Printed Matters

I cannot be accused – not this time around, anyway – of being objective in this election. I have been rather public in throwing my hat in with the Green Party of Ontario, and in particular my local Green Party candidate Tim Grant. I’ve leaned toward environmentalism my whole life, and, having tired immensely of politics as usual and the lack of bold vision and change, I am determined to vote to build the party that most closely matches my ideals, come hell or high water.

I have no reason to keep it close to the chest. I am not the voice of any organization with political clout. I am not a journalist, expected against reason to be a political eunuch. I do not speak for vested interests, other than my own. I speak as one individual among many, and I am happy with my choice to expose as many people as I can, in my limited way, to the new ideas being brought forward by the Greens.

But being the champion of such a small party as the Greens brings challenges. The relative lack of party machinery, and funding, are among them. The GPO is getting better in this regard – they have a fantastic team of dedicated professionals working hard over at Party HQ – but it still has a long way to go.

All that aside, the most galling and frustrating of the challenges is the absurd propensity of people, especially those who are ostensibly progressive small-g greens who profess to be for change, to resist change. They want us to vote for one of the older, more established parties because, I suppose in my darker moments, change actually scares them.

That’s probably not the real reason. The real reason is that they fail to grasp the importance of building a party, as opposed to just winning this week’s horse race. Perhaps, being greens, they have an impending sense that this might actually be the last election. If Tim Hudak and the his Hudakerrites get into power, they feel, we’ll be hurled back into the dark ages and all the electricity will be shut off and those of us who are left will never vote again. So their constant call is vote the same way they’ve always voted – NDP or Liberal, depending on the cut of their jibs – not because they are building toward their own ideals, but because they are afraid of what will happen if those coal-dirty, backward-to-the-future Tories start ripping down the Green Energy Act.

Of course that’s not true. This is not the last election, and not everything rides on this election, despite the admonitions of MaRS cleantech advisor Tom Rand, shilling here for the Liberals, or @PureShakti, hiding under a cloak of anonymity and shilling for the NDP. Both want you to vote Liberal or Dipper respectively to prevent the Tories from taking power. But they can’t both be right, can they?

Of course neither is right. The best course of action is to build the party that best reflects your own ideals, and get them ready for the next election, and the one after that. Because that’s the only way we’ll ever get to have a viable alternative in this province – we have to build it. The GPO cannot and will not suddenly develop the support and the machinery it needs to win elections out of thin air, or some magical organizational fiat on the part of its leadership. It needs to have your support. You need to have the courage to look forward a little bit, beyond the next four years, and the courage to decide for yourselves what your ideals are and to build toward them.

Tom Rand, climate-change entrepreneur David Noble, and @PureShakti all profess to have green vision. I would warrant a guess that the Green Party matches their ideals closer than any other party in this race. But they all argue that to vote Green would be to waste a vote. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It strikes me particularly ironic that Tom Rand would point to a piece by Tyler Hamilton in the Star as evidence that we should vote Liberal. Hamilton’s argument there is that Green Energy Act is laudable because it helps develop the critical mass necessary to get the fledgling alternative energy industry off the ground in this province. I whole-heartedly agree: the Green Energy Act is a visionary piece of legislation that is helping to kick-start the solar and wind energy industries here in Ontario.

And yet Rand refuses to see the value of the very same argument when it comes to how he will vote in four days. Instead of helping to build the party that most closely matches his ideals, so it can achieve critical mass too, he wants to try to convince you to vote for second-best. As David Estill pointed out, the Green Energy Act was adapted from German Green Party policy. It’s time to give credit where credit is due.

As Tyler Hamilton says, “It’s not about picking winners. It’s about Ontario not becoming a future loser.” Yet the Liberals continue to support nuclear energy, and their GEA is poorly implemented and subject to momentum-killing moratoriums and corporate handouts. The NDP, meanwhile, wants to take sales tax off fossil fuels, disproportionately favouring those who use more fossil fuels and discouraging efforts to be more fuel-efficient.

My suggestion to greens like Tom Rand, David Noble and @PureShakti is to vote like you mean it. Vote, with some vision, for the party that has provided a consistent and proven Green narrative for the Liberals to copy.