Will Nova Scotia Greens be up to green challenge?
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to get us out of the ecological mess we've got ourselves into.
by John Jacobs
March 31, 2006
Does Nova Scotia need a new political party? Some environmentalists
think so. A founding convention for a Nova Scotia Green Party was
recently held. Participants agreed to an organizational structure and
selected a leader, Nicholas Wright, a business and law student in
Halifax.
There is no question that environmental issues need to be brought to
the forefront of political agendas. A strong scientific consensus
confirms that the greenhouse gas produced by our economies is the major
cause of global warming. The only debate now is whether it is too late
to reverse the process and its consequences. An optimistic outlook is
that we are fast approaching the point of no return, what some
commentators have called the "tipping point."
Climate change is the most dramatic and pressing environmental
challenge we face. Fundamentally, we rely on an economy that thrives on
polluting the environment and wasting natural resources. Our health
care system is left to deal with the human consequences of ground, air
and water pollution. Cancer rates are soaring and the impacts of toxins
in our environment are increasingly being recognized. Our communities
and workers are struggling to deal with the consequences of the
depletion of natural resources such as fisheries and forestry.
Governments and political parties need to articulate viable strategies
to get us out of the ecological mess we've got ourselves into.
Unfortunately, the leadership shown by politicians in dealing with
these issues has been disappointing.
During the leaders' debate prior to the federal election in January,
the environment and the Kyoto accord were not brought up for discussion
by any of the party leaders.
Federally, the Liberals made much of signing on to the Kyoto protocol,
as it was popular with voters, but they did not have the stomach to
follow through. Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, rather than
decreasing.
The new Conservative government appears unable to make up its mind on
where it stands on Kyoto and may delay as long as it holds a
parliamentary minority. Both the past and the current federal
governments recognize that citizens want action on the environmental
front, but the parties are reluctant to take the steps needed. It will
take financial resources and a firm regulatory approach with the
private sector.
The federal NDP should be leading the push within Parliament. Its
platform received the highest grades from some leading environmental
organizations, ranking as high as or better than the federal Greens.
But surprisingly, during the last election, the NDP chose not to
include the environment of as one of the focuses of its platform.
Provincially, politicians don't seem any keener on taking the
leadership role needed. Going by their websites, none of the major
political parties in Nova Scotia explicitly places environmental issues
as a high priority.
The reality is that addressing the ecological challenges facing our
economy will require fundamental changes in how we, as a society,
produce and consume. We need politicians to tell it like it is without
fear of political unpopularity. Indeed, politicians who aren't afraid
to give us the straight goods on the environment will find a surprising
surge of support from the public and voters.
The challenge is no less than turning an economy profiting from the
exploitation of people and the environment into an economy based on
principles of environmental sustainability and social and economic
justice.
Rather than face up to the need for this economic change, successive
governments have made the problem worse by turning the direction of the
economy over to the corporate sector. As a result, not surprisingly,
corporate profits have skyrocketed, while the environment has paid the
price and many people and communities have been left behind.
And herein lies the challenge for a green party and, for that matter,
any party that believes in social and environmental justice: how to
overcome the economic and political power that corporations have
accumulated.
Will a Nova Scotia Green Party be up to the task?
It's hard to tell at this point, as it is early days and no policy
agenda has been presented. But recent developments within the federal
Green Party may provide some indication of the tendencies, or at least
tensions, within the new party.
Some former members have argued the leader of the federal Greens, Jim
Harris, has moved the party in a more corporate-friendly direction -
citing, for example, the shift to voluntary corporate compliance with
environmental standards, and away from previous policies which were
based on mandatory compliance by corporations.
Michael Oddy, the former interim leader of the provincial Greens and a
past federal candidate, left both levels of the party. He claimed the
Green Party had moved to the right by, for example, softening its
stance on climate change, military intervention and poverty, and paying
more attention to the economy, tax cuts and fiscal conservatism.
While there is no official affiliation with the federal party, the
provincial Green party leader, Nick Wright, ran in the past federal
election under the Jim Harris banner. In its first news release, Wright
states that the new party believes in "socially progressive
policy," "fiscal responsibility" and "environmental
sustainability," phrases taken from the same script the federal
leader used during the last election.
The clock is ticking. We urgently need a strategy to ensure a
transition to a sustainable economy and environment that is socially
just. All of our provincial parties need to put this high on their
agendas.
John Jacobs is director of the Nova Scotia office of the Canadian
Centre for Policy Alternatives, an independent public policy research
institute. A version of this article was published in The Chronicle
Herald.