Attention especially to Liberals and Liberal supporters!!

Good news, Joyce Murray, MP for Vancouver Quadra, has announced her candidacy for the Liberal leadership. She is not only the only announced candidate with ministerial experience (as B.C. provincial Environment minister) she proposed an electoral alliance in her announcement. She wants to work with us!

Murray is also the only announced leadership candidate with a really good record on climate change: she was the Environment minister who got B.C.’s carbon tax enacted, truly an accomplishment. See her website http://joycemurray.ca/

Calgary Centre By-election. The unhappy election of another Conservative in Calgary should get people who are not yet convinced of the need for an electoral alliance of the need for one.

The Conservatives lost an embarrassing 20 percentage points but won with only 36.9% of the popular vote, less even than Harper’s 39.6% “majority” of 2011. A Liberal-Green joint candidate would have won handily. Apparently some Liberal and Green Calgarians are thinking what a shame....

Email the National!

Peter Mansbridge recently announced that the National News is looking for questions for their At Issue (and other) panels for 2013. How about sending suggestions for electoral alliance? The lessons of the Calgary Centre by-election, the Joyce Murray announcement (paralleling Nathan Cullen’s run for the NDP leadership), the frustration Canadians increasingly feel as the Harper Conservatives demolish environmental protection laws, fisheries protection, science programs, etc., in order to build more prisons and send more prisoners for longer to them. Send to http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/

December 5, 2012
Lynn McDonald