If you could gather 6,000 passionate activists in a room, what would you tell them? What would you want them to do when they left?
What messaging would you want them to leave the event with? What Call To Action would you want to give them?
There was good energy in the room at the UCP AGM, but here I sit 48 hours later, and I can’t recall what the party wants me to do with my time now.
No one told me to get involved with my CA, there was no communication on how to sell memberships, there was no information on how to stay connected with other party members in my area, and there was no instruction on how to door-knock or make cold calls.
The world has changed so much in the last twenty years, and it will change even more in the next five. The political party that wakes up to that fact and adapts first will be in power for a very, very long time.
The old way of getting an MLA elected and telling the people to go home and wait for the next election is over. It is never coming back. Don’t be sad about it. There is no time for that.
It isn’t only Adapt or Die.
It is Adapt or Become Irrelevant, clinging to old ideas of communication that don’t work anymore. Death will come slowly after a lot of money has been spent trying to be something that isn’t what the people want.
The top-down approach evident in politics is going to die. Whichever party kills it first and embraces a bottom-up approach will be the main party in power for the next decade.
Member-focused CAs will be the future, whether the MLAs like it or not. The MLAs will be whipped not by the party whip but by the members of their own CA, who will dictate who the future nomination winner will be. In the end, the MLAs will be doing what their members want, not what the party whip wants.
Whatever power that big money used to have with the central party bureaucracy will disappear when the members organize and realize that they have more power than the wealthy have money.
The board needs to understand that this shift is coming. There is no way around it. It is inevitable. The democratization of everything that started with the internet and mobile phones is finally coming to democracy itself.
The AGM needs to become an community empowering event. The vision that the members have for the future of their local communities and their province needs to be taken in by the party to refine and polish it. The vision then needs to be returned to the members so that they can bring to their local community. It needs to breath life into members so that they can take that energy and bring it home.
The AGM needs to be the spark, the beginning of a fire that will spread around the province through the members and their CAs.
That is what the AGM needs to become, and this is what the party needs to become.
It needs to be a fire, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of a broken government system.
It can’t come soon enough.
I agree 100% Tim. This message needs to be heard by the UCP. Danielle needs to lead the charge if we are to reform the system.
Perhaps we need to send her this idea with a boatload of signatures?
This is another great article and a super observation. We're a very mixes bunch and could use some clear direction from the top.