Fill the Hill was this Saturday and it was a very successful outing for the Green Party.  Katie had the great idea a week or so ago to make an other batch of the new Young Greens buttons for Power Shift/Fill the Hill.  We ordered 500 assuming that we would be able to give out most of them and still have some leftover to have available to visitors of the office or other small events.

We quite simply underestimated the excitement for the Green Party found in Canadians under 25.  Walking through the fill the hill crowd I was able to easily give out the 500 buttons and I'm sure had I had 1,000 they would have all gone.  It wasn't so much that we were able to give away all the buttons but how excited people were to get these buttons.

About a half dozen times while snaking my way through the crowd I would get swarmed by people who wanted buttons.  They were taking a couple for themselves passing some to friends, and generally pumped that the Green Party was there and that they could get an "I vote Green", "I heart E May" or an "80% less bullshit" button.

There were dozens of speakers but Elizabeth May received the loudest applause for her short but passionate speech about why she was at fill the hill.

We need to make sure that in the next election Canadians 25 and under go to the polls.  If we can do this we will increase our vote dramatically and have a significant impact on the results of the election at the national level but we'll also have far greater success in ridings where we have yet to be competitive.

Events like this point to a shift in public opinion.  Many young people are reaching voting age feeling like Climate Change is the great challenge of our generation.  These people are Green.  If we get them out to vote they're going to vote for us.