BUSY BUSY BUSY in SURREY

BUSY BUSY BUSY in SURREY


Hi Folks,


You may have noticed that I haven't been posting as much as I normally do, but I've been out in Surrey for a number of weeks now (3 to be exact) working on a promotional and marketing campaign. No not for the Liberal Party of Canada. I'm leaving that to all the leadership campaigns.

Speaking of Liberal values, I have been very active at my Van-East riding level in the party re-newal process. I've been championing Liiberal policy dialogue meetings in our riding and we have hosted a number of very successful ones over the summer. More and more community members, Liberals and non Liberals alike are attending and articulating their viewpoints. I also attended the recent United Native Nations convention in Kamloops, bringing greetings from our riding association.

Our riding has come up with I think a very constructive Chronic Homelessness policy, which we hope will make it onto the convention floor at the Liberal convention in November. Hopefully, Van-Centre will join hands with us, speaking in support of this policy, which our Policy Chair, Lea Johnson has crafted and fine-tuned, which hasn't been an easy task with the various viewpoints needing to be incorporated into the wording. But we are almost there!

As the elected Vice-President of our riding, I have been instrumental in pushing for the return of our meetings back into our riding. I also championed the need for directors-at-large to be appointed to our riding executive. This has provided our riding with a great group of very capable and talented people. I would especially like to welcome back to our executive, Janet Lew, who took a number of years off to fulfill other obligations.

I have worked on the last two federal campaigns in Van-East where we were fortunate to have stellar Liberal candidates, Shirley Chan and Dave Haggard carry the Liberal banner. From those campaigns, I have observed the need to build a stronger grassroots riding association and have undertaken this, at times, daunting task.

I attended as many Liberal mtg's as I could during the recent Liberal Caucus tour. I even attended a Larry Campbell roundtable in the DTES. I observed that he hasn't changed much, except his face is more flushed.

Speaking of change, I hope to be a delegate at the upcoming convention in Montreal. I know many of the leadership contenders desire their supporters to fill the riding delegate spots, however, I'm hopeful that our members will recognize the hard work that I've put in over the years and provide me an opportunity to attend.

So that's it for now.

Enjoy a pleasant Labour day weekend everyone!

Jamie Lee Hamilton
tricia_foxx@yahoo.com