Mapping Green priorities

Today’s the first day of the Green Party’s biannual convention. Julia and I are in Ottawa and we’re excited to be part of policymaking and seeing what this whole convention business is all about.

Ahead of the actual convention, all the Green Party members were invited to vote on 13 policy resolutions that would be considered at this weekend’s convention. The results of that voting are publicly available, and while they are not binding, they give a good sense of the party’s mood going into this convention.

I’ve done a little data crunching on the results, and created a graph to help better visualize which issues might be most contentious.

The horizontal axis measures the resolution’s average priority, out of a score of 4. The vertical axis measures the resolution’s support, out of a score of 2. The first thing to note is that the axes don’t start at zero. Even the least popular, least important resolution has over 50% support from the broad party membership.

So what does this tell us? There’s a clear grouping of resolutions in the top right that should get passed no problem. Improving parks, waterways, transit, green energy… these are all quintessentially Green policies. Expanding our healthcare system to include dental? Seems like a logical progression. And the limits on tug-barge petroleum tankers is a direct response to the dangers of fossil fuel pipeline expansion.

The resolutions in the bottom left — especially those that wade into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are bound to be more contentious.

It looks like we’ll have our hands full this weekend. Let’s get into it!

Sam Nabi