The Hook

Greenies hate BC

They love fish farms, want to destroy rivers, pollute the pristine waters of Hectate strait with oil rigs, starve our poverty stricken children, and run up 100 billion in worthless Pirate power obligations.

They must since they are so active trying to reelect Gordo and gang.

Greens are a blessing in disguise

The NDP core vote is nearly back to its traditional levels now, and if anything - the Green support level is coming at the expense of the BC Liberals.
Greens are a dumping ground for disgruntled BC Liberals. One has to wonder where the Greens get their right-wing tilt...logic suggests that its from the infectious blight of BC Liberals trying to secretly take over their party in advance of the destruction of their own.

The Green Bullet

The Green party is not simple or shallow nor does it draw from one voter pool. Instead the green party is the choice of political people with more than average ability.

They are a diverse array of highly manipulative political players and their never winning a seat is hardly relevant to the success of their agenda.

In B.C., the Liberals have required their supporters within the green party to deliver and so has the NDP.

The only way to accurately gauge the Green party's intent is to have your finger on the pulse of the local players in a particular constituency.

EG: In a new Island Constituency the Green Party has run a candidate that will not win BUT he is a right leaning "Green" with a business background. This particular candidate was offered up by local greens who actually favour a NDP candidate whom is anything but green!

Last election a few thousands well placed votes (easily found in the count for green candidates)in particular constituencies cost the NDP government.

This election Robertson's "Green" tinge and his aspirations will upset the NDP's overall chances as he leans towards Campbell to keep the seat warm for him.

So the point is. The greens are not a typical party in that they do not actually run to win seats.

They are a party of convenience molded and applied by astute practitioners who must manipulate numbers for an agenda that typically applies to the two mainstream parties. All of which mostly delivers for conservative players regardless of party allegiance.

Really?

"the Green support level is coming at the expense of the BC Liberals."

Green support coming from the Liberals?

Have a look at these numbers and tell me how you came to that conclusion:

http://www.mustelgroup.com/pdf/20090213.pdf

If Green support were taken from the Liberals, they would be at 64% not their present 52%.

promoting collapse

It has been done before, I believe.

If a party claims to have a principled platform, yet acts to ensure the failure of that platform, then it's just possible that the failure of that platform is their actual goal.

Maybe on the hope that they'll have better luck once the salmon are all dead and the rest of us are all dying.

It's a childish position, but a strong one. Always easier to wreck than to build, and they may be hoping they can be in charge of the wreckage after they succeed.

If the Greens absolutely refuse to play nice, perhaps the best thing would be for the opposition to just join them.

NDP is not such a pristine and principled brand as it once was. Many of the items the Greens espouse are taken from a list of NDP failures. On top of that, the NDP contains several factions that are almost impossible to control, which create bad feelings by pursuing single interests single mindedly, ignoring the practicalities of politics, and making it very hard for many sympathetic people to support the party that ought to be their natural home.

Maybe a marriage would be the solution. These parties, neither one of them particularly left wing anyway, have way more in common than otherwise, and really ought to join up and work together one way or the other.

I'm aware that this suggestion is likely to result in the short term in even more childish whining about who should be the boss, but that's maybe a useful negotiation to have anyway.

Party Politics

Good observations, Bailey. The NDP primarily controlled by their hard left/labour wing as represented by Jim Sinclair. The union members are the foot soldiers and the intelligentsia of the party issues the marching orders. As with most socialist revolutionaries, they are not about to share power with anyone and despise any leader that will attempt to do so. This is why they dumped Mike Harcourt, who successfully brought the Green vote under the party umbrella.

The BCTF also swings a lot of lead in the NDP and this is represented by their woman only policy for new candidates.

The NDP has historically polled at around 35% has relied on the swing vote to get elected. Much of this in 1991 was the Green vote Harcourt brought in but this was lost on with Clark, who was put into power in coup. This necessitated a purge of all non-believers in the party and led to the crushing 2001 defeat.

Carole tried to distance the party from Sinclair and the BCTF but was unsuccessful and she now basically marches to their orders. She also tried to build a coalition but this was also kyboshed by Sinclair, who would rather have the party stick to it's ideology than share power with anyone. This way when revolution comes, he will have the complete control he needs to create utopia. Having to share power with non-revolutionaries in our system means unwanted ideas such as party consensus are necessary and this is contrary to the goals of the proletarian revolution. This is also a major reason Sinclair is so against the STV and why Chudnovsky resigned in disgust.

Dreaming in technicolour

BC Fed hard left? Jim Sinclair controls NDP? Socialist revolutionaries?

What in God's name have you been smoking,man?

I would put it to you that none of the people or organisations you mention would agree with your assessment of their motives or histories.

It has occurred to me several times reading your opinions that you either lack reality testing skills, or are trying to mislead people intentionally.

While some of the events in your version did in fact occur in some fashion, your interpretations just plain take flight. You leave the ground behind entirely, sir.

The labour movement is a human rights movement. Not socialist, because most workers are not socialist. Quite the contrary. There has been no socialist revolutionary movement since before the fall of the USSR. No "proletarian revolution" anywhere since the 50s in Asia.

Social Democracy has replaced socialism everywhere, even such actually hard left phenomena as the USSR and the Peoples Republic of China have left it behind in favour of some form of incentived market based economy.

What everybody does now, you see, is work for fairness. For a political system that permits incentives to reward enterprise while also and simultaneously attempting to protect those who are not able to contribute financially because of circumstance, or are victimized by oppressive forces.

Wherever the right wing forces you seem to espouse hold sway. the poor die or are enslaved. The young, the ill and the elders are abandoned. Truth suffers and is squashed. The earth and all human principles are driven down.

All these people and organizations are concerned with is opposing that. They may have their failures, they have powerful and unscrupulous enemies. They may make mistakes, since they are humans in the world. But every one of them is more trustworthy than somebody who would characterize a movement whose whole aim is to promote decent working conditions and family supporting wage levels as a "proletarian revolution"

I always get a kick out of

I always get a kick out of how vitriolic people get when talking about how the green party is so irrelevent, and why won't they just roll over and die already - if they were really so irrelevent, would their political adversaries get so worked up?

I'm looking forward to a post may 12th world, one in which BC-STV is enacted and we can put an end to this nonsense talk about 'vote splitting' and get down to the real work of compromise, coalition building, and policies that reflect more than the will of an artificial majority.