How green is thy party?
Th e environment is now Canada’s No. 1 issue: are the Greens ready?
DYLAN FERGUSON STAFF
“I don’t know where I see the Green Party in 10 years,” ruminated Andrew Basham, leader of the Manitoba Greens, standing next to me in a crowded bus bumping along the snowy road. “I mean, where will the world be in 10 years? I don’t know. It’s like we’re at such a turning point right now. I don’t know what will happen.”We’ve all seen environmental doomsday movies. If not An Inconvenient Truth, which will soon win Al Gore an Oscar (barring any voting irregularities), then something else where they show the glaciers collapsing — crash! — into the water, with dramatic sound editing. And the lines on the graphs shooting up, up, higher than the norm towards, presumably, the rapture. We’ve all got friends who refuse to drive a car, eat bacon, throw their sunfl ower-seed wrapper on the ground, shave, or put down the fucking djembe while you’re studying. Call them neo-hippies, clean-livers, urban saints, or annoying. We’ve all had the press slap us in the face with how the Earth has been brought to its knees by man-made changes to the natural order. And few of us can ignore it any more. Not just because of the fucking djembe, either.
In fact, recent polls have shown that the environment is the number- 1 issue for Canadian voters today. It just recently eclipsed health care, and is also considered more important to Canadians than the economy, Afghanistan, or Belinda Stronach’s love life. Also, it is the issue that Canadians feel has been most mishandled by the powers that be.
If anyone is primed to take advantage of the suddenly environment-obsessed climate, it is the Green Party. And I’m in on the ground fl oor. I fi rst became a card-holding member (well, if they had cards, I would be) of the Manitoba Green party two years ago. Th ere was a table on campus, and they had buttons. Now I’m riding next to the party’s president on a rollicking, cramped bus, while I listen to him talk about his vision of reforming the entire democratic system, on our way to the party’s policy meeting. My mission? To fi nd out if our provincial and federal Green parties are ready for environment-mania, and just how viable an option voting Green is.
After we get off the bus, we hurry through the freezing cold on foot (no gas dependency here!) to the Green Party of Manitoba (GPM) headquarters in the Pantages Playhouse building. Th e policy meeting is scheduled for 5 p.m.. We reach the GPM offi ce at around 5:50. Th ere is tea and cinnamon cookies.
After introducing myself as a member of the press to the seven people clustered cozily on fl ower-print couches draped with woven blankets, I am informed that my party membership has lapsed. I therefore hastily pay the required $10 and take a seat, ready for my exclusive coverage of a high-stakes internal debate, in the charged calm before the anticipated storm of a soon-tobe- called provincial election.
But the Green party is not like the “mainstream” political parties (the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP) and neither is their policy debate. In fact, almost everyone here falls under the heading of the car-free-vegetariandrum- loving-neo-hippie described above. And their debate amounts to each member taking turns, between sips of tea, describing various symptoms of “what’s wrong with the world” (“GDP growth,” “natural gas dependency,” etc.) and making suggestions as to who should run, how, and in which riding, with all the furious rhetoric of a campfi re party mere seconds away from holding hands and breaking into a stirring rendition of “kumbaya.” Whenever someone fi nishes a sentence, they say “OK?” with a soft, comforting infl ection. Th ey dance around each others' fragile egos, and when an argument seems imminent, a member must point out that they are headed towards confrontation. Plants hang from the walls, as well as inspirational messages, like “A harvest of hope doth grow from the seed of love.” Aw.
I remember thinking, as I rubbed my forehead, checked the clock for the 18th time, and craved for a cigarette: “this is a fucking political party?”
Well, sort of. Th e Manitoba Green party is one of the many provincial organizations operating in fairly close contact with the Green Party of Canada, which was established in 1983 as the result of a conference held at Carleton University in Ottawa. Under their fi rst leader, Trevor Hancock, the CGP ran 60 candidates in the ’84 federal election, and have been growing steadily ever since to become Canada’s largest political party without representation in Parliament (take that, Marxist- Leninists!). Th ey fi elded candidates in all 308 ridings in the last two elections, receiving about 4.5 per cent of the popular vote nationwide in 2006. Still, they have no seats — but federal Greens argue they should be considered one of the “major” parties. With skyrocketing awareness of so-called “green issues,” they may not be far off .
Our Green party is a member of the Global Greens, a coalition of Green parties worldwide. New Zealand’s Values Party, founded in 1973, is generally recognized as the fi rst national Green Party, but you can now fi nd them in countries the world over, especially Europe. Italy, France, Finland, and Germany all have Green parties that play an important role in national governments.
“Green politics are non-violent, they’re grassroots democracy, they’re focused on social justice and ecological wisdom, which is where we learn from the earth and from nature, which has been here a lot longer than we have, and has certain principals of sustainability embedded within it,” explains Andrew Basham to me, about an hour before our bus ride to Green headquarters. Basham is only 22; he has long, fair hair cradling his thin shoulders, and sparse blond stubble a la Kurt Cobain. He was munching on an apple as we spoke, shifting about in his seat and talking spacey hippie talk for much of the sit-down interview.
Th is was actually not the fi rst time I’d met Andrew Basham, though it took me a couple days to remember where I recognized him from. It was in Vancouver, the summer of 2005, when he spent a couple nights at the hippie house I was temporarily residing in. He was in town to attend a conference on sustainability at the University of British Colombia, and we had inhaled copious amounts of marijuana together. Had I remembered this at the time, I might have opted out of our stuff y interview and suggested we hold our own “green party” instead.
But that’s neither here nor there. I asked Basham what his party is focusing on for the upcoming provincial election. “Rethinking progress: well-being not growth.” He says that if you consider the current NDP government’s policies, “it just lays out their strategy for socalled economic growth, and basically we want to change that goal, and say ‘why is growth the goal when infi nite growth on a fi nite planet is unsustainable?’”
Basham nonetheless realizes, as do his gung-ho, sweater-wearing, “change the world!” teammates, that the Green party will not win this year’s provincial election. Nor will the national Greens win this (or next) year’s federal election. In fact, it is highly unlikely they will win a single riding in either.
Why is this, exactly? It’s easy to say that the Green party is too unconventional, too new, or too radical for voters to support it. But that has not stopped the Green parties in Europe.
Th e German Green party, Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen, has been hugely infl uential in its country’s politics. Th ey formed part of the coalition government, with the Social Democratic Party (SDP), from 1998 to 2005, winning 47 seats in the Bundestag, or German parliament, in ’98, and 55 seats in ’02. Th ough the SDP won more seats, and their leader, Gerhard Schröder, was chancellor during that period, Green leader Joschka Fischer was foreign minister for the coalition, as well as vice-chancellor during their fi rst tenure as governing party, helping Bündnis 90/Die Grünen drastically shape Germany’s recent foreign and domestic policy.
Th e Latvian Green party supplied that country’s prime minister in 2004, and Belgian, French, Finnish, and Italian Greens have all been part of the makeup of ruling coalitions at some point in the last decade.
Most Canadians would like to think our country is progressive and environmentally conscious. So why have European countries been able to put their Green parties in positions of power, while the Canadian Greens are unable to win a single seat?
Part of the problem may be the organization and governance of the CGP. From 2003 to 2006, the period in which our Greens ran in a full 308 seats for the fi rst two times, former Conservative Jim Harris was the leader.
“Certainly, from Harris’s style, it was a very autocratic and right-wing party,” says Murray Dobbin, speaking of the federal Greens during the ’04 and ’06 elections. Dobbin is a political writer, now a bi-monthly columnist for the British Columbia publication the Tyee, who has been vocally critical of the Green party. During the ’04 election, he wrote a scathing indictment of Harris’ leadership in the Globe and Mail, opening a lot of people’s eyes to the realities of a party about which most only know the environmental stance. I spoke to Dobbin about this over the telephone.
“People were voting for this party on the basis that it was progressive and hyper-democratic, which is how it promotes itself elsewhere, but in fact it was right-wing and less democratic than all of the other parties.” Th e Greens’ economic policies at the time were indeed fi scally conservative, and Harris has a history of silencing or fi ring people who spoke out against him. He essentially created Canada’s most topdown party out of one that would have you call it “grassroots.” In addition to this, both Greenpeace and the Sierra Club of Canada ranked the CGP’s environmental policies from their 2004 platform below that of the NDP and, in many criteria, below the Bloc as well. Not very green at all.
In 2006, the CGP elected Elizabeth May, who has a long history as an environmental activist, as their new leader, and they have since regained their status as the number 1- ranked environmental party. Th eir choice of new leadership was applauded by most Greens, as well as Dobbin. Still, the left-wing writer cautions, “this is not a ‘greener NDP party.’ I would characterize it, in its other policies, as a ‘small-l’ liberal party. Its fi scal policies are [still] quite conservative.”
“Well, there’s this old slogan in the Green Party,” said Andrew Basham. “It’s not left or right, it’s in front.” A common sort of statement from the Green crowd, who often rely on pseudometaphysical rhetoric rather than the oppressive, petty realities of the political world. “By focusing on well-being, we can transcend these artifi cial divisions between people,” Basham insists, when I push him to extrapolate. “Focusing on well-being really is important, because it’s in everybody’s interest, it’s for the common good . . . [unlike] the nitty-gritty little details.”
Unfortunately, those nitty-gritty little details have a way of not being ignored. And the Manitoba Green party should have learned that; two years ago, a diff erence of opinion sent shockwaves through the peaceful tea-sipping collective. In March of 2005, GPM founding member and leader since its 1998 inception, Marcus Buchart, resigned after what he termed “disrupters” tried to change the course of the party. Virtually the entire Green party council followed him into resignation, leaving the GPM on the brink of complete collapse. Alon Weinberg was one of the “disrupters” who helped rebuild the party, with Basham as its new head, after the breakdown. Green party members try to avoid talking about what went wrong, but Weinberg, who is now the Elections Planning Coordinator, told me that the schism was due more to “personal confl icts” than “any sort of policy reason.”
Th is only goes to show that no matter how peace-loving you are, no matter how you infl ect the word “OK,” politics is politics. Hearing about the Green party’s past collapse helped me to understand why everyone seemed so strangely gentle and confl ict-wary at the policy meeting I sat in on.
One could argue that the cutthroat world of politics is contrary to a hippie’s very nature.
Perhaps the disorganization of hippie-fuelled provincial chapters is what allows leaders like Jim Harris to take over. Despite Harris’ ugly history as leader, it is unlikely the party would have been able to run a full slate without his politically savvy initiative. Maybe the grassroots base, fuelled by ideals rather than political aspirations, just cannot connect on a unifi ed national level without some opportunistic leader taking the helm and whipping them into shape. Th is, of course, contrasts with the “revolution not bullshit” viewpoint of Green Party members like the good-natured crew I chilled on the couch with, but are they really being realistic? And if a top-down, ideal-corrupting national structure is the only option in Canada’s vast, spread-out political landscape, why should anyone vote Green at all?
Elizabeth May wants your vote. Th e chipper and well-spoken recently elected leader of the federal Greens told me, by phone, that she expects the Green Party to “elect more than a couple MPs” in the next election. “Obviously, to get someone elected to the House of Commons is the main reason to vote for the Green party of Canada,” she said. “It helps if that candidate does not just refl ect your views as a protest vote in the election, but actually takes them forward to the House of Commons and would pursue an agenda that is much needed. To pursue peace in the world, to pursue sustainable development in our environmental progress, to pursue social justice.”
She also says that having other parties adopt greener agendas is not enough to create real change. “If everybody tries to be green, I think it’s important for Canadians to have a real Green Party that can help be the litmus test for when policies are good enough, and when they’re not.”
May hopes to combat any negative perceptions of the party carried over from the Harris years. “Since I’ve become leader of the Green party we have established the youth wing of the party, Generation Green,” which encourages “grassroots involvement across the country. We have involved a more open, transparent process of policy sessions across Canada, where anyone can come and listen as we discuss our policies and developing platform.”
Certainly, May seems like a step forward in bridging the gap between grassroots revolutionary and politician.
But Murray Dobbin, for his part, would have you think twice about voting Green when you walk into that election booth. “Well, I think that people have too be really, ruthlessly practical,” he opines. He points out that if Green votes take away from NDP votes, as he believe happened in the last federal contest, the result is less environmentally-concerned individuals getting elected. “You hear people say, ‘well, I want to vote on my principals, and I’m really concerned about the environment, so I’m going to vote Green.’ But if voting Green means that there are fewer strong environmentalists in the House of Commons, then people need to rethink their principle.” Dobbin believes that “the most important principle is to make sure you’ve got a balance of power in the House of Commons, so that neither the Liberals, nor the Conservatives have a majority.”
“You know, there’s an old phrase, that history is made by those who show up. Well, the Green Party won’t show up. Th ey won’t be in the House of Commons.”
Despite the sudden frenzy of environmental awareness, both Elizabeth May and the Manitoba Greens I spoke to accept that the only way the Green party can hope to have their agenda realized, at least in the short term, is by having other parties adopt it. But the passionate individuals on the ground fl oor, as much as the political game may not suit them, remain determined.
Alon Weinberg, survivor of both incarnations of the Manitoba Greens, was the man who actually enlisted me in the Green party at that table in University Centre. Th inking back, maybe it wasn’t the buttons (cool as they were) that convinced me to shell out fi ve bucks and sign my name on that form. Maybe it was the enthusiasm for change that Weinberg exuded as he talked to me.
Weinberg, who has a beard, a single long braid, and wears colourful woven garb like so many of his peace-happy brethren, can talk for hours about his vision of future reform, and has. But when I asked him about the possibility of failure, he seemed, for once, at a temporary loss for words.
“I recognize that maybe we won’t succeed,” he said at last, then paused to examine his shoes. “But people have to realize that you might not be able to stop a whole forest from getting cut down. But you can maybe save one tree, and, you know, maybe somebody will be able to use that tree for shade one day.”
