What the Green's Could be

I recently re-watched one of my favourite TED talk videos about leadership and messaging (Simon Sinek): http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html, and it reminded me of the two things I think we need to do to turn the Green Party into legitimate community leaders:
1) Define, clarify and communicate who we are more effectively
2) Build relationships and establish Green Party members as community leaders.

To steal the model from Simon Sinek, I would want the Green Party (Canada or Ontario) to re-organize around this:

Why: We are community leaders who are interested in identifying problems and solving them. We are fundamentally committed to leaving the world a better place than we found it.

How: We build relationships with people from a wide variety of ideologies, religious beliefs, genders, ethnicities, capabilities, etc. In these relationships we talk about how our communities could be better. We combine these conversations with sound, scientific analysis to create comprehensible policies. We work with other political parties to implement these policies

What: We want you to vote for us, to join us and to help us move away from a divided politics of fear to a politics of good ideas and solving problems.

What it means on the ground:
Practically, this means several steps:

1. Resources need to be shifted to hiring organizers with experience building volunteer organizations. These organizers need to be given a region that they have the responsibility to assist in developing organisational capacity.
2. Candidates, campaigns, messaging teams need to be motivated to shift away from talking about why our ideas are right, and towards how our ideas connect to the "why" message  above.
3. EDAs and CAs need to develop the ability to identify ways their communities could be better and to find ways to help other community leaders solve those problems. 

Students in the Guelph Community

With the last Ontario election we are likely to see in the next four years, I've continued to think about how I want to use my volunteer time. I've settled on a project that combines some of what I like about politics with lots of what I like about my job: I want to encourage people to be better neighbours.

Guelph has a long history of contentious relationships in student neighbourhoods, which is not unusual for a University town. The administration and the city do important work on setting expectations, policing and responding to complaints, but I'm pretty sure that we should expect more leadership from the people actually living in the community. If students could put names and faces to the people living in the houses around them, they would be less likely to vandalize their yards or keep people up with noisy parties. If long time Guelph residents spent a little bit of time building relationships with students then perhaps we'd encourage more University Graduates to stay in the city and apply what they know to develop R&D, Green or 21st century jobs in places like the Hanlon Creek business park.

So, I'm going to be using my involvement/relationships with the Hanlon Creek Neighbourhood Group, the Green Party, the University and the City to see if there aren't some relationship building events we could run to start having students and permanent Guelph residents get to know each other. I think we should demand that our leaders work to create less of these stories:
http://www.guelphtribune.ca/opinion/more-needs-to-be-done/
http://www.guelphtribune.ca/opinion/make-u-of-g-students-pay-for-their-actions/
http://www.guelphtribune.ca/opinion/student-problems-in-downtown-too/
http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/local/article/603545--university-of-guelph-suspends-men-s-rugby-team-for-two-games-over-off-field-conduct


And more of these:
http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/local/article/604610--downtown-under-control-but-guelph-neighbourhoods-get-closer-look-in-effort-to-address-off-campus-headaches-attributed-to-university-students
http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/local/article/600912--university-of-guelph-students-assist-goderich-residents-in-wake-of-summer-tornado

Voting Green: Health Care

In 2009-2010 health care made up 36% of the Government of Ontario expenses (Government of Ontario). The next closest expenditure of public money is education, coming in at around 16%.

So, we can’t have a reasonable, logical, coherent election without having a serious conversation about health care. If we accept that the population of Ontario is aging rapidly as the largest cohort (Baby Boomers) is retiring we need to talk about two things:

1. What are we doing to ensure that Seniors are getting the quality care they deserve?
2. Are we being progressive and forward thinking in preventing our health care costs from drowning out education, community and social services, business and job creation, etc.

So, let’s look at why the Green Party makes sense for these two questions. Please remember that I try to focus on action oriented, tangible ideas, for the full health care platform go here:

Seniors

1. Invest 2 Billion over 3 years in making a contium of health care more affordable for Seniors
a. Including: Home care, transitional care, assisted living and long term care services
2. Provide tax credits to family members staying home to take care of elderly relatives
3. Improve the funding of long term care homes and assist with elevating their level of care to provincial standards
a. We currently rate behind other Canadian Provinces and comparably to Mississippi

Long Term Solutions/Forward Thinking

1. The GPO ideas for health care are founded in health promotion and illness prevention, including:
a. Using zoning powers to ensure communities are walking and cycling friendly
b. Integrate the Ministry of Health Promotion and Ministry of Health and Long Term Care
c. Create a $285 Million dollar fund to improve water and sewage infrastructure

Specific Impact on Guelph

I know many families in Guelph that are faced with significant challenges around the cost and time commitment of caring for an elderly family member. Making their job even a little bit easier is a worthwhile goal of an effective government.

Elevating the importance of health promotion, ensuring the we have access to clean water and committing to providing easier access to an active lifestyle will benefit not only our quality of life but the bottom line of our government’s budget as well.

Conclusion

A candidate shouldn’t talk about job creation, energy costs, immigration, education or any other provincial issue without first being transparent about how they are approaching this problem. The Green party is transparent and realistic in it’s approach and I don’t think that can be said about the other parties.