Thursday, April 29, 2010

Ontario Ginger Project Organizes

An organized left within the Ontario NDP is working to develop a comprehensive left platform for the parrty. Their blog states:

In late 2008, The Ginger Project was founded with the intention of promoting the Democratic Socialist electoral platform that the NDP lacked during the ONDP leadership campaign. (The NDP, alone among all Western Socialist and Social Democratic parties, refuses to adopt and publish a comprehensive, evolving platform that exists both during and between elections).
 
We continue to wish to stimulate discussions relating to issues of both socialist democracy as well as public policy. This will help us to promote a more leftist agenda for our Province.

Follow their blog here.

Ginger Group in history (Wikipedia)

The Ginger Group was not a formal political party in Canada, but a faction of radical Progressive and Labour Members of Parliament who advocated socialism. The group is said to have taken its name from Ginger Goodwin, a United Mine Workers organizer. Ginger was shot dead outside Cumberland, British Columbia by company hired private policemen on July 27, 1918. His murder sparked Canada's first general strike. The term ginger group also refers to small group with new, radical ideas trying to act as a catalyst within a larger body.

The Ginger Group split with the Progressive Party in 1924 when Progressive leader Robert Forke proved too eager to accommodate the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King and agreed to support the government's budget with only minimal concessions. J. S. Woodsworth, using his right as the leader of the Independent Labour MPs, moved a stronger amendment to the budget based on demands the Progressives had made in earlier years but had since abandoned.

The Progressive and Labour MPs who broke with their Progressive colleagues to support Woodsworth became the "Ginger Group" and was made up of United Farmers of Alberta MPs George Gibson Coote, Robert Gardiner, Edward Joseph Garland, Donald MacBeth Kennedy and Henry Elvins Spencer as well as United Farmers of Ontario MP Agnes Macphail. The group was later joined by Labour MPs J.S. Woodsworth, William Irvine, Abraham Albert Heaps and Angus MacInnis, independent MP Joseph Tweed Shaw and Progressive MPs Milton Neil Campbell, William John Ward W.C. Good and Preston Elliott.

Members of the Ginger Group played a role in forming the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in 1932, with Woodsworth becoming the new party's leader.

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