Equality Party 2.0 Selects Interim Leader

As I mentioned a while back, The Equality party is in the process of re-forming, now going through the necessary steps to become certified with the Directeur général des élections  du Québec (DEG), a process that gives official standing and allows the party to run candidates in the next provincial election.
It seems that in the eyes of the election commissioner the old Equality Party has lapsed and cannot be resurrected.

And so the whole process of creating a political party must start from scratch, including collecting memberships, filling out forms, providing a deposit, etc. etc.

Until the time that the party is official, posts will be filled on an interim basis, pending a general membership vote.

This last weekend, the interim committee selected Mark S. Bergeron as the interim leader and if you are not familiar with the name, let me refresh your memory.

"A Quebec couple has lodged a complaint with the province’s ambulance service after they say a paramedic refused to speak to them in English as their daughter suffered a seizure.
Last weekend, Mark Bergeron and Stephanie Hansen of Vaudreuil, just outside Montreal, called an ambulance for their two-year-old daughter Ella, who was convulsing and unresponsive with a febrile seizure. Children can have these types of seizures when they develop a fever and their body temperature rises quickly."
“Her eyes were closed, she was unconscious,” Bergeron told CTV Montreal. “She wasn’t responding to anything (the paramedics) were doing.”

Two-year-old Ella tries out a slide in Montreal on Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012.

Bergeron is bilingual, but began having trouble understanding medical terms the paramedics were using in French, and so asked if they could all switch to English.
“With a lot of hostility in his voice he basically said to me, ‘No, moi je parle francais,’ meaning that I had to address him in the language that he was comfortable with in this situation, which in my opinion was absolutely unacceptable,” Bergeron said. Read and watch an interview with Mark

The incident convinced Mark to get involved with this new version of the Equality Party, one that will speak up for individual rights as well as other economic and social issues from a federalist standpoint.

 Here is a bio provided to me;

I was born in Montreal on February 23, 1976 to an Anglophone father and Italian mother.

My paternal grandfather was a rare Anglo Bergeron and my paternal grandmother was Hungarian. My father, however, was raised by his Hungarian grandparents and only learned to speak English at the age of 6.

My mother was born in Italy and her family came to Canada in search of a better life when she was young. My grandfather passed away shortly after arriving in Canada and my grandmother raised 5 children on her own in Montreal, speaking nothing but Italian her entire life.

We were raised in the West Island, born in Kirkland, spent my teenage years in Beaconsfield, and finally settled in Hudson in 1993.

I attended French school throughout my formative years, from Pre-School to Grade 4, at École St. Rémi in Beaconsfield. From there, I attended private school, Lower Canada College, in NDG until graduation in 1993. In 1994, I opted for LCC’s Pre-University program in lieu of CEGEP, which allowed me advanced placement in University, outside of Quebec. The program is not recognized by Quebec institutions.

In the fall of 1995, I left Quebec for the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton campus. My first two years were in the Science program, specializing in Biology. My father, however, convinced me to switch into the Business Administration Program so that I could run the family business. I graduated in the Spring of 2000 with a BBA (Bachelor of Business Administration) with a Major in Finance.

In April 2001, shortly following my return to Montreal, I completed both the Canadian Securities Course (with High Honours) and the Insurance of Persons course offered by La Chambre de la Sécurité Financière.

My return to Montreal included my wife, a unilingual, Anglo New Brunswicker, and  we settled down in Montreal West. We lived there for eleven years until our family (We have 3 children) outgrew our place and moved to Vaudreuil-Dorion.

I work alongside my father as a Financial Security Advisor, managing a client base of over 2,000 individuals, and approaching $70 million of assets under management. Essentially, I am a self-employed financial services broker, but the aforementioned is my official title. In addition, I am Vice-President of my father’s corporation.

A while back, I wrote a piece describing why I think a political party representing equal rights is important and why a seat in Parliament is not as important as one would intuitively think.

Firstly, as a bone fide political party, the leader could not be kept off the airwaves and would naturally have the "right of reply" to those who propose limits on personal freedom.
As of now, despite the best efforts of those in the Anglo/Ethnic community who have organized lobby groups, nobody is called upon to offer a defence of individual rights in the mainstream media, when those rights are attacked by franco-supremacists.

Let me put it bluntly, when loudmouths, like Mario Beaulieu spout their nonsensical ethnocentric rhetoric on television, the Equality party can rightfully demand (and in my opinion will receive) the right to counter those arguments. The media, like it or not, will have no other choice but to present a response from a bone fide political party in the interests of fairness.

Secondly, the leader of a bone fide political party can speak with some authority across Canada, bringing the message to Canadians that personal rights are being infringed in Quebec and that it is the duty of those in the ROC to defend those rights, rather than just give up on Quebec and the millions of Canadians living here who don't want to be abandoned and who do not wish to flee.

The coming per vote subsidy can provide tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, money that can be used to build support in Ottawa and the ROC for a defence of our individual and collective rights.

As for specific policies I'm not going to presume to speak for the party or the leader, the former and the latter will no doubt apprise the public as to what it is the Equality Party 2.0 stands for.

I have been provided this quick policy comparison which you can peruse in detail by clicking on the illustration.

FAIR DISCLOSURE:
As a political organizer, I have been asked to provide advice to those creating the new Equality party and have done so willingly.
I have filled out a membership form and will certainly vote Equality in the next provincial election.

That being said, I HAVE NO OFFICIAL capacity and do not speak for party. That will be up to the leader and the executive, again of which, I am not a member.

I hope you will take up membership and support the party whichever way you can.

While the party gets its ducks in a row by going the the process of becoming 'official' in the eyes of the law, you contact the party through this email that was provided to me.

equalityparty2.0@gmail.com