In gratitude
The family of the late Dawn Douglas wish to express their deep appreciation and gratitude to our friends and neighbours for all the acts of kindness, food, flowers, cards, and donations.Your caring and thoughtfulness will always be gratefully remembered. We wish to thank the community, Mayor Lee Pratt, the Royal Canadian Legion, and the Cranbrook Health Care Auxiliary for the wonderful tribute to mom and a life well lived. We also want to say a special thanks to Dr. Shilhan for all her loving care over the years. We truly are grateful for everything she did for mom. Mom will be missed forever, loved always never to be forgotten.
Ever grateful
Dawn’s Family
One Time Alliance
Recently I became a member of the One Time Alliance, a coalition of pro-democracy and environmental protection activists across Canada. The One Time Alliance is not a partisan formation, but we have clear policy preferences, and that is why we have formed our association.
As you probably know, in virtually every election the plurality (“first past the post”) system constructs a government which has only a minority of the popular vote. Other parties fail to get seats proportional to their share of the popular vote. The consequence is that successive parliaments do not have the full range of democratic representatives to speak to policy issues. The Liberals and the Conservatives dominate under the plurality system – they control the policy agenda. And they like it that way. This is why Justin Trudeau broke his electoral promise to make 2015 the last unfair election and to bring in electoral reform.
Our One Time Alliance policy priorities are protection of the planet, and electoral reform. Successive federal and provincial governments have failed us on both these issues. The One Time Alliance sees an opportunity for real change if Greens, New Democrats and other similarly motivated citizens join with us. We have a strategy, and we want to implement it before the next federal election.
Based on the federal 2019 electoral data, we see an opportunity for both Greens and NDP to take more seats with our strategy. Specifically, we see 100 ridings not currently held by either, which are potentially either a Green or an NDP win. With our strategy, we can reasonably expect about 66 campaigns to be successful.
The strategy requires Green and NDP co-operation, the two parties who claim they care the most about social justice, electoral fairness, and climate and environmental protection. If riding associations agreed to field a single candidate for only one of the two parties in the targeted 100 ridings, we can create the conditions for more wins for both parties. With more progressive voices in the House of Commons, especially in a minority Parliament, we could have the numbers to pass electoral reform and environmental protection legislation. With the amplified voices in defense of our planet, Parliament would be far more responsive to environmental policy initiatives.
Partisanship must be replaced by targeted co-operation in order to elect the people who can move the legislative agenda on our two main issues. We are urging you to join us in planetoverparty thinking. Our strategy respects the differences between the two parties, but focuses on what we have in common. To “join” with us, you merely need to “like” us on Facebook or retweet us on Twitter.
We invite you to read our Win-Win strategy and related documents: Towards a Win-Win Strategy – One Time Alliance for Democratic Reform and One Election, One Candidate, One Chance. You can see more and comment at onetimealliance on Facebook, and soon, on Twitter.
Joyce Green, Cranbrook
For One Time Alliance
