In honour of Doris Anderson, take some time this week to check out what it will take for you to get involved in politics or to help a woman you know get elected. This online course was set up by Equal Voice Canada, an organization founded by Doris to advocate for electoral reforms and the removal of other barriers to increased representation of women in politics. The course is free but does require you to register.
Given the lack of blogs it may feel like I've alreadybeen gone for a monthbut in reality I'm just off now for April. I don't think I've ever had a more overwhelming month -- we are most certainly living in crazy times.
The final great news before I go: the Ontario Citizen's Assembly has firmly rejected STV as an option for their referendum. Doris Anderson would be so pleased. A bientot...
According to a recent United Nations report, women constitute half of the world's population, perform nearly two-thirds of its work hours, receive one-tenth of the world's income and own less than one-hundreth of the world's property.
Less than 2 in 10 of the world's elected officials are women. You make think those figures are coming from other "backwards" jurisdictions but they are in fact not that different from the backwards numbers we have here at home. In Canada and BC we dropped to just 20% of MPs in the last federal election and all the way down from a previous high of 28% to just 22.8% in the 2005 provincial election.
You can make a difference. Encourage a woman you know to run for office. Tell her about the Women's Campaign School November 16-18 in Vancouver, sponsor her seat at the school, volunteer your time on her campaign and get her elected. And to make sure other women can get elected too, read legendary feminist Doris Anderson's opinions on STV and join the KNOW STV campaign.
The last word to a Chilean proverb in honour of the election of their first ever woman president, Michelle Bachelet. "With a few women in politics, women change. With many women in politics, politics change."
Canada lost one of its greatest icons when Doris Anderson passed away yesterday. Like many woman my age, I was completely unaware of Doris and her acheivements even as I, and every one of us who came after her, benefitted from the many gains she made for women in this country. However, fortune brought her to me through her son Mitch, a close friend of mine and a phenomenal and gifted activist in his own right.
In addition to the work she did for all of us, Doris was a great gift to all who got to spend even a short time with her -- her indomitable spirit, her passion for women's equality in all facets of Canadian society and her refusal to apologize for being fantastic at what she did were lessons that motivated many of us to take up her cause.
She will be sorely missed but her accomplishments and vision for the future burn bright in the hearts of so many and that is the greatest legacy any can hope to leave, the mark of a truly well lived life.
For those interested in why Vancouver school enrolment is declining at a time when the school-aged population is increasing, check out Bill Good on CKNW Monday morning from 9 - 10 am. I'll be on along with the local District Parents Advisory Council rep, Trustee Don Lee and parent Cheryl Davis.
If print is more your thing, you can check out the story that ran recently in the Georgia Straight for more information.
Valentine's Day news from The Onion, "America's funniest online news source". (really!). This under the headline Westminster Dog Show Finalists Form Elite Iditarod Team.
It's been seven weeks since I stepped onto the Al Gore freight train in Nashville and still no sign of it slowing down. There's been media interviews, frenzied bookings for over two dozen events, reading hundreds of pages of new reports on the impacts of climate change, harried lessons in remote control power point projectors, four new and voluminous email listserves or various Climate Project trainee groupings, lunches, dinners, phone calls, emails...it's all climate change all the time and it just keeps coming.
On the plus side, of the two thousand some odd generations that have walked the Earth in 50,000 years of civilization, how many have gotten to live through the broad scale paradigm shift we are standing in the eye of right now? A case in point was the BC government's throne speech -- incidentally possibly also the longest throne speech in 50,000 years of history -- last Tuesday. If someone had told me a year ago even one sentence of the section on climate change would be spoken in our legislature, I would have told them it was impossible. It's a satisfying thing to see a government change its mind, but it's a beautiful thing to see a government change its heart.
Yesterday Hillary Clinton announced she's in for the nomination race for Democrat presidential candidate. She's not the first women to run for the Presidential nomination in the states (the Republicans beat the Democrats to that honour when Margaret Chase Smith ran for the 1964 nomination), but the first one to do so for a major party in a very long time.
Clearly Howard Dean's upstart campaign for the 2004 nomination made an impression. Her campaign site looks like Dean's on steroids. You can even "win" a contest to be the very first post on her blog. Not sure that's exactly what you call open space but I'll suspend judgement until I see the tone of the post they pick as the winner.
Two interesting housing ideas came through my email in the last few days. The first is from Victoria where housing advocate Diane Carr teamed up with SOS Designs to create a proposal called the Independent Settlement Project. The project would house 190 people -- or about 20% of Victoria's estimated homeless population -- at a cost about 90% less than what is now being spent on those people through social and policing services.
Other good things to recommend the project: it incorporates green building design elements that lower the maintenance costs of suites and it uses existing public land in the form of an elementary school that has been closed down. The neighbouring park space and playground would also be preserved.
The Victoria School Board has so far said that it would rather sell the land and convert it into money. The only problem there is that money comes and goes but land is finite. Selling it now may bring in some money, but having to buy it back at some point in thefuture will cost alot more money. There is also only tax payer who doesn't care who owns the land, they just care that it's not getting used. To paraphrase a part of the proposal "the issue is like a jig-saw puzzle, and it feels like we’re all pushing different pieces around on the table, trying to see what fits...And guess what? There’s no picture on the outside of the puzzle-box to help us get started."
