Category Archives: conservative party

Everything New is Old

As you’ve likely gathered, I’ve been away for a week. Out of the country, actually. This morning, the radio kindly informed me that, while I was gone, the Conservative party made a series of announcements and declared themselves “green.” (Clever of them to wait until I wasn’t looking to spring this stuff. Not sure how they got their hands on my travel plans, but I’ll find out.)

“Good,” I thought. Then, I looked into the details. “#$@%,” I thought.

Turns out, there were two main announcements. The first announcement came on Wednesday, with a $230-million investment in “clean energy” research. (Those of you keeping score at home will note that that amounts to 16% of the $1.4-billion of our tax dollars that go to the oil and gas industry which, by the way, really doesn’t need it.) This sounds like a great idea at first, until you realize that the Conservatives have defined “clean” as “coal and oil.” I’m not going to dignify that with any further analysis.

The second announcement regarded energy rebates for home retrofits. Again, a good idea that has been masterfully neutered. With the Conservative plan, all you have to do is pay for an energy audit ($200-$300), then pay for the renovations to your home (say, $1000 and upwards), then apply and wait for your rebate while you hold off the credit card company. Somehow, I don’t predict long line ups for this one. Better than nothing, but not much help to people who don’t have thousands of dollars lying around, or who don’t own their homes.

The really amazing thing about these two plans is that one year ago when “Canada’s Newest Government Ever!” took power, better versions of both these ideas already existed, and were then promptly eliminated. In fact, Stephen Harper’s government has frozen or killed more than a dozen climate-change programs since they took office, including the EnerGuide program.

Of course, those programs were also not enough, and saw Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions rise by 24% through to 2004, and more since then. If these ideas are “green,” it’s because they’re really old and stuff has started growing on them. It’s past time for more than positioning, Harper.

Wrath of Khan

Back in August, I supported Bill Graham’s decision to allow Wajid Khan to serve as a special adviser to Stephen Harper on the Middle East and Afghanistan, arguing that “we need more cross-party cooperation and dialogue, not less — especially in a minority government situation.”

In the wake of Khan’s defection to the Conservatives, I stand by that principal. In fact, the CBC reports that it was Stéphane Dion’s insistence that Khan pick a side that forced the move. Dion also made a statement to the Liberal website, saying, “I was never comfortable with Mr. Khan serving as an adviser to a Conservative Prime Minister, as Mr. Khan has done since August of last year.” Other Liberal MPs had “questioned how Khan would balance his allegiance to the party with his new role as an adviser to the prime minister.”

The fact that the obvious answer, “he’ll do whatever he thinks is best for the country,” didn’t seem obvious doesn’t speak well to our MPs’ assessments of each other’s motives. (Nor, unfortunately, of Dion’s.)

That being said, Khan’s assessment that “the best leader for Canada is the man who now has the job” isn’t doing much for my opinion of him either.

Ministering to the Environment

The Toronto Star reports that John Baird is your new federal minister of the environment. You might think this decision would be of huge importance to me, but I’m finding it hard to react. I want to be optimistic, but I don’t see how this will change anything. I hope I’m proven wrong.

For one, Rona Ambrose never had a chance. Initially, she wasn’t even supposed to be good at her job. The PMO didn’t consider it a priority to maintain our life support systems. Then, when it became clear to him that environment = votes, Harper took over the file and stopped letting Ambrose speak. My first hope for Baird is that he’ll be allowed to do his job.

Defining the nature of his job is the next big challenge. The Conservative government is yet to acknowledge the obvious fact that addressing the climate crisis is priority number one, but they’ll probably have to. Then, they, like the rest of us, will have graduated from if to how. That’s the tricky bit, because as the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment explained, the climate crisis did not develop in isolation from other problems, nor can it be solved in isolation.

For government, that means two things. First, it means that climate change cannot be addressed unless we also address other environmental problems, including toxicity, over-fishing, air pollution, access to water, etc. Second, it means that much of what has to be done falls under the jurisdiction of other departments, including the ministries of…well, I was about to list them, but I would have had to list almost every single one. (Not to mention the over-arching challenges of addressing cancerous economic growth and destructive cultural assumptions.)

So that’s why I don’t think this shuffle will matter much one way or the other. There’s a joke that the Green Party wouldn’t even have a minister of the environment if we were in government, since we’d take our species’ survival — as opposed to our political survival — into account when making all decisions. (I know, we’re radicals.) And besides, to quote Roy MacGregor, this isn’t about the minister of the environment. “This is about Canada, and the rest of the world, ministering to the environment.”

Poisoning Children and Politicians

While scrutinizing for Elizabeth May in London North Centre two months ago, I had an interesting conversation with a Conservative volunteer. She complained to me how outrageous it is for governments to be outlawing pesticides, citing that mainstay of schoolyard arguments that “it’s a free country.”

The problem is, of course, that when you define freedom that liberally (hehe) and approach it in such an ideological way, you back yourself into impossible corners. (Witness Donald Rumsfeld’s famous observation that “Free people are free to…commit crimes and do bad things.”) I asked the Conservative volunteer if she would agree that, even though it’s a free country (whatever that means), the government would be within their rights to, say, prevent people from putting poison in children’s food. (She did.) I then explained to her the process by which toxins like pesticides work their way up the food chain, bioaccumulating and becoming more potent at each level, until ultimately they show up in mothers’ breast milk.

At this point, she uncomfortably changed the subject. I don’t remember what to, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with “liberal corruption.”

I was reminded of that by two main news stories today, which report that some children’s necklaces have been recalled due to lead poising risk, and that politicians are even more toxic than humans. Er, I mean, more than other humans. (Apparently, Jack Layton is particularly fire retardant.)

The Globe and Mail reports that the testing, done on Jack Layton, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, and Liberal environment critic John Godfrey, “found a bewildering cocktail of contaminants…[that] have been found to cause cancer, disrupt normal hormone function, and lead to birth defects,” including DDT, which has been banned for decades but will continue to circulate in the environment for decades to come.

The politicians had between 49 and 55 pollutants in their bodies, slightly more than what most Canadians are carrying around. Most upsetting for me is that, according to Rick Smith, the executive director of Environmental Defence who did the study, the politicians “were surprised as heck by the results.” They shouldn’t be. This is neither news nor new. I wonder if Rick had to resist an urge to slap them.

Regardless, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say, on record, that I don’t think we should be poisoning children, or, heck, even politicians. I know, I know, it’s a controversial position, but I think it’s important to take a principled stand on this one, public opinion be damned. In fact, a well-known Green Party member once suggested to me that we use the following campaign slogan: “The Green Party: We don’t want to poison your kids.” Catchy, ain’t it?