Daily Garth

As you know, earlier this year the Conservative Party Leadership booted MP Garth Turner from cabinet, then banded him from standing for nomination in his local Halton Conservative Party, kicking him out of the party - without kicking him out of the party. They've never said anything about why, but the corperate media has surmised the Prime Ministers Office didn't like the independant ideas he was writing in his blog.

In an effort to create 'transparency, openness and accountability' in the Parliment of Canada, the now Independant MP Garth Turner held a press conference at the Ottawa press club on Tuesday November 14th.

In that press conference he TRIED to launch a new Web site, but he gave the domain name of an Evangelical web site by accident (because he's 'old' and he doesn't understand the KEY importance of that single line "Go To...").

I think what he's up to is a New Canadian Virtual Political Movement, a Canadian Daily Kos, called 'Promiseskept.ca'.

Daily Kos is a Web movement that almost got Howard Dean nominated as the Democratic Presidential Candidate in 2004 and in the two years since the sites influence is political book in the U.S.. Since the revolution in congress on November 7th that turfed the Republicans from the House and the Senate, political organizers know they ignore the new model only at great risk to their political careers.

If I'm right a site like Promiseskept.ca could develop something like this:

A web site would act as a chat room on national political issues; a critical mass of e-mailers and bloggers would then create public pressure on individual MP's thus making the Party Whips job of browbeating members into voting Always with the Party difficult, hopefully impossible. This could easily lead to defections from the Parties and create a critical mass of independant MPs who could dominate the political agenda with-in this minority government, in the short term, as in NOW!

The next step in the years ahead would be to support candidates with campaign workers organization and money all pulled togeather Online, to Win Ridings in the next election. Quickly the Old Parties would begin to adapt to the new reality (hopefully), democratizing themselves from the inside in order to save their political lives. If this didn't happen, a new Political party would coalesce out of the ferment.

Garth writes in his announcement today:

" ... my Conservative party believes in free speech, diversity of opinion, co-operation, equality of all people, progressive social values, true environmental protection and stands firm against intolerance, bigotry exclusion. "

This new beginning could be a Very Broad Coalition from 'Red Tories' or small 'c' conservatives to unfearful lefties - people who are able to put aside some less important issues and including all those who see the Corporatization of government as the important thread that is the Great Challenge to democracy today. A way to bring that 50% of people 'too smart' to waste their time voting, back into the political process.

Thats my take on it, at any rate. As always, the Comments section is OPEN.

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