at the last election and the Conservative candidates did not know their party’s platform and actually did a good job presenting the Liberal, NDP, and Green Party platforms (maybe that’s why they got elected).
I am very interested to see where this townhall “conversation” goes.