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The Canadian Green party has a policy initiative called a "Negative Income Tax". Basically, you just extend the progressive tax system downward so that those level below certain level receive tax dollars instead of paying them. It would save a boatload in administrative expenses because we could abolish the agencies that administer welfare and unemployment insurance. http://greenparty.ca/node/13380

Green Party of Canada

Or how about Liberal Party of Canada?

Seriously. The people behind the sponsorship scandal are gone, and they at least have a chance at winning.

How does that saying go? Something like "a vote for Green is a vote for the Conservatives"?

Let's get the Cons out, then worry about keeping the Libs in line. It shouldn't be hard to do after they saw how quickly and decisively we kicked their asses over AdScam.

Green Party of Canada

Green Party of Canada is explicitly and actively anti-nuclear. Here are a few choice quotes:

The best energy choices to respond to the climate crisis should be those that deliver the greatest reduction of GHG per dollar invested. By this criterion, nuclear energy is among the very worst options. Reactors cost billions of dollars, take more than a decade to build, operate unreliably after about the first dozen years of operation, and only produce one type of energy: electricity. Even if the industry were âoegreen and cleanâ as claimed by the pro-nuclear propaganda efforts, it fails on the economics. Nevertheless, it is neither clean nor green.

Nuclear energy has an inevitable link to nuclear weapons proliferation. India made its first bomb from spent fuel from a CANDU reactor. As well, depleted uranium waste is increasingly and routinely used to coat bullets and missiles in âoeconventionalâ warfare, leaving a legacy of radioactive contamination as an on-going health and environmental threat to civilians post-conflict.

And from their program:

Develop renewable energy sources so that by 2040, wind energy production reaches 50 GW, solar PV 25 GW, ocean energy 12 GW, geothermal 25 GW. Various policies, including carbon conditionality clauses requiring provincial adoption of Advanced Renewables Tariffs (a.k.a. Standard Offer Contract, or Feed Laws). All coal, oil, gas and nuclear power to be phased out.

... we need to replace all of the coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power generation capacity ...

Work with the provinces to phase out all power generation from coal, gas and nuclear energy ...

All subsidies and supports to the nuclear industry will be withdrawn.

As usual for your typical green extremists, it's lies, FUD, and more lies.

Any sensible green party should be actively promoting nuclear as the only immediately viable green option. Any green party that is actively anti-nuclear is not a sensible party.

Open Source software was part of the Green Party's very thorough and thoughtful election campaign. Too bad most Canadians never bothered to read it.

I see it still features on their web site as a current issue. With a minority government in power and the threat of a coalition or vote of non-confidence always looming, it's hard to say how much pull the Greens really have, having failed yet again to win a seat in parliament.

FYI: The Greens aren't just about the Environment

Actually the Green Party of Canada had a statement on net neutrality in their platform long before the NDP took up the cause.

See: http://www.greenparty.ca/en/policy/visiongreen/partsix#_Toc180047668

(I know because I drafted it)

Threaded media are useless for political debate, for exactly the reason you suggest: any worthwhile question will be crapflooded by those who consider it against their interests to discuss.

The kind of post-by-post deletion or moderation you have to do for a debate thread necessarily becomes censorship when you have to decide if a post that contains a few relevant sentences and a few irrelevant, can be retained or not.

Accordingly, you need third person statements and the kind of contract that prevails in a wiki: version control is sacred and attribution is strict, but no one has sole control of any sequence of words that will appear to the reader, that's only collective.

In other words: absolutely no one other than the administrators who create the buttons, frames, form prompts, has sole control of even so much as a full sentence on any topic/issue page, even if they created it and solely authored it. All they have a right to is accurate attribution and quoting, just as they would if a third party journalist had written a story about the topic.

So the wags who say "impossible" are correct that it's impossible with slash or civicspace or yahoogroups or opengroups or newsgroups or mailing lists. If it is possible at all (not saying it is) it would have to be on a wiki base. And that's borne out by all the good meaty political stuff that's on wikis now: dkosopedia, sourcewatch, wikocracy, anarchopedia, openpolitics, Living Platform, consumerium. And quasi political wikiscience like embodimentwiki and administrative gurudom like let.sysops.be.

Threaded media are useless for political debate, for exactly the reason you suggest: any worthwhile question will be crapflooded by those who consider it against their interests to discuss.

The kind of post-by-post deletion or moderation you have to do for a debate thread necessarily becomes censorship when you have to decide if a post that contains a few relevant sentences and a few irrelevant, can be retained or not.

Accordingly, you need third person statements and the kind of contract that prevails in a wiki: version control is sacred and attribution is strict, but no one has sole control of any sequence of words that will appear to the reader, that's only collective.

In other words: absolutely no one other than the administrators who create the buttons, frames, form prompts, has sole control of even so much as a full sentence on any topic/issue page, even if they created it and solely authored it. All they have a right to is accurate attribution and quoting, just as they would if a third party journalist had written a story about the topic.

So the wags who say "impossible" are correct that it's impossible with slash or civicspace or yahoogroups or opengroups or newsgroups or mailing lists. If it is possible at all (not saying it is) it would have to be on a wiki base. And that's borne out by all the good meaty political stuff that's on wikis now: dkosopedia, sourcewatch, wikocracy, anarchopedia, openpolitics, Living Platform, consumerium. And quasi political wikiscience like embodimentwiki and administrative gurudom like let.sysops.be.

Here in Canada, we actually have four parties currently represented in Parliament. This is down from the five that were there before (two parties merged; nobody got destroyed at the polls).

However, since Confederation, the Prime Minister has been the leader of either the Conservative or Liberal/Whig party. There are other parties, and they do hold seats, but none of them have ever formed the federal government. However, some have won provincial elections.

Handy links:

• Conservative Party of Canada
• Liberal Party of Canada
• New Democratic Party of Canada
• Bloc Québéois
• Green Party of Canada (never elected any members to Parliament, but tends to get a fair number of votes at the polls)

Representative vs. Proportional Representative assemblies

What we have here is a failure to evolve the system of Democracy. In the past, when communication systems were poor, people were somewhat illiterate (post universal enfranchisment), people would have to 'know' their prospective representative in more character-based sense. This person would embody local values, exhibit strong personal-leadership skills or otherwise be a 'local standout'.

But, as the modern world was born the discussion 'widened'. We (Democractic Citizens) are no longer required to simply Trust in A Person (your "Representative") to make good decisions when the Vote arises. We are able to communicate many more ideas, within a much larger area... this communication means we dont need him to be "independantly trustworth" (so to speak). Physical geography matters much less. But, with the first-person-past-the-post system, your stuck being drowned-out by your neighbours. You might be a liberal in a strong conservative area -- too bad, your vote doesnt count.

Strong partisanship has also evolved. The networks of die-hard partisan politicians have evolved to be self-necessary. ie: you cannot get elected without the network (the power, connection, support, money, endorsment etc)

The result? Stagnation. Party Whips. Entrenchment. Corruption.

Most modern Democracies have a measure of Proportional Representation.

Every party OTHER THAN Democratic & Republican in the USA should be running on a SINGLE TICKET Proportional Representation Plank.

This is ALSO true of every NON Liberal party in Canada (including the Rightist party(s))

The Green Party of Canada is committed to implementing Proportional Representation in Canada to ensure that Canadians have a Democracy capable of properly serving Canadians in the future.

Please see the Green Party's 2006 Platform:Renewing our Democracy

Anyone who A) dosnt vote and B) donsnt like the entrenchment of the current parties should be lobbying for Proportional Representation...

Too bad the republicrats will collude to prevent it.

Is wiki such a good idea in politics where partisanship is everywhere.

I don't know, but the Green Party of Canada has teir entire party platform developed online via a wiki called the Living Platform. Politics are a little less partisan in Canada, and given that it's the platform for an entire political party rather than one individual... Of course the party itself retains some control. Only registered Green Party members can edit locked pages, and the actual platform is established by registered party memebers voting on what policy from the Livng pltform should be promoted to official party policy - the fact remains that it provides an open forum for developing policy ideas (and includes, for instance, some extensive material on intellectual property policies) and engaging the public more widely in policy development. If you're in Canada than please stop by and get involved.

Jedidiah.

The Green Party of Canada has been using a Wiki to write its Living Platform.

Have a look at the Living Platform here.

From the website; The Living Platform is a collection of pages that grows and evolves through membership cooperative participation - another example of the Green Party's comitment to open deliberation and community driven politics.

The Green Party of Canada has been using a Wiki to write its Living Platform.

Have a look at the Living Platform here.

From the website; The Living Platform is a collection of pages that grows and evolves through membership cooperative participation - another example of the Green Party's comitment to open deliberation and community driven politics.

We also have Greens, Libertarians, Socialists, Communists, as well as other parties like the Marijuana party. All of these parties were offical and registered in the last federal election.

Canada still has more choice overall, having 3 [Liberals, Conservatives, NDP] (or 4 in Québec [Bloc]) major political parties. All of these parties hold significant political clout in the current minority government.

What the grandparent was likely saying is that as the in some districts Democrats and Republicans differ only a campaign symbol and who is paying. Voting for any party in the USA other then these, while is good for democracy, is unlikely to get anybody elected. While from election to election districts may sway from Republican to Democrat and vice versa, what real change occurs?

Medevo

For any Canadians out there who are worried about having to choose between the butt-reaming we'll get from the US if the conservatives are elected, and the butt-reaming we'll get from our taxes if the NDP are elected, might I suggest taking a look at the Green Party? Seriously.

http://www.greenparty.ca/

So far it's the only one I've seen that actually mixes corporate accountability with sensible taxation reform by moving taxation away from taxing people to taxing resource use. So yeah, your gas tax goes up, but at the same time your income tax goes down -- and you can take steps to use less gas.

Link.

Closed protocols, systems, and architectures can play host to deleterious behaviour that is virtually impossible to correct. Open standards and architectures are necessary for any long-lived system.

The government must be able to create, customize, and improve its systems without having to rely on a single supplier. Conversely, the public must be able to verify and critique the architectures that are used to store, transmit, and protect sensitive information.

A Green Party government will only acquire systems are built upon open standards and protocols. If such systems are not available, or do not provide sufficient functionality, the value of creating or improving an open source solution will be weighed against the cost of using the equivalent closed system. A closed system will only be used if the vendor agrees to be liable for migrating to an open architecture within a reasonable time period.

I had been going to vote NDP, but unless they have a similar response I may vote Green instead!

Better answers, and they're more knowledgable about privacy than the Liberals.

Well I'm probably going to cast my vote for the Green Party. Fiscally conservative, socially progressive and for enviromentally sustainablility. They are the only party taking a long term view, such as what kind of country are we leaving for our kids to inherit, instead of seeing no further than the next election like the other parties.

Even if the Green candidate in your riding doesn't win, your vote still counts for something under the new election campaign financing rules.

Well I'm probably going to cast my vote for the Green Party. Fiscally conservative, socially progressive and for enviromentally sustainablility. They are the only party taking a long term view, such as what kind of country are we leaving for our kids to inherit, instead of seeing no further than the next election like the other parties.

Even if the Green candidate in your riding doesn't win, your vote still counts for something under the new election campaign financing rules.

Expect to see more such moves if the Green Party of Canada comes to power in this month's federal election. Not that they will actually win the election, of course, but the Greens do explicitly support open source software in their platform

You might want to look at the Green Party. I haven't reviewed their whole platform, but from what I've looked at, they want to run Canada, not the 51st state, and, they support Open Source :)

The problem is, due to very little media coverage, most people I know don't even know they exist.

• Require federal agencies to initiate transitions to open source operating systems and productivity software.
• Make technology that has been developed at public expense, a publicly owned resource. Software that has been developed at taxpayer expense will be released under an open source license, making it free for all Canadians to use.
• Shorten the length of software patents to seven years. The software business cycle is so fast that longer patents only stifle innovation.

Would you add, change or remove anything, make your wish list. It seems like we are making politicians wake up and smell the coffee.

• Require federal agencies to initiate transitions to open source operating systems and productivity software.
• Make technology that has been developed at public expense, a publicly owned resource. Software that has been developed at taxpayer expense will be released under an open source license, making it free for all Canadians to use.
• Shorten the length of software patents to seven years. The software business cycle is so fast that longer patents only stifle innovation.

Would you add, change or remove anything, make your wish list. It seems like we are making politicians wake up and smell the coffee.

• Require federal agencies to initiate transitions to open source operating systems and productivity software.
• Make technology that has been developed at public expense, a publicly owned resource. Software that has been developed at taxpayer expense will be released under an open source license, making it free for all Canadians to use.
• Shorten the length of software patents to seven years. The software business cycle is so fast that longer patents only stifle innovation.

Would you add, change or remove anything, make your wish list. It seems like we are making politicians wake up and smell the coffee.

I followed this case quite closely. Despite our highest court ruling in favour of Monsanto, all it would take is this to become an issue in our upcoming federal election (will be called this Sunday), and our patent law will be changed. Once the law is changed, the Monsanto case's precedent will be tossed aside, and we will get back on the right track.

Our (Canada's) patent law is quite out of date, it does not address the issues regarding patenting of genome, plants, organisms, and other living matter. Once it is brought up to date (not when, it would be political suicide for all parties not to protect farmers like Schmeiser), we will get things right.

All parties which are running in every riding have to deal with this the correct way.

- The new Conservative Party of Canada will stand to loose grassroots support if they do not protect the rights of farmers to save seed. Although I wouldn't vote for them because they have yet to release their platform... shuuush... they don't want people to know that yet.

- The Liberal Party of Canada will stand to loose support in Ontario where Schmeiser was situated, although it is slipping because the provincial government did a 180 in the first budget.

- The NDP hates GE food, says there is no viable market for the stuff, it should be labelled, etc etc. They would definitely protect the rights of the farmer to save the seed.

- And the Green Party. This is a given, they don't like GE foods, they don't like GE anything, because it destroys biodiversity.

This is just a temporary setback. The justices here did not fully comprehend the severity of their decision, but they were forced to work within the framework of the laws given to them by Parliament in 1985. Things have changed, and this act of Parliament will be apart of our next election, and will be dealt with the next government.