Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The Young And The Restless

A few short days ago, I wrote a post in which I described the pervasive deficit of doing and the surplus of talking amongst supposed Principled Conservatives who are aggrieved with the state of things in Ontario today.

It occured to me shortly afterwards that a demonstration of how this is done may be needed.
As I write this, the youth of the PC Party of Ontario are hard at work on merging the youth and campus wings of the party. For reference purposes, the youth wing is the Ontario Progressive Conservative Youth Association (OPCYA) and the campus wing is the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association (OPCCA). A letter from Grant Dingwall, the OPCYA President, can be read here.

Now, for those of you who have no idea how OPCYA and OPCCA affect your lives (and offhand, I'd guess that's a lot of people), I'll make it very, very simple. We currently have two organizations that draw on the same pool of youth volunteers. People in OPCYA can be in OPCCA and vice versa. Furthermore, in 5 other provinces, there is only one youth organization as opposed to two.

It should be noted that there is no intention to create a youth wing where one currently does not exist, as was the case during the federal convention early this year.

Now, if anyone can raise an objection from a conservative point of view to the idea that we should have one youth organization instead of two, I would like to hear it. Because I haven't heard one yet.

I am aware that merging two youth associations into one youth association is not going to put Ontario back on track. But, by cracky, it is one of the first instances I can recall in a long time where people in our party decided to reform things from within instead of complaining about problems external to the party.

I am also aware that people may not approve of this change, saying that it may go too far or that it may not go far enough. That's fine. That's what democracy is about. But if you feel quite strongly that this merger is the worst idea ever, please note that this idea was conceived of and is being implemented by the youth of our party, and it would be very difficult- in my opinion- to justify an attack on our party's future leaders for doing what they said they would do once elected to their current positions.

So I ask you once again, readers: if the youth wing can work to make this happen, what's stopping you?

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