Taking the pulse of the voters

The winds of change are blowing in Vancouver Quadra.

I was canvassing for Conservative Party candidate Stephen Rogers in my own neighborhood this afternoon. By the time our little walk-through was finished, I was feeling pretty good about our chances.

We set out around 1 pm with a list of supporters (signified by happy faces next to their names), undecideds and non-supporters. We also had some "hockey cards" of our candidate with different Conservative policy summaries on health, taxes and justice (collect them all!).

It was nice to see a few Conservative lawn signs in the area - not as many as we would have liked, but the other parties don't seem to have made too much progress in that department either.

Maybe people just don't want to attract the vandalism that hit owners with signs last time we had an election (although if I recall correctly, the NDP signs were the only ones that didn't attract mischief. Hmmm).

Stephen had a few friendly chats with our supporters on our route. Mostly, we were knocking on doors of 'undecideds' to guage which way they were leaning.

A lot of times, residents said they'd voted Liberal in the last election; but the scandals that the Grits were nailed for still haven't gone away and residents of all stripes are unimpressed with the dumb Liberal moves during this campaign... and now they are leaning towards the Conservatives.

One interesting note - on the phones the other day, one voter said how he was changing his vote to Conservative because of Paul Martin's sudden decision to get rid of the Notwithstanding Clause (you remember - that little piece of our constitution that ensures our elected leaders have the final say, so that unelected judges - mostly Liberal appointees - don't run the country.

Thanks for that, Paul. Keep flailing.

After an afternoon of meeting with the people, I went out to vote for my candidate at an advance polling station. I've decided to make that a tradition every election. There was no lineup! I was done in about three minutes. Nice.

If anyone else is interested in helping out, there is still time before the election on Jan. 23 to make a difference. Take a lawn sign, work the phones or get involved as a scrutineer at the polls (we'll need a few hundred on election day just for Vancouver Quadra!).

For contact information for Stephen Rogers and the Conservatives, click here.
But whatever your political stripes, let's all get involved and show democracy is alive and well in this country.

tags: Conservative Party, Stephen Rogers, political stripes, polling station, advance polling, Vancouver Quadra, Canadian election 2005, go door to door