We're almost three weeks into the election now, and we've been working hard to ensure we're well prepared for the long days that we have ahead of us in this historic election period. This is Canada's longest federal election campaign since 1926.
The length of this election period makes this a marathon instead of the usual sprint, which is exhausting for political parties, but even more so for small groups like ours that are trying to make an impact on this election.
Sensible BC remains committed to a position of non-partisanship, and our campaign is specifically focused on encouraging constituents to get out and vote in favour of progressive marijuana policy.
This also means that if a Conservative candidate were to step away from the Conservative Party’s prohibitionist platform and take a stance in favour of cannabis reform, then we would consider endorsing that candidate. As it stands now, the Conservatives have set themselves apart as the party of prohibition.
Once Stephen Harper called the election, we officially began phase two of our campaign. We will be sending out information packages to each of our targeted ridings that will include up-to-date candidate information for canvassers to communicate to voters. We’ll also include details on what needs to happen on the ground with volunteers and mark collecting.
We have received questions from many supporters asking about how we were deciding which ridings to target. After much deliberation, we have chosen to target specific swing ridings that match either of the following descriptions:
- The riding is weakly held by Conservatives but could be swung towards the Liberals, NDP, or Greens.
- The riding is weakly held by the Liberals, NDP, or Greens and is at risk of flipping Conservative
These decisions are based upon voting data from the 2011 federal election as well as current regional polling for British Columbia. We have limited resources as a non-profit organization so we need to use our resources as carefully and strategically as possible. Focusing on swing ridings will help us get the most out of the money that we spend.
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another important factor that isn’t taken into account in old voting data is that the conservative base has collapsed , and the greens are seeing a lot of new support from disillusioned ex conservative supporters , and as far as the island is considered the cpc has no chance of obtaining any seats there…..