by Mike Nickerson
Regarding Murray Dobbin's article about the Green Party being less than Green.
We are flattered that Canadians are taking the Green Party seriously enough for writers to be producing attack literature aimed at undermining our message. It really is a mark of having arrived in our somewhat ill democracy.
For the record, I would like to refute some of the claims that Mr. Dobbin has made. I write from knowledge gained as the Ontario Representative on the Green Party of Canada's Governing Council.
While there are elements of truth in Mr. Dobbin's writing, as there has to be in order to fool people about the rest of a message, there are key elements that are clearly mis-representations. His account of Revenue Sharing is the most blatant.
Sharing the Party's revenue from the new Elections Finance legislation was an idea originally circulated by Jim Harris in the 2004 election. Soon after the election, at our National Convention, a committee was struck to make recommendations for implementing Revenue Sharing.
The committee faced a broad spectrum of views. Many members loved the idea, while others thought it to be organizational suicide. No other political party, to my knowledge, has even considered sharing its public revenue with local chapters.
The issue was a complicated one. In some lights revenue sharing looked good and, in others, it looked quite the opposite. Many of us, including Jim, changed opinions as the options and implications were discussed. (If one holds a firm view throughout a discussion, others must wonder if they are actually listening.) When the recommendations of the Revenue Sharing Committee were finally presented to Council, a number of options were mailed to the membership for their vote. The vote was very clearly in favour of sharing.
During the two day Council retreat, dedicated to resolving the issue, it was clear that, had Council wanted to evade the sharing of funds, it could have done so for defensible technical reasons. Early in that discussion, Jim Harris stated that, in his opinion, we could not entertain diversionary opportunities and were bound by our Constitution, and common decency, to work with the decision of the membership.
As there are large financial implications for the Party, Jim also went on to say that, if it was difficult to balance the Party's accounts after sharing revenue, he would forgo his honorarium, before any staff layoffs. My EDA is presently expecting a cheque that will be helpful in my own Green Party campaign in Lanark, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington.
The truth of Jim Harris's actions were far from the dictatorial opposition that Mr. Dobbin suggested.
While there were many other points of misinformation, I will touch only briefly on a few others.
Much emphasis is put on the fact that Jim Harris was once a member of the Progressive Conservative Party. That was before eighteen years as a member of the GPC and a couple of years prior to that volunteering for the Green Party in England. This takes his active membership in the Green Party back to within a year or two of the Party's formation.
Given that any person who has been politically active for more than the Green Party's twenty two years of existence has to have come from another party, Jim's previous political activity is hardly a detail of primary significance. We continue to attract people from the Liberals, the Conservatives, the NDP and other parties, as well as many who hadn't bothered voting before the Green Party arose.
Mr. Dobbin suggested that empty seats on the GPC Council was a significantly bad thing. In the last year, the GPC Council has moved from being a working council, where the Council members were expected to do the Party's work voluntarily, to a governing council where our job is to direct paid staff to do the work. The implications of not filling a couple of functionary positions has little significance now that we all fill the same role as participants in the decision making process. Whether fourteen or sixteen people meet to make decisions is not as significant as missing functionaries would have been five years ago.
Contrary to Mr. Dobbin claims of there being no mechanism for changing leadership in the Green Party, our Constitution prescribes that a Leadership Review can be initiated at any time by a petition of the membership. There is also an automatic opportunity for review at our National Convention, held every second year.
Finally, in regard to suggestions that the Green Party is not necessary because the NDP represents green issues better than the Green Party does. In the early 1980s, before the Green Party existed in Canada, I received a copy of the NDP's environmental policy. I was delighted. For more than a decade I had been active promoting environmental awareness. Here was political policy that took the issues seriously.
I was very disappointed that, in the next election, the NDP did not raise any of its environmental policies for the Canadian people to consider. I was disappointed again in the next election, and the next and the next. It was not until the 2004 election, when the Green Party was being taken seriously, that NDP environmental policy was finally disclosed to the public.
Where might we be today had the NDP respected their own environmental policy and informed Canadian voters about the options?
Much has changed over those two and a half decades. The planet seems to have gone into irreversible climate change, rates of asthma and cancer, due in significant part to permitted toxic releases, have skyrocketed and numerous other symptoms of overshooting the Earth's carrying capacity have become facts. (Fishery decline, oil peak, clean water, etc.)
Canadians would likely have responded positively to environmental policy from an established party, in the same way that they are responding to the Green Party now. We would likely all be better off presently had the NDP considered environmental issues politically expedient twenty years ago, when the problems were far less serious.
The Green Party formed and has grown strong as a spokesvehicle for concerns about long term well-being on the social, economic and environmental fronts. We invite all the other parties to get on board and acknowledge that our nation's activity cannot continue to expand without regards to the finite nature of our wonderful planet.
hope that Straight Goods will see fit to present this differing view. If you or any of your readers would like to understand the challenge that the Green Party is asking everyone to acknowledge, and the goal that we understand will lead us out of danger, please take a look at: http://www.greenparty.ca/challenge_goal.html
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