Category Archives: democracy and good government

Thanks Elizabeth, Bill

democracy and good government, green party, liberal party, toronto,

Last night Elizabeth May came to Toronto Centre for two great events. The first was a Pride Week meet & greet at Byzantium on Church Street, where a diverse group of people gathered to enjoy a special “Green Martini” that had been prepared for the evening. Elizabeth re-affirmed our party’s commitment to LGBT equality, pointing out that the Green Party of Canada is the only federal party to have ever had an openly gay leader (Chris Lea), and was the first party to support equal marriage when we did so in 1996. The second event was an incredible meal at Jamie Kennedy’s Wine Bar (also on Church) with a packed room of about 90 people. Video of both these events to follow.

It was only upon arriving at the first event that I heard Bill Graham had announced his resignation, effective July 2nd, just hours before in the House of Commons. He finished his parting remarks with the following, which is worth reprinting here:

In closing, I want to say one thing about the civility of this place. There has been a lot in the press recently about the lack of civility in the House. It may be attributable to the minority situation we are in and it may be attributable to a lot of causes, but surely we owe it to ourselves to disagree without being disagreeable. We do not need to do that.

I believe everyone in the House carries within him or her the desire to serve our country and, whether one has that desire or not, the capacity to affect the future lives of every citizen of this great land, and to some extent others around the globe. Let us treat each other with the respect that thought brings. In what we bring to this place, let us respect one another and, in so doing, I believe our fellow countrymen will respect this institution and respect us for the work we do.

Those words informed my comments at last night’s dinner. It’s not just the lack of civility that’s worrisome, it’s the disrespect that this government is showing for Parliament itself. Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have the right to believe what they do, to advocate for their positions, to run in elections, and to implement their agenda when elected. They do not, however, have the right to sabotage our democratic systems, which is what they are guilty of doing.

I want to publicly say again that Bill has been a good MP and that I’m grateful to him for his years of service. It was fun having him as an opponent. There’s one final quote I’d like to leave you with, again taken from his comments in the House yesterday, that I found particularly interesting.

“It is important that [the people of Toronto Centre] be represented by a future voice rather than someone from the past.”

Jeffrey Simpson: The Greens Are Right

climate crisis, democracy and good government, green party

In a column in today’s Globe and Mail entitled The Greens are right: Use economic clubs to battle climate change, Jeffry Simpson is largely positive about our recently released climate plan. He doesn’t agree with everything we proposed, but he likes the plan enough to write:

Good for Canada’s Green Party. Last week, the Greens issued a policy to combat climate change that was the most arresting and innovative in Canada…

At the heart of the Greens’ climate-change policy is something as obvious as it is politically toxic: Economic tools are the best way to change behaviour. Subsidies and exhortation won’t cut it. Price changes and markets might, or will. So the Greens propose a carbon tax, at levels that would raise the cost of a litre of gasoline (and other carbon-emitting products) by 12 to 24 cents.

The Harper government, predictably, screamed “the mother of all tax increases,” forgetting the Greens also had suggested that the money raised from the carbon tax be offset by reductions in income and other taxes. The net tax effect would be neutral…

This is bold stuff, and better than anything on offer from the other political parties.

It’s heartening to get this kind of endorsement. Yet, just six months ago almost to the day, Simpson was referring to Green Party leaders as “eco-nuts.” I’m not sure where he meant for that comment to sit on the spectrum between disrespectful and playful. Regardless, his seeming change-of-heart surrounding our credibility reminds me of a story.

A few years ago I had the great fortune of spending several summers directing an outdoor skills leadership program for 15-year-olds. On the surface, we were teaching them what we called “hard skills,” like fire building, canoeing, navigation and cartography, first aid, etc. In reality, however, this was in many ways a pretense for teaching more broadly applicable life skills.

One of my favourite sessions we did with these campers went like this. We brought the group of 12 teens to a spot where one of our leaders, Bill, had laid out a long rope on the ground. In the middle, the rope loosely twisted and turned around on itself in all sorts of ways. Bill asked our campers a simple question: if we pull on either end of the rope, do you think it will form a knot in the middle, or will all of the twists and turns just slip over each other, leaving a straight rope with no knots?

Everyone was given a minute to examine the rope, without touching it, before making up their minds. Then, Bill asked us to spit into two groups. “If you think the rope will form a knot when we pull on both ends, stand on this side. If you don’t think it will form a knot, stand over here.” The group split in half almost perfectly.

“Ok,” explained Bill, “if you are absolutely sure that the rope will make a knot, I want you to go stand way over near this end of the rope. If you think it will probably make a knot but you’re less sure, stay on the same side, but don’t go as far. Same goes for the folks who are betting on there not being a knot.” Everyone was different degrees of “sure,” so they spread out in a line, parallel to the rope, so that the person who was most sure on the knot side was furthest from the person who was most sure on the not-knot side, with those who were less sure standing closer towards the middle.

“Now, Chris and I are going to start pulling on both ends of the rope. We’re going to do it slowly, until it either does or doesn’t form a knot. As we pull on the rope, I want you to move as your opinion changes. If you become more sure if your position, move further away from the middle. If you become less sure, move closer to the middle. If you change your mind completely, move to the other side.”

We started to pull the rope, and people started to move. This process lasted about fifteen seconds, and there was lots of back and forth. Eventually, all of the twists of the rope resolved themselves, no knot was formed, and Bill and I were left holding a straight rope between us. You’d think, then, at this point, that everyone would have ended up standing on the “no knot” side, since in the last few seconds it became very clear that a knot was not going to materialize. But that’s not what happened.

Why? Because the people who had decided they were 100% sure a knot was going to form had too far to walk. They couldn’t get to the other side in time. Some didn’t even try; they just stood at the other end of the room in disbelieve that they’d been proven wrong.

The moral of the exercise wasn’t, I don’t think, that we shouldn’t be sure about things, or take strong positions. But it’s important to recognize that, the more sure you are, the further you have to travel to get to the other side, and the harder it is to even see their perspective.

Again, I’m not sure how far along the other side of the “are the Greens credible?” rope Simpson was six months ago, but good on him for being open to movement. Maybe I should call up Bill and see if he’d be willing to do his rope activity for our Members of Parliament and other lifetime partisans. Couldn’t hurt.

Time To Make A Choice

democracy and good government, economy, green party

The Conference Board of Canada, which last week came out in support of implementing a carbon tax, has released a new report condemning Canada’s “culture of complacency” which has caused a “mediocrity that is hampering what we can do and what we can be.” The report graded Canada in six categories: economy, innovation, environment, education, health and society, and called the results “stunningly poor.”

The Globe and Mail reports that the report also says that “since Canada’s health-care system is geared toward resolving urgent needs, little innovative thinking is done on how to prevent illness.” (Where have I heard that before?)

Few of us will be surprised by the report’s conclusion. This apparent reality represents a failure of political leadership. As Christopher Waddell observed during the last election campaign, the leaders of the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP all “seem struck by a collective crisis of imagination.” What’s worse, politics has become more about what we can’t do than what we’re capable of doing. There was a time when Stephen Harper accused others of defeatism. Look who’s defeatist now.

The report compares Canada unfavourably to other OECD countries, but lack of vision is also a global problem. At almost the exact moment as the G8 wrapped up their meeting that Susan Riley says failed the planet–and I am not making this up–my computer produced, without warning or provocation, an error message that I have never seen before:

Catastrophic Failure

Seriously. Actually. No foolin’. Reminds me of the timing of lightening during the recent Republican presidential debate. (BTW, have you ever tried taking a screen-grab of a computer during a catastrophic failure? It isn’t easy.)

I suspect the reason that we elect leaders who make only minimal, vague, flabby promises, is that we’re afraid of getting burned (and/or because we’ve been burned too often in the past). If you don’t fall in love, you can’t get hurt. Same goes for getting excited about a politician’s potential. However, the moral about it being better to have loved and lost applies here equally as well. Especially in a time of crisis, when strong leadership is critical.

The next platform of the Green Party of Canada will make bold commitments, and outline an extremely ambitious vision for Canada. It will be easy to dismiss this vision as idealistic or unrealistic, but that’s also the easiest way to ensure we don’t get there. It’s time for us, as a nation, to choose between mediocrity or greatness, between success or failure. What’s it going to be?

The Triple E Crisis, Plus

climate crisis, conservative party, democracy and good government, economy, energy, green party, liberal party, ndp

Last Friday the NDP sent out their fifth e-mail newsletter in a row (update: sixth, seventh) complaining about gas prices, saying that Canadians are “victims,” getting “gouged” and “cheated” at the pumps. The implication, of course, is that if the NDP were in power they would make sure gas prices were lower. That might be a good way to get votes, but it’s completely irreconcilable with their claim to have a strong environmental platform. (I was going to let it slide after the first and second email, and I forgot about it after the third and fourth, but now that the fifth one has reminded me, I thought it was worth opening up the discussion.)

There’s a triple-E crisis at work here. Our Environmental crisis is, in fact, an Energy crisis that will become an Economic one if we don’t take the right kind of action. The problem, simply put, is that we’re using up too much stored solar energy (fossil fuels) too quickly. And it doesn’t take a doctorate in economics to understand that when something is cheaper, people use more of it less efficiently. When we use more fossil fuels less efficiently, we exacerbate the climate crisis while simultaneously using up what has been the source of almost all economic growth and prosperity in the past two hundred years.

Instead of acknowledging that reality, too many politicians focus on playing to the cameras. There’s a reason so many people have come to believe that politicians will say almost anything to get elected; it’s true. (In the last federal election, I used the fact that Greens recognize the need to end artificially low energy prices as an example of how we were an exception to that rule.) This is what Joe Trippi calls “transactional politics,” the process by which politicians offer promises (lower gas prices, lower taxes, more police) in exchange for your vote. It’s also what has led Mark Kingwell to declare that “politicians have become brokers of interest rather than leaders, and citizens reduce themselves to consumers of goods and services enjoyed in return for regular obedience to the tax code.”

The problem is that transactional politics exist in direct opposition to transformational politics–the kind of leadership that Kingwell (and, I suspect, most Canadians) pine for, and that we so desperately need in this time of crisis. That’s why the biggest threat to our quality of life (best case) and collective survival (worst case) is not the Triple E Crisis itself, but the lack of attention most citizens are paying to the complex political issues that confront us. Here, we add a fourth E, the Electorate. Democracy requires that we all take some responsibility for the direction of our government, yet many Canadians feel no such responsibility. We’re all too busy with too many other important things to be bothered by the mud-slinging PR exercise that politics has become. And that, I would argue, is what makes us more susceptible to things like Jack Layton’s claim that we pay too much for gas (never mind the fact that we pay way less than most other counties), Stephen Harper’s claim that there’s a foreign stripper epidemic that needs to be addressed (never mind the fact that only ten strippers immigrated to Canada last year), or Stéphane Dion’s claim that somehow there are “mega-bucks” to be made by taking action on Kyoto (acting is cheaper than not acting, but that doesn’t mean we’re all going to somehow magically get rich).

That’s why I take democracy itself so seriously. An engaged, informed electorate is the only way we’re going to solve the problems facing us. I have no doubt that the Canadian public is intelligent enough; we only need the will, and to direct our energies and attention to the right places.

Of course, there’s hope. The attempts of the status-quo parties to buy votes aren’t proving effective, to the point where the only party telling you what you don’t want to hear is the only one that’s up in the polls since the last election. It’s just like we were told in high school: just be yourself, the other kids will learn to like you for who you are soon enough.