Talk:Jim Harris (politician)/Archive 1

message: Hello,
Does anyone have any information about the 1993 GPO leadership campaign?  Specifically: what was the final vote total, were there any other candidates besides Harris and de Jong, where did it take place, how many were in attendance? CJCurrie 00:50, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: 1993 GPO Leadership Contest

message: I've just reviewed Harris's business page -- and, in fact, all three of the companies previously listed in the article (GM, Honeywell, Mobil) appear on his list of clients.  So too do numerous other companies.  I'm not sure this qualifies as any sort of smoking gun -- for a motivational speaker to meet with such groups is not unusual, nor is it much different from a lawyer defending clients with a wide range of views (many of which are bound to diverge from his/her own).
If you can find a credible source (ie. not the GPC discussion board) which cites complaints against Harris on this front, it might be possible to return this information.  Until then ... CJCurrie 23:01, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Harris's clients

message: The most complete version of the article yet, with over fifty different references should be debated and examined point by point on this talk page.  For one person to hide it from sight and comment and decide what is balanced or reasonable isn't the way things are usually done.
Anyone who sees the Canadian media can verify that the main attention Jim Harris has got in this election has been for the internal conflicts within his party - this is not a minor matter.  Do a major media search (CBC, CP, CTV, Canwest, National Post) and you will discover that the biggest stories have been Harris' financial doings, his many conflicts with women within the party, the failure of the party to get its platform out the door, his absence during the campaign's kickoff, opening his campaign to an empty room, and so on.  The ineptness is a story in itself, and it might be the only story worth reporting on this man who has no chance even of taking a seat in the Canadian House of Commons, and who won re-election by a very slim majority (54%) way down from his original 80%, even after a huge breakthrough.  You have to wonder, what kind of guy is so hated that his support drops so far so fast even when he's increasing the vote by five or six times over the prior election?  Neutrality also means honesty - not permitting people to turn this page into spam for their books and so on.
In a few sad cases, to give someone a 50-50 good-bad coverage is not neutral as a random poll of people who know him well or have worked with him would turn up a much lower ratio than that.  The article doesn't make a big deal of the fact, for instance, that all his former assistants Matthew Pollesel, Robert Newman, Gabriel Draven, Hayley Easto, Michael Pilling are all totally and irreconcilably alienated from the guy, or that he ran through Matthew Day, Robin Green, Derek Pinto and Dan King as campaign managers in this election alone.  For Harris more like 10-90 good-bad on his dealings with people in his own party, would be giving him a very nice break.  In the field his track record is radically worse than that.  Even Adolf Hitler had some people left with him in his bunker at the end.  It's not sure that Harris will, at the rate he burns through people.  He might have to be in a rising party just to make friends who don't know him yet.
Anyway it would be valuable to decide in an open process what the key facts are.
If you're concerned about this bio being used as a partisan platform to attack the Green Party of Canada, then, instead of trying for a bogus balance in this article, why not expand on Andrew Lewis, David Chernushenko, Michael Oddy, Frank De Jong, Lynette Tremblay and other Greens in Canada? [unsigned]
My response:
Some aspects of the previous posts are worth keeping.  The problem is that the general presentation was rather amateurish, and some statements were over the top.
A few months ago, this page was effectively a battlefield between pro- and anti-Harris posters.  The result was that the page was basically an unreadable polemic.  I don't want to see this happen again.
You have to wonder, what kind of guy is so hated that his support drops so far so fast even when he's increasing the vote by five or six times over the prior election?
Even Adolf Hitler had some people left with him in his bunker at the end.  It's not sure that Harris will, at the rate he burns through people.  
Notwithstanding the legitimate criticisms of Harris, I think this may be a bit over the top as well.  Perhaps someone could just reference Stuart Parker's essay, and that would be that.  CJCurrie 18:00, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Point by point examination 

message: There have been a whole pile of accusations added to the "Conflict and Controversy" section of this article. Some of those accusations are stated as simple fact, rather than identifying that they are accusations and who is making those accusations. There appears to be a bit of an edit war brewing here, involving anonymous contributors who seem intent on presenting a negative POV on the article's subject. Additionally, some of the content seems like it may fit better under a controversies heading for the Green Party of Canada article rather than this article. 
So, I have a request to the anonymous contributors who want to include the accusations against Harris in this article: Please review the Neutral point of view policy and the tutorial before adding accusations to this (or any other) article. If you follow the directions there, your content is far more likely to remain in the article (which is what you want, isn't it?). --GrantNeufeld 10:20, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bias and Neutral Point of View 

message: Murray Dobbin's articles on Jim Harris and the Green Party were extremely biased and factually innaccurate, to put it moderately.  Furthermore, he is a partisan member of the NDP. (see *http://www.canadiandemocraticmovement.ca/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=791).  I am a member of the Green Party so obviously I'm biased myself, but I don't see why Dobbin's propaganda deserves mention on Wikipedia.Nick.annejohn 19:04, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Murray Dobbin's articles 

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thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Jimharris.jpg