With one week left to file nomination papers, Canwest wrote a story today on the state of the slate over at the Green Party. I did my best to ensure all my names were up-to-date from all public sources, and we took the figures at 2:00 PM ... since that would be exactly one week from the deadline (next Monday September 21, at 2:00 PM local-time) that all candidates must file their papers.

Here's what Shannon Proudfoot wrote:

The Greens have pledged to run a full slate of candidates across the country for the Oct. 14 vote, but had only 176 nominees confirmed as of 2 p.m. ET Monday, based on all available information gathered by PunditsGuide.ca. The party appears to have significant gaps in Quebec, the Atlantic provinces and across the Prairies.

However, party spokesman Mike Gosselin says the Greens had 203 candidates nominated, screened and approved as of Monday afternoon.

"We will have 306 candidates," says national campaign chair Jim Harris. "That's unequivocal, there's no question."

The candidates verified by the Pundits' Guide amount to 57 per cent of the 306 candidates required for a full slate, not counting the two ridings where the party has already committed not to run against Liberal Leader Stephane Dion or independent MP Bill Casey.

With 130 ridings still to be confirmed based on Canwest's analysis, the Greens will need to nominate an average of 19 candidates a day in order to achieve the national status the party declared when pushing for Elizabeth May to be included in the leaders' debate.

Sure enough, by dinner-time a few new names starting to appear on their web-site's candidate list (found here), which got my totals up to 179 from 176 where they'd been earlier.

But meanwhile, over at Rabble.ca, one of their election bloggers had been sent an internal party email, indicating that candidate recruitment would have to ramp up quickly. Some babble ensued, and the Globe & Mail picked up the story by 7 PM. Except that by 7 PM, the Green Party now said they had 286 candidates confirmed.

News hit the west coast sometime after that, with the Georgia Straight reporting the Green Party had rushed out a revised list of B.C. candidates after the Rabble.ca story. The list includes "Green Jim" Stephenson in North Vancouver, the same fellow who had been their candidate in West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Sea to Sky Country, but stepped aside to make way for Independent-turned-Green M.P. Blair Wilson to become his new party's candidate a few weeks ago.

While all this was going on, I was struggling to make sure all the names I had counted for Canwest were actually entered into the database. The upshot is that the 7 additional BC names which just surfaced this evening on the west coast are not in the database just yet, but I'll get them in tomorrow. That gets the Green Party up to 29/32 BC candidates, or 186/308 overall (60%), that are publicly source-able at the present time.

So, if you're a Green Party candidate, and your name is not on our list yet, please get in touch right away to ensure it's added.

Labels: 40th General Election Nominations, Greens