Thursday, October 23, 2008

What is Renewal?

During the last leadership campaign, Liberals used the word "renewal" as if it was some fairytale object that, once chosen, would magically transform the world in a Tinkerbell trail of glitter.

There was a Liberal Party Renewal Commission in 2006. It had 32 sub-committees and held public consultations in five cities, but I can't find any sort of report for it. It used to have a web page on liberal.ca but that has disappeared completely.

I found some criticism of the Liberal renewal commission, written at the time it was going on, by Cherniak and Political Nobody. There's a reference in an old article in Macleans. Otherwise, renewal seems to have been taken out back and shot.

So dropping the emotionally-laden term "renewal", there's lots of stuff we need to think about fixing up:

* Organization of the party
* Fundraising network
* Fundraising methods
* Computer systems (web site, databases, tax receipts)
* Constitution re system of electing leaders
* Constitution re other things
* ???

Update: Renewal Obituary

1 comment:

Top Can said...

There's a lot of things, but in all honestly if I had to sum 'renewal' up as one thing, I truly have no idea. I mean, what do we need to renew first as a priority to the exclusion of all others?