It's Alive!

... No, not this blog (although I'm grateful for a cyber-kick to the rear end from Erin Airton for guilting me into posting again).

I'm talking about the CPC in downtown Toronto.

As I've said here before, I'm the President of the CPC's Trinity-Spadina EDA (hold the applause - it isn't exactly a hotbed of conservatism - yet). Last night, we hosted a "Town Hall" meeting which drew about 100 folks from a number of "416" ridings. 100 people out on the night of a heatwave to listen to 3 MP's and a couple of candidates (plus one thankfully-brief EDA president!) isn't too bad. We weren't able to confirm everything until about a week prior to the event, which limited our ability to get notice out. Hopefully that won't be a factor next time.

Anyway, we had a good line-up. The moderator was St. Paul CPC candidate Peter Kent, and as speakers we had CPC MP's Peter Van Loan, Steven Fletcher and Monte Solberg. Our candidate in Trinity-Spadina, Sam Goldstein (website to follow shortly!) batted clean-up, and did very well. PVL spoke more on party organisation, while Steven and Monte talked more policy. Not a lot of policy details were announced, which did irk some people; my understanding is that the platform will be released plank-by-plank over the next couple of months. Hopefully, once that's done we can have another gathering like last night's.

All in all, I was pleased with how it turned out. After dreading the thought of there being 15 or so people in the crowd, I wasn't too sorry to see 100 faces in the audience. It goes without saying that downtown T.O. is tough sledding for Conservatives; the thing is, we know that, but we still don't plan on running a mere paper campaign.

For more commentary - of a more unbiased nature than my own, to be sure - check out RightGirl and LIB.

More later.