GREGORY HARTNELL: WHY I QUIT THE DYSFUNCTIONAL B. C. ‘CONSERVATIVE’ PARTY

BCCP PRESIDENT McGRATH PRETENDS THEY CAN’T DO INTERNET VOTING

by Gregory Paul Michael Hartnell, President

Concerned Citizens’ Coalition

I just quit the dysfunctional British Columbia ‘Conservative’ Party, after having been informed by one of the few members who is still on the sinking ship, President Wayne McGrath, that the Party can’t allow Internet voting at its up-coming Annual General Meeting and subsequent Leadership Convention without a Constitutional amendment, and that can only be done by those who are prepared to attend the AGM in person.

That is a classic ‘Catch 22′ expressly designed to ensure that the innovative and safe voting system is never used in this Party, in my humble estimation.

At an earlier posting to this Concerned Citizens’ Coalition Blog, I listed ten suggestions that I thought might benefit the Party, putting internet voting at the end of the ten-point list.

I should have put it as Point Number One, as there is no real excuse for not allowing this in 2009.  The reference made by Mr. McGrath in his email correspondence to doing things according to the Constitution is laughable, when one considers that President McGrath seems to have been part of a small group that recently instituted a coup in the Party, after the precipitous resignation of the former Leader Wilf Hanni, the latter taking eight other Board Members with him.

Mr. McGrath may like presiding over a Party with a handful of holdouts, but I now question the legitimacy of the whole Annual General Meeting itself, seeing as how Mr. McGrath did not provide any evidence to me in his correspondence that the meeting was not the idea of just one or two people in his cabal.  I am under the impression that there is no Board of Directors left in this Party at all, so I now question not only the ban on safe Internet voting, but also the very legitimacy of the upcoming Annual General Meeting itself.

True social- and fiscal-conservatives (sometimes known as ‘paleoconservatives’) of which I consider myself to be one, need a principled truly CONSERVATIVE PARTY in B. C. now more than ever before.

This new party could do worse than adapt some of the ten points that I recently posted here under the heading: ‘MY ARGUMENT WITH THE B. C. CONSERVATIVE PARTY: Ten points for recovery (with apologies to Thomas Merton)’.

That kind of principled conservative (not libertarian) party would naturally attract all those disgruntled ‘paleos’ like myself and others who mistakenly have been propping up the so-called ‘Gordon Campbell BC Liberals’ for a shockingly long time.  These unprincipled yahoos should really rename their party the ‘B. C. Libertarian Party’, as it is quite clear that they worship at the altar of the Unholy Market Place, and have no social or conservation concerns whatsoever.  It is unregulated laissez-faire economics that Gordo and his gang of crooks is pushing, not conservatism, nor even liberalism, which is another thing altogether. 

To make ourselves attractive to the latter cohort, these people (disgruntled ‘BC Liberals’) have to be offered a true conservative alternative to the decadent status quo in Victoria under Gordo.

To take votes away from Greens and Socialists, the new party would also have to bring in new policies that would take the rug out from under these left-wing parties.  They do not have a monopoly on conservation or social justice issues, and that is why it is very important that paleos, whatever they do now, do not succumb to knee-jerk reaction on issues pertaining to the environment or to the plight of the poor.

Hard-hearted Campbellites, who pretend there is no money for the poor, the disabled, the homeless and the addicts and alcoholics that want to get clean and sober, while miraculously finding billions to squander on the Olympics, will always have their party in Mr. Campbell’s brand of quasi-fascistic libertarianism, complete with a phoney carbon tax as a sop to nondiscerning voters worried about so-called ‘climate change.’  

There is apparently no getting through to these Campbellites, save to pray for them.  But once the Olympics’ cost-overruns are truly understood by the people, and Campbell’s shananigans with lost emails pertaining to the BC Rail sale are exposed for the obstruction of justice that they constitute, the ranks of the disenfranchised will swell considerably.

I now consider myself to be a free and disenfranchised voter in every respect, unrepresented by any party at the federal or provincial level.   That does not mean that I don’t know what I believe in; on the contrary.

I am not an anarchist, nor a libertarian, although like most, I have smidgens of these false philosophies in my over-all political makeup.  I try to keep those anarchic and libertarian tendancies in check, as Mr. McGrath and his cohort would be well advised to do.