West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country

Friend --

I have delayed this update a little, in order to include an important initiative I have been working on.  More on that later.

So we are not caught short, please know that I have agreed to run again if we are faced with a snap election, although the likelihood of this seems somewhat diminished after the recent departure of Andrew Scheer.  If the sitting parliament runs full term or close to it, a new candidate selection exercise seems the appropriate way to handle this.

Red Deer Conference

First, for those who have not seen it, here is the recording of Max's speech at the Red Deer conference.

Max's Keynote Address in Red Deer

This was a fantastic conference filled with top quality speakers, organized by Danny Hozack.  Franca and I stayed on the same floor of the conference hotel as Max and the organizers and, along with other PPC candidates and EDA executives, we were invited to attend gatherings in the evening.  I won't soon forget the opportunity to mingle with Max and the others, eating pizza with a glass of wine.

https://freedomtalk.com

Election Wrap Up

Today, I signed off on the auditor's report on our campaign election expenses.  The final total was $22,005.70.  A rough breakdown is $6K for signs, $1K for wood sign frames, with the bulk of the rest spent on printing, mailing, & advertising.  We ran weekly print ads in all 5 of the papers with circulation in our riding:  The Northshore  News; Squamish Chief; Whistler Pique; Bowen Island Undercurrent; and Coast Reporter.  The Coast Reporter also did an audio interview which can be heard here:

Coast Reporter Audio Interview

Our campaign was highly competitive on election signage.  The major parties held only a slight edge in sign quantity, but our sign quality was better than all the rest.  The same can be said for our print ads, where our ad frequency exceeded the other parties.  Our on-line advertising was a bit weak, as were our direct mail and door-knocking efforts.  We learned a lot in this first campaign and I am determined to put into place the tools required to make substantial improvements where necessary.

Information Technology Initiative

I think our biggest short-coming was a failure to effectively utilize volunteers.  This deficiency is not limited to our riding and is a direct result of the limited time elapsed between the founding of the PPC and our first election contest.  My initial thought was that our EDA needs an IT system to facilitate all of the things that go into the running of a campaign.  My second though was that we are not the only riding that needs this.

One of my reasons for attending the Red Deer conference was to talk to Max about this need and to get his input.  Since then, I have been de-risking the project and recruiting volunteers on some limited Twitter message boards.  For those interested, the details at the bottom of this email come from a project update I sent out a couple of days ago.  If you have relevant skills and an interest in helping with this project, please contact me.

Fundraising

I have disabled the Donations page on my campaign website, now that the financials are complete and audited.  Any further contributions should be made through the EDA:

https://www.wvscssppc.ca/donate

If you have remaining contribution room, before the end of the year is a good time for donations.  That way you will be able to claim your tax credit next April.  And of course, 2020 will open up a new contribution period, one that I and members of my family await.

People's Information Management System (PIMS) Project Update

The following section in italics  is only for those with an interest in this sort of thing.  If that is not you then you can stop reading here.

Merry Christmas to all,

Doug 

"This email is going out to 8 individuals, 4 at National HQ and 4 others who have expressed interest in the PIMS Project.  Among them are 2 software programmers, 1 web developer and 1 more with business experience in IT development.  I have volunteered to do the Business Process Analysis work and to create an initial project specification, for review.  Just today, one more seasoned programmer has volunteered to help but has not been included on this email.  I think it quite likely that a wider request for assistance would bring in many more potential contributors.

The PIMS acronym is derived from the Conservative Party's CIMS naming convention and I envision a future smart phone app which might be called PPC2GO.

The initial scope of the project will include Candidates / EDAs / Regional Coordinators.  I hope to schedule a trip to Gatineau in January to extend the project scope to include National HQ.  I will prepare a presentation of our progress in advance of that trip.

We have settled on Visual Paradigm Pro for initial requirement gathering.  The Pro version includes a cloud-based story board which will be useful in a distributed development environment.  2 subscription licenses have been acquired and initial evaluation looks positive.  https://www.visual-paradigm.com/

The software development environment is likely to be PostgreSQL / Python (IDE is PyCharm Pro) / Django / Bitbucket (SourceTree) / Heroku for prototyping.  We have acquired 2 licenses for PyCharm Pro https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/ and have tested these against an installation of PostgreSQL v12 with the latest release of Django.  I now have a sufficient level of confidence around the amount of de-risking done to date that I am starting the system specification work.

Merry Christmas to all.  Lets make 2020  a productive year for the PPC."

Robert (Doug) Bebb
www.bebb2019ppc.ca