Mike Schreiner will become Green Party of Ontario leader

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mike2The Green Party of Ontario, which was anticipating a leadership race culminating in a convention November 13 to 15, 2009, has just announced that at the close of nominations Mike Schreiner is the only candidate to become the next leader of the Green Party of Ontario. According to the party’s processes, he will still face a secret ballot vote against “none of the above.” (Just to be clear, he will kick NOTA’s butt.)

News reports had indicated that Mark MacKenzie was also going to contest the leadership. At this time I don’t know if he intentionally withdrew or failed to be properly nominated in time.

I will not pretend that I’m not disappointed there won’t be a contest. There are some negatives that will come out of this, specifically A) potential public perception, for anyone paying attention, that more people didn’t want the job and B) failed opportunity to gain media attention, sign up new members, etc. Leadership contests are good for parties, and this one would have been good for the provincial Greens.

However, as everyone in Ontario will soon learn, Mike Schreiner will make an excellent leader, and I’m very excited about the coming years and the 2011 election. That’s all for now, more to come later, I’m sure.

ps. To preempt predictable comments from some frustrated and vocal party members, yes, a big reason why there weren’t any other candidates is because of the party’s requirement that leadership contestants must be members of the party for at least 6 months. No, that’s not due to a conspiracy, it’s a decision that party members have made and recently reaffirmed. And no, I actually don’t like that rule. There will be some members who will propose (as they have in the past) that that rule should be changed for future contests, and I would agree. I think 6 months is too long, but it’s also the rule that was already in place for this contest, and the rules were rightly followed.

Claire Hoy: Still making stuff up

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The last time Claire Hoy managed to attract my attention was during that thing we loosely refer to as a referendum on voting reform in Ontario. At that time, he was playing a bit fast and loose with the truth. Now he pops up on my radar again, this time writing about the United Church of Canada and its new Moderator, Mardi Tindal, who also happens to be my mom. And again, he’s sayin’ stuff that simply aint true.

For example, regarding the United Church and Israel, Hoy writes:

But as we saw in the publicity leading up to the recent United Church gabfest, once again a host of seriously anti-Israel and yes, anti- Semitic resolutions were being pushed by church activists. To be sure, they didn’t get the church body as a whole to approve them, but then again, the church did the old typical United Church cop-out, and rather than denouncing some rather hateful resolutions, simply set them aside for further study.

Wrong, Hoy. The meeting didn’t receive the offensive material for study, it repudiated all of that background material in almost no time. Further, the way the church’s General Council handled the whole of the resolutions was “met with cheers by the Canadian Jewish Congress and its chief executive officer, Bernie Farber.”

Then, Hoy criticizes the Moderator claiming that she “dismisses the word ‘faith’ as ‘too static….'” Since Hoy did not actually interview the Moderator for his rant disguised as a column, one assumes he was attempting to quote a profile that appeared in the National Post. Problem is, the quote that he uses is almost the complete opposite of what Tindal actually said in the Post, which quoted her correctly:

“For me the word ‘faith’ is part of a new paradigm … the word belief sounds too static, where in fact in faith we are invited to participate relationally.”

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the required background knowledge to figure out which things Hoy makes up and which things are real. When someone’s writing is contaminated to such a degree, I think it’s probably best to just avoid it altogether.

Sick bank

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garbage-cityOne of the most publicized sticking points in the ongoing Toronto civic strike is the union leadership’s belief that their members have a “right” to bank unused sick days and cash them in when they retire. This has raised a notable amount of public ire (polls out today suggest 76% disapproval ratings for striking CUPE locals 416 and 79) for obvious reasons that I probably don’t need to detail.

There’s another angle to this, however, that I think is less discussed. The main purpose of providing paid sick days is to ensure that employees are not financially penalized for getting sick. It wouldn’t be fair for an employer to say “you were sick for 7 days this year, therefore we’re docking 7-days-worth of your pay.” Heck, if an employer did that, organized labour would rightly fight against it, wouldn’t they? They might even go on strike!

Except that in Toronto, CUPE has done the exact opposite. They’ve gone on strike to ensure, in part, that if someone is sick for 7 days, they’ll get paid for 7-days less work than someone who doesn’t get sick. They’ve officially taken the position that people who don’t get sick deserve to be financially rewarded for their health, at the expense of people who need—through no fault of their own—to use their sick days.

For someone who believes in economic Darwinism, in free-market-everyone-for-themselves capitalism, maybe this makes sense. But for CUPE? It suggests that they’ve become ideologically confused…that they’ve forgotten their raison d’être.

The current union leadership is doing a disservice not only to their members, but to the reputation of collective bargaining itself. The path we’re on does not end well for organized labour; a course correction would be wise.

(And no, I’m not a fan of how the city’s handling the situation—or, rather, not handling it—either. And according to that same poll, neither is the rest of the city. We need a leader, David, not a scolding parent.)

Illustration by Michael de Adder for Metro Canada