ChangeCampTO: Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit

I would like to invite community-based organizers in southern Ontario to join us at an event in Toronto coming up on February 16th.

ChangeCampTO: Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 from 5:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Toronto Reference Library, Appel Salon
http://changecampto2010.eventbrite.com/

In a fun-but-focused 3 hours, registered attendees will contribute to the creation of a toolkit for a self-organizing, people-driven, nonpartisan movement for positive change in Toronto and beyond.

We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations across the City of Toronto and beyond through community-based leadership.

We are tentatively calling this open toolkit “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box”. This idea was born in a ChangeLab session at last year’s ChangeCamp, and this year we plan to make it real.

If you are new to ChangeCamp and want to learn about its history please visit ChangeCamp.ca.

As one of the organizers of ChangeCamp, I look at the prorogation of Parliament as a symptom of a deeper problem of cultural and systemic apathy in our society. In its wake, I declared war on Canadian complacency.

I have also seen in the CAPP movement that responded, the potential power of people self-organizing in their communities thanks to the web. We aren’t complacent. We care. But we can do more.

In my view, these issues are nonpartisan. Prorogation wasn’t just about the Conservatives and the issues of the day, it’s about a deeper problem of the cynical abuse of power that is made possible by a complacency that is deeply cultural.

The question that all of us at some point have to ask ourselves is: What have I done to contribute to the very thing I complain about or want to change?

So, we turn our attention away from our leaders and Parliament Hill towards ourselves and our communities. We look to develop in ourselves and each other a new kind of nonpartisan leadership, one with a genuine capacity to engage one another in conversations that matter, to create new possibilities.

If ChangeCamp has patron saints, they are Peter Block and Clay Shirky. We want to enable a self-organizing movement of people who work to create spaces for their fellow citizens to have conversations that matter, both face-to-face and online, enabled by new forms of communication.

I invite you to join us.

ChangeCamp.ca
ChangeCamp on Facebook
ChangeCamp on Twitter

Valentine’s Day Card campaign clarification

There was room for confusion in my last post.  The Valentine’s Day Cards mailing address is actually a CAPP Ottawa mailing address and CAPP Ottawa has lined up a horse and carriage and are working on a volunteer Cupid. We will make a spectacle of the delivery so that the press continues to cover the issue.

The FB Group is called Valentine’s Day Cards for Democracy but more important is getting the word out with the Event Invitation on that page. If you’re not on FB, our mailing address is P.O. Box 693, Osgoode, Ontario K0A 2W0.

Please help spread this initiative through the various regional sites and with reposts on the CAPP main site. Please collect cards from everyone you know and send them on. Together, we can make this a news worthy event.

Thanks for supporting the cause.

Jim Prentice Challenges Quebec’s Environmental Leadership

Environment Minister Jim Prentice is taking Quebec to task because of their leadership on emission standards. Please read the following article in the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/prentice-attacks-quebecs-climate-strategy/article1452601/

Valentine’s Day Cards for Democracy campaign

CAPP Ottawa wants to heap a pile of Valentine’s Day cards (“I love Democracy” and the like) on Mr. Harper but we need your help.

So far there are only 84 members at the Valentine’s Day Cards for Democracy FB Group. Out of 222,384!?!? Please join the FB Group “Valentine’s Day Cards for Democracy” and forward the Event Invitation to your contacts.

Collect cards from family, friends and co-workers to send on.

Please post the link to your regional CAPP sites. Please repost this request regularly on the CAPP sites since we only have a short window of opportunity for this initiative. Thanks for your help, and let’s get those cards rolling. Cheers.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=449845460461&ref=mf#!/event.php?eid=459823830166&index=1

VIDEO NEEDED OF PROTESTS FOR SHORT FILM ON THE LOSS OF SOVEREIGNTY

I am producing a 15-minute film that will be released in late February. It has been undertaken to confront the loss of personal sovereignty, medical freedom of choice, the circumvention of elected officials for multinational corporate benefit, and the countless other heresies being negotiated and acted upon by the Canadian government — in YOUR name. It is a film intended to educate and rally freedom-loving Canadians to action before our  precious liberties disappear forever.

Conservative MPs report taking some heat

Robert Fife reports in this broadcast (see around the 8:45 mark) that Conservative MPs are taking “a lot of flak from their constituents… they think MPs are taking a two month holiday… they think the PM has abused his power for partisan reasons by shutting down parliament to avoid questions on the Afghan detainee issue.”

Keep it up people!

Tories Should be Embarrassed

The Liberal party has clearly out done the Tories by creating a public frenzy over the prorogation of parliament. After all Jean Chretien prorogued parliament four times. I don’t recall anyone being too upset then, even when prorogation held up a report on the sponsorship scandal and shut down the Somalia inquiry.

Shame on the Tory media machine for letting their counter parts in the Liberal party so clearly out do them.

Canada’s Shoebox Parliament

I just thought I’d share my own take on prorogation, with a little puppeteering and satire in a shoebox

You can search for it on YouTube under “Canada’s Shoebox Parliament” or just follow this link:

Hope you enjoy it!
Liam

Rally Photo Roundup from Rabble.ca

O Canada, I believe: A ‘No Prorogue’ poem

This is the poem I wrote for and read at the Regina rally on Saturday.

O Canada, I believe: A ‘No Prorogue’ poem

O Canada, I believe we have a problem. PMS: Prime Minister Steve. Canada’s Prime Minister prefers to ignore advice from scientists and diplomats in the warfields, silence watchdogs and whistle-blowers and shutdown dissenters and to let Parliament decide–Later*. A mere war-criminal or -monger, he is Disaster, Capital’s arrogance and greed, personified.

O Canada, I believe our system needs some medicine. When it allows abuses of democratic power by a Minority government leader to evade investigations into the torture of detainees– well, O Canada, there’s something wrong. We need to talk. And we’ve started. We are here.

O Canada, I believe in the energy of our activists and our votes, in the people on this street and all the streets all over our nation and beyond. It’s the energy that’s given us public healthcare, unemployment insurance, minimum wages… Personhood.

O Canada, I believe in the maple leaf – the Manitoba Maple that lives in these parts. I believe in the leaves on trees, the air we breathe, the water that flows and the earth that grows the food we it. I believe in the power of symbol to connect us.

O Canada, I believe we care. I believe in our capacity to care, to take care, of each other in our families and communities, in this province and our country and all around the world. I believe we do it, not for personal gain, political games or polling numbers– We do it because we genuinely care.

And, O Canada, I believe in the strength of diversity. Though partisans would have us divided, we hold together, one voice, united. No! No prorogation!

O Canada, I believe in the power of the people. I believe in the power of the people to create a flashpoint, to make a difference, to take back democracies.

~ Bernadette L. Wagner
January 23, 2010

* from the poem, W.L.M.K. by F. R. Scott