[fvc-wat-disc] excellent webinar

Tue Dec 15 13:42:32 EST 2020

Thanks guys. I even noticed I did better than usual on this webinar.

I think it's because it's newer material. I've given PR 101 and similar so
many times in ten years it bores me to tears and I feel like a robot
delivering it.

This referendum stuff is more emotional for me.

The amazing group in BC that I worked with day in and day out for almost a
year, it's been two years now and some of them are just starting to recover
from profound heartbreak to pick themselves up and reconnect for ten
minutes to take a group card photo.

Like Trudeau's broken promise, it's one of those experiences that will stay
with me for a lifetime.

I remember in 2013 when I was interim ED I organized a press conference
with Thomas Mulcair and Stephane Dion. One of the media actually showed up
and asked about a referendum and I said "I'm not supporting another
made-to-fail referendum." I took a lot of flak for that afterwards, cause
we're supposed to pretend of course we can win a referendum or we look like
losers, right?

I really put off doing this webinar because the takeaway isn't hope, and I
like to instill hope.

The gist is that unless you have serious political leadership, or political
circumstances outside of our control, referendums are usually (but not
always) doomed. *But if you had serious political leadership, we wouldn't
have referendums in the first place,*

It is like webinars on "Why Alternative Vote is bad." I hate doing them -
all negative - but we *have* to keep doing them because new people come in
all the time and if our core team are not informed, they will be more
easily bamboozled by politicians. If the Liberal Machine ever decided to go
gung ho on promoting AV I think we could be sunk. We won round one on that
with a hell of lot of work during the ERRE, but in a small pond.

The main objective for me with the referendum webinar was for our folks
realize it wasn't just the last referendum. It wasn't the question. *We fit
into a bigger pattern around the world on every change topic. *

You know that old saying, "Those who don't understand history are doomed to
repeat it?"

That's our movement when it comes to referendums. It's just human nature,
lack of information, beautiful optimistic people, and the cycles of a small
movement like ours.

Referendums can be held with years and thousands of miles in between -
meaning there's different organizers in different places. Between
referendums people leave the movement.

So when the next referendum rolls around in Place A, there's maybe one
person who had any experience with a past one, and six people on an
organizing team for whom the other ones are just in some academic paper and
who think theirs is "different".

You know, past campaigners did it all wrong! Those people didn't start
early enough! They had the wrong message! They didn't try hard enough with
public education! And this time we're going to have the magic message!

One thing with opponents, is they are not like this. They are connected
across the country because they're connected to a large well-oiled party
machine with a common interest and they just deliver whatever version of
the playbook is needed in that province.

We can't always avoid a referendum because it's not up to us. The
politicians give us these referendums to kill it for decades, some of them
while *pretending* to be allies. That part I find infuriating.

But if everyone in our movement understood the research on referendums, *we
could start pushing back behind the scenes years ahead*.

Often times our folks have connections within parties or other groups that
could help get the train off that track early on.

MAYBE that would prevent us just finding ourselves in a no-win situation
where the only options are:

a) fight the referendum knowing the odds or
b) walk away when it's going to happen anyway.

What we're doing now is trying to *PROACTIVELY* steer the movement boat in
a different direction towards citizens' assemblies as a better process that
also gives the change the citizen-based legitimacy it needs.

Of course it's a long shot. Everything is! We in Fair Vote are like the
little engine that could, though!

And the good news today is:

The folks for the Global Climate Assembly <https://globalassembly.org/> are
going to do a webinar with us!! YAY!! Hopefully in January.

I'm looking at their site and if they pull this off well, I think that will
be the world class model of how to do it! (The only thing missing is that
it's not commissioned by a government but that's because there's no "world
government").

The CORE of it is the randomly selected citizens- as it must be! But
they're expanding it so that everyone can feed into it and develop that
sense of involvement and citizen ownership of the process.

Happy holidays to you and your loved ones!

Anita

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 12:18 PM Peter Croves <petercroves at gmail.com> wrote:

> yes, it was!. Done will
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 12:02 PM Mary Jackes <mkj at bell.net> wrote:
>
>> I wanted to congratulate Anita, too.  It was a terrific presentation in
>> terms of the slides, her speaking, and the really impressive research that
>> went into it.
>>
>> I was super impressed!!
>>
>> Congratulations,
>>
>> Mary
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 10:31 AM Dave Arthur <arthurd23 at bell.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I wanted to say how great the webinar on referendums was.
>>>
>>> I think we are all aware of some of the issues with the referendums we
>>> have had in Canada but Anita’s presentation put it all together.
>>>
>>> Anita, a fabulous job. Thank you.
>>>
>>> Dave A
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from Mail <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for
>>> Windows 10
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> This is the fvc-wat-disc mailing list
>>> Post a message: fvc-wat-disc at listserv.thinkers.org
>>> Unsubscribe:
>>> http://listserv.thinkers.org/mailman/listinfo/fvc-wat-disc_listserv.thinkers.org
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> This is the fvc-wat-disc mailing list
>> Post a message: fvc-wat-disc at listserv.thinkers.org
>> Unsubscribe: http://listserv.thinkers.org/mailman/listinfo/fvc-wat-disc_listserv.thinkers.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> This is the fvc-wat-disc mailing list
>> Post a message: fvc-wat-disc at listserv.thinkers.org
>> Unsubscribe:
>> http://listserv.thinkers.org/mailman/listinfo/fvc-wat-disc_listserv.thinkers.org
>>
> _______________________________________________
> This is the fvc-wat-disc mailing list
> Post a message: fvc-wat-disc at listserv.thinkers.org
> Unsubscribe:
> http://listserv.thinkers.org/mailman/listinfo/fvc-wat-disc_listserv.thinkers.org
>

-- 
*Proportional representation delivers more of what YOU voted for!*
Sign the Declaration: www.fairvote.ca/declaration
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.thinkers.org/pipermail/fvc-wat-disc_listserv.thinkers.org/attachments/20201215/6793c283/attachment-0001.htm>