Potvin should run in Central Nova!

A sad day in the Green Party to dismiss a great candidate like Kevin Potvin.

There has been no better example of how words can be taken out of context, contorted and rejigged to suit another political agenda.

Kevin Potvin is an outspoken candidate, that is why we East Van Greens accepted his nomination in the first place, this whole issue just makes me wonder about the whole political environment and our [Green] role in it.

Wow. Great work from the Public Eye Online posse. Now if we can just get the Tories and Liberals to dump all their candidates who support the Canadian occupation of Afghanistan, we'll be even.

Given recent developments, I think now might be the time to consider some of Mr. Potvin's other words from the past, particularly those that have a Green-tinged theme to them.

To whit:

"In a Texas city, an old inner-city bridge was overcrowded with cyclists, pedestrians and cars, leading to the death of two pedestrians in 2000. They considered rededicating lanes to bicycles, building out extra lanes, or redirecting car traffic elsewhere. In the end, they built a separate bicycle and pedestrian bridge that is beautiful, effective, and much-loved in the city. The completed cost of this 700-foot span in 2002 was US$9 million.

Some councillors in Vancouver have suggested $15 million is an affordable cost to build extra lanes off Burrard Bridge. Instead, for much the same cost, we could build a separate bicycle bridge from around the Aquatic Centre in the West End to around Vanier Park in Kits. Because pedestrian and bike bridges do not have the same load requirements as car bridges, such a crossing offers all sorts of interesting and beautiful possibilities in design. With the mountains, the sea, the park, the beaches, and the existing and beautiful Burrard Bridge, we could design a unique structure that could well become the most photographed object in an already very photogenic city."

Crazy talk - no?

I mean all the guy did, the guy who ran for City Council in Vancouver's last civic election and garnered the most votes by an independent, was suggest a reasonable, feasible and downright attractive, both fiscally and esthetically, solution to a problem that has vexed Lotuslandia's major civic parties and a good chunk of its population for eons.

OK?

Well it appears Elizabeth May, Green party Leader of Canada has just given the boot to one of the worldwide Green movement's core values. By not allowing Kevin Potvin to run in Van-Kingsway, Ms May, has completely disregarded grassroots democracy. And if her position on abortion wasn't bad enough.

It is time to change the concept of roadways. It is time to designate bicycle lanes on most major and minor roadways. There needs to be the road for vehicles a break and now a road for the bicycle next to the road. Bicycles will need to be liscened and insured to help offset the costs. If there is a bicycle lane and one uses the road the rider should be issued a citation the same a s car driver who drives his vehicle on the sidewalk or other lane. Present roads should be upgraded in this manner. This would not include downtown roads as that would be almost impossible unless the road is wide enough to accomodate the lane. These lanes should even be made available on the highways. However none of this foolishness of having a bicycle crossing traffic lanes to get into a left turning lane. Bicycles should be walked across on a crosswalk. Also none of this idiocy of giving a bicycle to a child and saying "go for a ride". Now you have a ie: 7-year-old riding a bike on a street. Bicycle driving lessons the same as a car to learn the rules of the road. This is the way it was when I was young and it should be implimented again. The role of the bicycle is changing.

as to the bike in Vancouver the best way to deal with it is licence and insure the bicycles then they can ride on the roads I pay taxes for thru the taxes on fuel.

In the mean time just ban them north of broadway.

"Well it appears Elizabeth May, Green party Leader of Canada has just given the boot to one of the worldwide Green movement's core values."

And that is to allow someone with kook ideas to run? What if this person was running for the Liberals or Conservatives or NDP and stressed his 9/11 conspiracy ideas? He wouldn't last long in those parties, either.

It is interesting that the topic which was Potivn's kook ideas on the causes of 9/11 have turned into bicycle bridges and lanes.

We can't have any Greens embarassing Mr. Dion now, can we? How quickly chickens come home to roost.

"Out of context"?

I would love to know just how many Green supporters and other candidates share Kevin Potvin's sentiments. That is to say, who get excited about mass murder, because it's convenient symbolic reality check for the USA.

Imagine religious conservatives everywhere started gushing about, I dunno, a hurricane that killed hundreds of people on the grounds they deserved it because they were homosexual sinners.

Oh right. That happened after Hurricane Katrina, and everyone condemned it. As they rightly should. If Mr. Potvin and some of his ideological bedfellows were randomly murdered out on the street, and others came out and cheered it "symbolically" because they despise Potvin's politics, would that be okay then?

Anyone whose first thought at the horrific deaths of three thousand people is the politics surrounding the event, is a morally bankrupt jerk so consumed with ideological hatred they can no long make distinctions between good and evil.

I have to laugh at the Potvin defenders. In one way it is scary to realize that there really are people out there who have such a warped perception of reality. But then again these individuals feel that they have all the answers and we are all so ignorant not to see their insights. Thank god these individuals will never reflect the mainstream because it really would be a world on insanity.

Sadly, Kevin Potvin's commentary is typical of the dim witted fanaticism that is a hallmark of the green movement.

Wow! Israel and friends of Israel win.. yet again!

Wow! Yet another anti-Israel comment from someone using the rather ironic user-name "Real Conservative". I say ironic since I've never seen a comment which is even remotely conservative from this user name; just comments like a slanted caricature of what a leftist believes a conservative might be... yet this article is about a Green candidate who has been sacked for his bizarre beliefs. Ironic, indeed.

As a Green I am very disappointed in Elizabeth May. At the first sign of mainstream media criticism of Mr. Potvin, she tramples on the grassroots of our party. I don't agree with Kevin Potvin on 9/11 but I think he would have been an excellent, vocal and principled candidate for us. Instead, we'll end up with an obscure, no-name candidate. We're becoming exactly like all the other top-down political parties as we allow our "leaders" to sacrifice our principles for the sake of political expediency. Shame on us.

Green Guy, if May hadn't given Potvin the boot this would have absolutely sunk her hopes and the green party's hopes. It would have become a massive distraction. It already has been - look at how much it took away from the recent Dion annoucement. She could have been talking about beating up on Mackay and the Green/Liberal love in, but she is still dealing with the fallout from this.

Plus, there would have been huge ammo for the Conservatives to paint the Liberals as soft on defence/anti-american with their recent leaders' pact. By canning him now, she minimizes the damage.

posted by gerry: "I have to laugh at the Potvin defenders. In one way it is scary to realize that there really are people out there who have such a warped perception of reality. But then again these individuals feel that they have all the answers and we are all so ignorant not to see their insights. Thank god these individuals will never reflect the mainstream because it really would be a world on insanity."
Hmmmm...and here I was wondering what to make of my feelings about the fact that people in the west can blithely drive their fat arses down to their favourite fast food emporiums to load up on their favourite carcinogens while their governments kill millions of innocent women and children with bombs and/or toxic uranium dust. It would seem that I'm the one with a "warped perception of reality".

Yes..by all means..let's hope that people like Kevin Potvin and myself never "reflect the mainstream"...I mean, what would become of our society if we were to truly embrace green principles and, more importantly, were to, en masse, demand an end to imperialism, genocide and exploitation of those in the third world. Quelle Horreur!!!!

Why bother voting Green now that Elizabeth May has endorsed Dion?

I'm not a member of the Green Party, so I can't nominate Sleeps to be their candidate in Kingsway. Any Greens out there who might like to do the honours? At least do it for the amusement value.

The Greens, the NDP, The Liberals, the Democratic left in the USA have gone from simply wrong to becoming some of the best entertainment this new millennia could have asked for.

You are the the political equivalent of the Keystone Cops. This political slap stick, political stand up comedy ... all of it rolled up in one confused convoluted ideology.

Keep it up ... we on the right, love it.

It was the greatest thing to do under the ridiculous circumstances created by Potvin. Ms May deserves a pat on the back for standing up against this left-wing extremist.

Instead, we'll end up with an obscure, no-name candidate.

Potvin was an obscure, no-name candidate until his disgraceful comments came to light. Now he can go back to being a mindless left-wing drone advancing mindless left-wing conspiracy theories dressed up as "nuanced, progressive thought."

All these people defending him simply confirm that the liberal's most feared enemies are history and reason.

Had May done anything but can him, she would have been dismissed as just another wacko socialist leading a bunch of other wacko socialists. But now she might get 10, maybe even 12 votes against Mackay.

Now if we can just get the Tories and Liberals to dump all their candidates who support the Canadian occupation of Afghanistan, we'll be even.

Occupation...right. Read a book sometime, obscurantist, and have a grownup handy to help you with the big words, like "occupation".

In the early 1900's the people of Vienna elected a mayor who espoused deeply anti-semetic ideals about putting all the jews in the world on a boat and then sinking it. The Austro-Hungarian government overrode this election and made another man mayor. Despite all the good things he talked about, such extreme veiws have no place in any liberal society (even the more authoritarian ones).

Democracy does not always mean the right thing will happen. Often unchecked democracy is just a strange organized anarchist-mob like contraption where people act in a herd like manner. May's action (while controversial) are essential to keeping our democracy a liberal democracy (and not in the party sense, but in the philosophical sense that our Nations government is founded upon).

You can argue against it's grassroots offensiveness all you like, but in the reality of our liberal society... there can be such a thing as too much democracy, and any serious party leader understands that.

Potvin's words were NOT taken out of context, or twisted, or spun. He wrote what he wrote.

May's slow action on firing him has turned me against her for good.

Still may vote Green, will depend on the local candidate, but May is no leader, and not fit to head up the Green Party.

"timely email from a Green Party organizer caught me in another fantasizing moment, and I agreed to run as a Green in Vancouver-Kingsway"

Does that mean the Greens asked him to run?

I wonder if Ben West recruited Potvin. He is the Green Party outreach coordinator and both he and Potvin are on the Grandview Woodlands Area Council together.

Obscurantist, I noticed that your post here was given official praise on Babble by writer, a former editor of that site. You must be honoured! Personally I find writer's own posts to be a mysterious mixture, some reasonably perceptive, other's more towards the fringe.

Your good friend Kevin Potvin is a different matter. He is the fringe by definition. If any real good comes out of this episode it will be that the hardball rejection of a Vancouver candidate by the so-called leader of a fringe national party on the grounds that the guy is just too damned flakey even for her bunch will serve as a reminder to Vancouver's insular, irresponsible, and self-indulgent political class, from Ladner to Cadman, that there are limits to how much bloody baloney the rest of Canada is willing to put up with.

Of course I know Canadian troops aren’t engaged in an “occupation” of Afghanistan, Darrell. It was poetic licence on my part, and I apologize profusely for any misunderstanding I may have created.

Our women and men in uniform are engaged in “reconstruction” (of the infrastructure that NATO forces helped wreck in the first place), and we’re there at the request of Hamid Karzai, the legitimately elected (and heavily guarded) mayor of Kabul. And every time our heroic soldiers waste twenty or forty or eighty of the seemingly inexhaustible “Taliban” fighters in a single battle, a little voice inside me cheers, “Yeah! Beautiful!”

And we’ll be there until... um, until... well, as long as we have to be to make Afghanistan safe for democracy and Canada safe from terrorism, I guess. Or until we run out of soldiers. Whichever comes first.

Anyways, I just wanted to check something. I think I've figured out how to do boldface on this site, but I'm not sure. I just wanna be able to do it, because it looks so cool. So let's see whether this works....