Elizabeth May dodging leadership review
Elizabeth May is facing ever-looming questions about her efforts to avoid a leadership review she must face later this year.
Among resignations and lay offs from the party's national organization, May is leading a party that remains indebted from the 2008 election campaign, and seems to be increasingly losing faith in her leadership.
"Elizabeth is a weak political leader, but she is strong enough to dominate the $2-million-a-year, 9,000-member Green Party," said John Oglivie, a prominent critic of May's. "This is now the ‘Elizabeth May Party of Canada.' Get used to it."
This has to be a tough criticism for May, considering the extent to which she has criticized Stephen Harper's attitude toward democracy. Like May, Harper is often accused of dominating his own party.
May has admitted that the extent to which her critics are allowed access to conference call meetings of the national council has troubled her.
"It would be disingenuous to say it never bugged me, but does it bother me at any large level? No," May said. "It is what it is. Can you imagine any other federal party allowing any member to listen in on council calls?"
May campaigned against the rule that requires the Green Party leader to face a review every four years -- this year would be her first review.
Now, talks are underway within the party's national council to curtail the review.
If May wants to lecture the country on democracy, perhaps she should start by insisting that she face this mandated leadership review.
Eizabeth May can't lecture the rest of the country about democracy if she can't practice it within her own party. It's time for Lizzie May the would-be democrat to put up or shut up.
Monday, January 25, 2010
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Quoting John Ogilvie in any article about the Green Party of Canada sacrifices all the credibility of the article.
ReplyDeleteIf you wanted to write something honest you should get some info from someone who knows what they're talking about.
Wow. Thanks for that response from the Lizzie May press department.
ReplyDeleteAre you in favour of the leadership review?
So the rats are leaving the sinking ship and the only question is "Why?" The likely answer is that the Green Party of Canada is essentially bankrupt due to gross financial mismanagement, as some observers have been pointing out for quite a while now.
ReplyDeleteThis disgusting state of affairs must be laid at the feet of Elizabeth May, who has dominated the Green Party since her election as leader by the simple expedient of moving her supporters into well-paid positions of power, allowing her to subvert the party's already fragile internal processes.
The Green Party of Canada has been operating as a closed, introverted, and self-serving hierarchy that has become completely out of touch with even its own small and rapidly-evaporating membership.
It's time to restructure, revitalise, and rebuild the Green Party of Canada and the provincial Green parties as a grassroots confederation of bioregional Green circles, along the lines of the distributed democratic model I have been suggesting on my blog http:///greenpolitics.ca/.
The Green Party is supposed to offer a different way of doing politics. At this time in history when the prime minister of Canada is showing complete disdain for even the primitive system of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy that has persisted in this country, such a Green vision of a genuine citizen-based, compassionate, and ecocentric democracy is desperately needed.
The disintegration of the Green Party of Canada is a disaster, but it is also an opportunity. Out with the old; in with the new.
It's about time.
To me, Stuart (and I hope you're following this), is this:
ReplyDeleteWhat is going to be done to save the Green Party?
I personally believe that Canada needs a strong Green Party -- it needs a strong Conservative Party, strong Liberal party, and strong NDP as well.
(But Quebec's twin separatist parties need to be eliminated.)
Elizabeth May and her merry cabal are running the Green Party into the ground, with no resources to save it.
This can't be allowed to just happen.