I'd rather be dead than Green Green Party perhaps not as awesome as everyone thought they were
9 comments I don't know much about Jim Harris, but it's pretty silly to criticize him for running a full slate of candidates and trying to get a budget, or for not filling all the bogus positions that fringe parties have (Youth Vice President for the Atlantic Region, etc.), just to increase the number of eccentric people on committees and add to infighting. And frankly, who cares what their actual platform is? Does anyone think they will form the government and implement it? Or even get one person elected? Let the party be a well-organized recepticle for environmentally-minded protest votes and it will serve its purpose.
I do think it's odd that the party leader is so invisible (he was out of the country on the day the election was called). But he seems to be doing more than the last leader, who barely ran 100 candidates in the 2000 election and got less than 1% of the vote. | | |
I think Harris' strategy for the last election was effective. Running a full slate of candidates and getting the word out that each vote gave them $1.75 was shrewd.
They'll never top 4% without an actual concrete platform, though. Unless they are satisfied with being a protest vote party, they do need to draw new voters to them, and having an autocratic leader is bound to do the opposite and drive existing members away. | | |
| I just think it's really disingenuous for a party that most resembles the old tories to be draping themselves in the vestments of the left + environmentalist. a lot of people have been taken in, thinking they're voting for something that the Canadian federal Greens are not. (and this is something i was complaining about last election, too.) | | |
| most of this should obviously be blamed on the voters! but the Green leadership isn't absolved. | | |
I disagree that the Green party is being disingenuous about their policies. Personally, one of the reasons I am attracted to them is that they have strong environmental policies without some of the crazier left-leaning policies that the NDP has.
With regards to this article, I agree that the Greens should have a much better policy outline online. It's actually pretty disappointing that they don't, after doing as well as they did last time around. All the bureaucratic stuff I don't see the issues with. It's very very hard to start a new politic party and bring it to the point where its winning seats. A strong leader is key to doing that.
Also, I would like to point out that if Canada used a proportional system for its elections then the Green party would have some representation in parliament right now and their policies would surely be much more clearly stated. I'm hoping that we get some crazy minority mix-up that will allow some proportional rep to be passed. | | |
Dustin - There's nothing "disingenuous" about being right of the NDP. There IS somethng disingenuous about riding on the coattails of your party name and letting people go along with the delusion that it's a party whose policies are close to the NDP, and more than that a party whose priority is the environment. As that link points out, in the last election the Green Party's environmental platform was rated as worse than the NDP's by Greenpeace and the Sierra Club (this election's standings haven't been announced yet). It is NOT a hippie party, which is the vibe the party (happily) gives off - and I think it's their duty to make that as clear as possible. Their current murky no-policy-but-check-it-out-we're-GREEN thing is really cheeky and a little bit dishonest.
There's also the issue of (bad) policy. Last election, they were campaigning for huge at-the-pump gas tax hikes. While the wealthy can afford paying a few more thousand dollars a year for the privilege of riding their gas-guzzling SUVs, the poor -can't- afford to be saddled with the same burden just because they can't afford a newfangled enviro car. Much better to put huge penalties on gas-guzzling vehicles and huge incentives for low-impact vehicles. Gas tax (like the GST) hurts low-income families more than high-income. | | |
| And Dustin, I'm genuinely curious which current NDP planks you think are "crazy". | | |
The solution isn't new-fangled enviro cars. It's increasing the use of the existing mass transportation system and discouraging cars wherever possible. A quote from the Green policy site: "Work with provinces and municipalities to make a massive re-investment in Canada’s public transportation infrastructure." As long as they are committed to public transport, I'm in favor of ramping up gas taxes. Pulling out one aspect of their enviro policy without looking at the whole is a little disingenuous I think ;-).
As for crazy NDP policies, I just don't find some of their views realistic. I'm against increasing centralized power in the government. They seem to want a massive government that controls everything. Rather then pumping endless amounts of money into our current healthcare system, I think that alternative options should be considered. The NDP seems to have an immediate knee-jerk reaction against even looking at it.
Also, I still have lingering anti-NDP sentiment from when they (Ontario provincial NDPs) cut the funding to my high school. I agree with some of the things that I think the NDP says they stand for: education, public transport, the environment, proportional representation, legalizing pot. However, they haven't seemed to actually push for any of these things. Instead their big fight was to maintain higher corporate taxes. | | |
The primary difference between the NDP and the Greens is that the Greens approach is to place the environment first, whereas the NDP's approach is to lace people first. The Sierra and Greenpeace questionaries did not take into account the entire Green environmental platform, only a slice of it. Greens believe in retooling the entire economy to be far less reliant on natural resources and to produce far less pollutants as a result. The NDP have a pure regulatory approach, and have no plans that I have ever seen to deal with our society's dangerous, and dead end, consumerist addictions.
I wrote a comprehensive rebuttal to Dobbin's piece (he wrote a similar diatribe against the Greens last election) on my blog. Dobbin's piece also showed up on the Council of Canadians web site, and they were kind enough to link to my piece as a rebuttal.
http://section15.blogspot.com/2005/12/closet-dipper-dobbin-smears-greens-yet.html
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