In the period between the last Provincial election and the next fixed date Provincial election scheduled for October of 2007 it appears that the Kingston & The Islands Greens will have participated in not two but probably three federal elections.

Given that context, if I were to summarize the primary activities of the Kingston & The Islands Green Party last year (and the year before) it would be this : Prepare for an election, Campaign in the election, Recover from the Campaign and then again Prepare for an election.

In effect, except for a few months immediately after an election, we have been in either permanent preparedness mode or actively campaigning.

This has both positive and negative implications.

The positive is that we have more opportunities to grow the Green Vote in Kingston and The Islands, and we have been doing this successfully. We obtained 8% of the local vote –representing over 5,000 people - in the federal election earlier this year and we now have excellent political momentum going into the Federal and Provincial elections expected within the next year.

We are now approaching our first critical threshold of 10% of the local vote, at which level we qualifiy for a huge 50% refund of all our federal campaign expenses. This will permit us to significantly scale up our future campaigns.

Other positives are the emergence of a strong and effective Queen’s Greens political club who work closely with us to advance the politics of Green on campus.

And we can be encouraged that we have a growing membership and a dedicated executive.

With each election we are improving our skills and the knowledge base on how to run strong and solid campaigns and we are also refining with increasing success our fund-raising ability year over year.

It would be fair to say we are in the top 10% of Green Party EDA’s/CA’s in terms of membership size, campaign budgets and electoral performance.


On the negative side, we are still smaller organizationally than the local Liberal, Conservative and NDP parties. Admittedly they have been at this longer than us and have sitting M.P’s & M.PP’s to boost credibility but we must continue to work hard to close this organizational gap.

And we don’t have the luxury of decades to try and shift the political agenda to environmentally sustainability so we must be much more efficient and effective now.

The challenge is to do this as an all-volunteer organization because we do not have paid constituency staff to moon-light on election preparedness and even on actual campaigns!

Clearly as a volunteer, it is easier to incorporate into your life the amount of time and effort required before and during an election, if the elections are spaced 4 years apart and not every year.

So clearly, this cycle of annual elections is a mixed blessing though the opportunity to change the political status quo is so important to our future that it overshadows the negatives.

I want to personally thank everyone who contributed in even the smallest way during this past year to getting us to where we are now today. Every little bit helped in more ways than you can imagine.

Thank-you.