Russell McOrmond's blog

An article by Michael Geist discussing the MPs and ridings that might most be affected by Copyright reform includes Elizabeth's riding.

Or fellow cabinet minister Peter MacKay, already facing a battle in which the Liberals have dropped out of the riding to strengthen Green party leader Elizabeth May, who won his seat by a mere 3,273 votes in the last election and has St. Francis Xavier University in his riding (home to 4200 students).

An article by Stephane Massinon for the Halifax Daily News talks about a recent Harper visit. The article quotes Dal's Lori Turnbull saying that if MacKay "was put to a national poll against Elizabeth May, I'm not so sure (he'd win), but in Central Nova, no, he's fine". If this is true, then that is the first part of the battle of winning the hearts and minds of Canadians. Elizabeth now needs to continue to try to focus some of that support in her riding.

Since the media and average Canadians are increasingly discovering and paying attention to the Greens, we need to be more clear about who have been elected to be spokespersons for the party. I think we should ensure that the template for this site detect whether a page is BLOG related and put up a disclaimer that makes clear that the views expressed are those of an individual party member and not the party as a whole.

I find it interesting when some of the tech media that I follow have articles about greening IT. Today's alerts for ITBusiness.ca has articles titled "Green IT: Marketing ploy or new tech?" and "The greening of Canada". The first focuses on electricity usage reduction for servers, and the latter on the use of telecommuting and other communications to reduce the footprint caused by transportation. (digital communication replacing transportation)

What I find interesting is that an industry that has not been known to think about efficiency at all has people thinking in these terms. This to me suggests that the idea of going green is becoming pretty mainstream, and we need to ensure that Greens harness this progress!

Elizabeth did a great job on CTV's Question Period this afternoon.

While I'm not happy about the negative spin suggested in an article by Tim Naumetz for CanWest News Service, it does discuss the massive amount of work taken on by Elizabeth May. While David may not be as active in the party as he would have been as leader, he is continuing in the green movement as both a consultant to the government and a green businessman.

A bit of a thread started as comments to another BLOG article, but I wanted to highlight the topic. There are a few recent media files I think people should listen to to understand the connection between Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Green Party principles/policies. It is important for Greens to realize that this is not simply a way to save money on software (any more than reducing environmental wast is only a way to save money), but that like other Green policies it has positive impacts on many other aspects on our global society. In many ways, this global movement isn't really about software at all, and really about better answers to some of the most basic moral and economic questions of our time.

An interesting CANOE article that features Elizabeth May vs. Tom Harris on carbon taxes.

I was pointed to a talk by John Doerr, a very rich venture capitalist, talking about the importance of going green. Ignore some of the problems in the video, such as the fact that it is sponsored by a legacy car manufacturer (private modes of motorized transportation will never be adequately efficient), and you will see a very important message. There is money to be made in investing and going green, that the technologies and innovations are there, and that it is critically important for the future. Going green really is a win, win, win scenario for nearly everyone concerned. He begins and ends talking about what changed his mind: a conversation he had with his daughter.

An interesting Huffington Post article by Raymond J. Learsy ends with the following: