Canada is facing a general election later this year. A lot of us mere mortals are alarmed at the direction Canada is headed.

There is a widespread feeling that Canada, a vast nation with so much good land, one of the biggest forest and water and resources, is heading in a dangerous direction of denigration of its living space, its environment and its socio-economic fabric, for the sake of disproportionate profit by a few.

In the middle of this crisis, our very democracy might be facing new challenges.

Canadians as it is have a poor record of voting.

Now new facts are emerging raises question on the very process employed within many political parties in selecting their candidate that could be unethical, and cloaked in secrecy.

This blog is an effort to start chronicling firsts hand information and observations on this, and same time ask ourselves, as citizens of a free democratic nation, what we the people might do, to clean up our politics, our elections, and our nation. We owe it to ourselves to do so.

Clean democracy does not fall from the sky like snowflakes. We have to work to keep it clean, else it will taken away from under our feet. How? Well, there may be reasons to suspect that :

• a large number of people are of a sudden becoming party members in droves just in time to participate in candidate selection, probably for the sole reason of influencing the selection process but otherwise taking no part in volunteering or promoting either party doctrine or our democratic process in any other way.
• a number of these “sudden members” may not even know that they were members of a specific party, or that they might have voted in some candidate. In other words, there is reason to suspect that their name and signature may have been unethically produced.
• that some of these members may not actually be living within the riding, and the address written in their forms seem not to be the place where they actually live.
• that some of these people, might have been members of more than one party at the same time and their names may have been used for more than one party candidate selection process.

Introducing Ms Wendy Bales, of Deroche, BC, a small businesswoman, an organic farmer, a sustainable agriculture campaigner, and a politician, on her observations on what she found going on, in her riding.

She found some evidence of questionable goings on while canvassing for herself as an NDP potential candidate in the last Provincial election, wanting to be the selected member of the party. She subsequently found it hard to investigate the matter further because of difficulty in accessing membership and voting record data. She eventually resigned from the party, removed her name from it, and is now contemplating running for office in the federal election on an independent ticket.

The party in the process lost a genuine and hard wording candidate with a lot of responsible social work behind her, and Canada lost an honest and deserving candidate.

This is not to say that the problem exists only in her riding or only in NDP. She is now worried that the issue may be beyond individual parties and widespread, and the system is being abused because there is this lack of transparency and because parties can and do high their internal workings away from public eye.

It may be time for the people of Canada to demand that each political party makes all its books available first of all to all of its members, and then to the wider population, if they wish to earn the trust of voters.

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This is the first of more videos and information on the topic.

If you know of questionable goings on in your own area, or have something to contribute to this topic – send me a note.