Category Archives: green party

TVO Battle Blog: Leaders’ Debate

democracy and good government, green party

Crossposted to tvo.org. Today’s question: “Should more party leaders have been included in the Leaders’ Debate?” (400 word limit)

Yes. Frank de Jong and the Green Party of Ontario have earned their place at the table. Of course, it’s predictable and at least a bit self-serving for me to say that, so let’s take a look at the facts and arguments.

First, it’s important to understand that, contrary to the claims of our opponents, there are no rules for deciding who gets to be in the debate. None. The decision is made behind closed doors by a group of unelected and accountable broadcast executives using whatever criteria they chose. That’s not right; there should be an open and transparent process with clear criteria.

Second, there’s precedent. Provincial Green leaders have been included in other televised debates, including Adriane Carr in BC and, most recently, Sharon Labchuk in PEI.

Third, Greens are polling at an all-time high, within striking distance of the NDP. Thomas Walkom writes in The Toronto Star that “if I had to pick a winner for the week, it would be Frank de Jong’s Greens,” and Ian Urquhart says that The Greens have hit a nerve. In other words, we’re a serious, credible voice that many people are considering voting for. They deserve to hear what we have to say.

Fourth, as columnist John Lorinc points out, excluding the Green party means excluding whole issues and new ideas. It means, for example, that the majority of Ontarians who support the creation of one publicly funded school system will not hear from a single party leader who shares their views during tonight’s debate.

Finally–and, for me, most importantly–the overwhelming majority (close to 80%) of voters believe that the Greens should be included in the debates. We live in a democracy, so surely that counts for something. (Check out these responses to CBC posing the question.) And you have to ask yourself, if that many people want to hear where we stand, what right do the broadcasters have to deny them? And to the party leaders who oppose our inclusion: what are you afraid of?

I’d encourage you to read Frank de Jong’s excellent op-ed piece in today’s Toronto Sun outlining the reasons he should have been included. And if you’d like to hear what Frank has to say on the issues, check out gpo.ca during tonight’s debate. He’ll be responding to questions live, because he believes that you have a right to know where the Green party stands.

Green Party A Hit, Green Candidate Hit By Car

green party,

I was away for the weekend without much access to the internet, and it’s taken me until now to clear out the 1000+ emails and unread blog posts I accumulated. Now I feel like there’s so much backlogged information to talk about I don’t even know where to start, so I’m going to just get it all out of my system in one go. But read on, it’s good stuff.

1. Toronto Centre Green Party of Ontario candidate Mike McLean was hit by a car. He’s OK, but I had to fill in for him at a debate. No word yet on whether it was a targeted assassination attempt or not. My guess? The car itself recognized Mike as a Green candidate and was asserting its instinct of self preservation.

2. After one week of campaigning, Thomas Walkom writes in The Toronto Star that “if I had to pick a winner for the week, it would be Frank de Jong’s Greens.”

3. Also in The Star, Ian Urquhart says that The Greens have hit a nerve, and provides a good outline of what we stand for and why voters are finding our platform so attractive (we’re currently the only party with any momentum in the polls).

4. Yesterday, Metro Morning had a good debate regarding the three options for dealing with faith-based school funding: a. keep the status quo (fund only the Catholics), b. fund all religions (Tory’s plan), or c. fund no religions, creating one public school system. Unfortunately, they failed to mention that there is a political party (the Greens) who support that third option, so the majority of Ontarians who agree with us are on their own to figure out there’s a party they can vote for.

5. Which, by the way, is a really important reason Frank de Jong should have been included in tomorrow night’s leaders’ debate. Without him there, important issues will not be raised.

6. So, since we weren’t invited to the leaders’ debate, we’re throwing our own. And, unlike the official leaders’ debates, everyone’s invited. It takes place tomorrow (Thursday) evening starting at 6pm at the Pantages Hotel. We’re going to reenact the debate live, with Frank adding his own responses. I’ll be playing the part of Dalton McGuinty. (Yes, seriously.) You can watch it live on gpo.ca.

7. In strange and slightly hilarious news, Eye Weekly has used my photo in a story that doesn’t actually mention me. WHAT?

Cons Rooting For Bob?

conservative party, green party, liberal party

A commenter just tipped me off about this post on Garth Turner’s blog. (Yes, this is the first time I’ve mentioned his name since our emotional break-up last October. Never mind that.) Garth makes some very interesting–if non-specific–accusations about the Conservative campaign here in Toronto Centre. Namely, that it’s being sabotaged by the PMO:

Unable to hobble the new Liberal leader with its tidal wave of smear and innuendo, the Harper Party strategists are hoping Mr. Ignatieff and especially Mr. Rae still have the scent of power in their nostrils. The plan is to facilitate a Rae victory in Toronto Centre, get Bob Rae into the House and have Stephane Dion sitting smack in the middle of the two guys from whom he snatched victory. Then [Prime Minster Stephen Harper] will start bating them, ask rhetorically who is in charge, and again attack Dion, mocking his consensual style of leadership as being weak.

And it gets even more scandalous:

That explains the on-the-ground strategy in Toronto Centre. It explains what PMO political operations director Doug Finley is doing. It certainly clarifies the media blackout, the hobbling of the local campaign and the complete disregard for the hard work and honest efforts of Conservatives there. Mr. Harper is about to elect Mr. Rae.

Don’t believe me? Ask the poor candidate.

There, in that last line, and again in the intro, Turner twice suggests that our Conservative candidate himself has been complaining of being sabotaged by his own party. He does not, however, offer any specific evidence or examples, nor does he give us any idea what kind of “political operations” and “hobbling of the local campaign” Conservative war room chief Doug Finley might be up to. I’m also left to wonder why the Conservatives would bother, since Rae is all but guaranteed to win anyway. Still, makes for some interesting speculation. Maybe one of our regular commenters can help clear this up.

Government’s Biofuel Policy Dangerous

climate crisis, conservative party, energy, food, green party, social justice

“My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come.” – George Monbiot

Just a few years ago, the biggest threat to our society’s survival was our willing blindness towards the crisis facing us. Now that we’re aware of that crisis, the biggest threat to our survival is our willingness to believe that there are easy answers; that we’re “on the right track;” that our political leaders are starting to “get it.” This is the threat of greenwash, intentional or otherwise, and it can’t be underestimated.

Last week, Canada’s New-ish-like GovernmentTM announced a $1.5 billion subsidy for biofuel production. You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like a positive, “step in the right direction.” In reality, it’s extremely dangerous and wrongheaded. In short, while some biofuel policies make sense, biofuels from crops like the ones targeted by Stephen Harper’s plan (corn, wheat, soy) lead to increasingly higher market prices for those crops, setting up a competition between cars and people for who gets to be fed by the Earth. Further, they’re likely to exacerbate, not mitigate, the climate crisis. And it’s happening already.

The fundamental idea behind biofuel is simple, as is its fundamental flaw. Fossil fuels comprise concentrated energy stored up by organic material (plants and animals) exposed to intense heat and pressure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Since our dependence on fossil fuel energy is now becoming problematic and unrealistic for at least two major reasons (climate change and peak oil), the thinking behind biofuel is that we should just cut out the middle man and convert organic matter into hydrocarbons ourselves. It should be obvious, however, that we can never hope to produce biofuel rapidly enough to match our consumption of fossil fuels, since they took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate and we’ve already used up about half of that supply in just the past century.

What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that more than simply inadequate, this strategy is actually destructive. The $1.5 billion proposed by the Conservatives is an attempt to meet their own requirement for 5% ethanol content in gasoline by 2010. Europe has a similar target of 5.75% of transport power by 2010 and 10% by 2020. The United States is looking to use 35 billion gallons of biofuel a year. Problem is, according to the International Herald Tribute these targets “far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70 percent of its farmland with fuel crops. The entire corn and soy harvest of the United States would need to be processed as ethanol and biodiesel.” Of course, no American president or European leader is going to allow that to happen. Therefore, if these targets were actually met, they would likely have to be met by destroying the food systems of the South. The poor would go hungry while the wealthy pumped diverted human food into their SUVs.

Think this sounds implausible? It’s happening now:

CBC News, May 22 2007 – The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, and Canada is not immune, say industry experts.

Food prices rose 10 per cent in 2006, “driven mainly by surging prices of corn, wheat and soybean oil in the second part of the year,” the International Monetary Fund said in a report.

“Looking ahead, rising demand for biofuels will likely cause the prices of corn and soybean oil to rise further,” the authors wrote in the report released last month.

What’s more, the degree to which biofuels can contribute to solving the climate crisis has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the wrong kind of biofuel policy could even make the climate crisis worse. According to the BBC, a recent United Nations report found that “demand for biofuels has accelerated the clearing of primary forest for palm plantations, particularly in southeast Asia. This destruction of ecosystems which remove carbon from the atmosphere can lead to a net increase in emissions.”

Even once the initial conversion of wilderness to farmland is complete, biofuels grown by current agribusiness methods require large inputs of fossil fuel energy, which defeats the purpose. As a result, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is very weak. According to a U.S. government report, the EROEI for ethanol grown from corn is 1.34. In other words, it takes approximately three barrels of ethanol to produce four. And that’s the optimistic outlook. A study out of Cornell University found that the production of biofuels actually results in a net energy loss.

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:

  • corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
  • wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:

  • soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
  • sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Normally, you would expect the market to sort at least some of that out, since biofuels that actually lose energy would not be economically viable, right? Unless of course, the government subsidizes them to keep the price artificially low. (Oh wait…crap.)

Despite all this, I tend to think that most people pushing for biofuels are well-intentioned. George Monbiot, on the other hand, begins a column published recently in the Guardian titled A Lethal Solution by saying:

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

He goes on to point out that “a report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that…biodiesel from palm oil causes up to TEN TIMES [caps his] as much climate change as ordinary diesel.”

Now here’s where this gets really hard to follow: not all biofuels are bad. The same UN report cited above also concluded that “using biomass for combined heat and power (CHP), rather than for transport fuels or other uses, is the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade – and also one of the cheapest.” The Green Party of Canada also supports investments in cellulosic ethanol, since it doesn’t set up the same competition between people and cars for food (a competition which, as Monbiot points out, “people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation”). A good shorthand then, perhaps, is that we shouldn’t be making car-food out of people-food, and that we should focus our biomass efforts on CHP instead of as replacements for transport fuels like gasoline and diesel.

It may seem like asking a lot for us laypeople to be able to tell the difference. Even so, in a democracy it’s our responsibility to figure it out. We can’t get the right solutions out of government unless we know which governments (in waiting) are offering them up.