Leadership race sign ups

I was talking with my two boys about the leadership races to get a sense of where they are at with the race.  To remind people, I encouraged them to join a party and vote. Daniel is a member of the Liberals and Ben is a member of the NDP.

They are very angry at the signing up of a cat, they feel it is unfair, wrong and insulting for this to have happened.  Daniel decided he wanted to sign up all the kitchen appliances or all the grains of sand at the beach, but he realized he was too late to do that.    It is the most energized I have seen him about the race so far.

I will say that the big impact of this 'bullshit' is that at age 16 and 13 respectively Daniel and Ben feel insulted and abused by the political process.   My intention was to get them involved and feeling like they had a stake in politics.  I want to encourage the idealism of youth that they could change the world in some way and there is a point to the world of politics.    Instead the membership stuff is leaving them cynical and angry.

I will get some more input from Daniel about his impressions of the campaign and post them here.  I really want to know who he likes and why and who his second choice is.   I know he is going to want to rant about the cat, I will try and get beyond that.

Ben got a couple of interesting emails from within the NDP including a nice note from Paul Ramsey.  Ben has a much longer road to go to know enough that he will feel comfortable voting, that is his view, not mine.

I wish many more youth joined the political parties, they have much more of a stake in the outcome than I do.   100,000 teenagers joining teh BC Liberals would have overwhelmed the other sign ups.   The youth at Esquimalt high could have easily owned all the votes for their riding given the small membership.