Are You Getting Enough Greens?

With a provincial election looming, the Green Party of Ontario will offer voters something new. While the Tories have been forced to think green and the Liberals and NDP have always included environmental promises in their platforms, the Green Party will actually deliver on their policy of environmental integrity. And its leader is not afraid to call a spade a spade.

Frank de Jong has been a member of the Green Party since 1987 and the leader since 1993. He says, “There’s a whole range of scams and fads out there. One of the big scams has to do with ethanol, which is a dubious green technology.”

In the production of corn as the source of ethanol, 50 per cent of the total energy input is made up of fossil fuels. Likewise, growing soy as a source of high-cetane diesel requires an ample amount of pesticides. In the end, an edible product is turned into a gas that may burn clean but wasn’t produced clean.

Another fad, de Jong says, is the incineration of garbage to get heat from waste. “What we need is for the federal and provincial government to enact extended product warranty legislation so that manufacturers are responsible for their products from the cradle to the grave. That would get rid of garbage altogether.”

He does, however, see positive initiatives from the Ernie Eves government, such as lifting taxes from photophaic and green electrical systems and the PST off of biofuel. “We’re in the fifth decade of the green movement,” says de Jong, “It’s been two steps forward and one back all the time.” But there’s been progress, like the feds’ phasing out of ozone-depleting CFCs, and the anti-pesticide and anti-smoking movements.

But other problems persist, such as the use of genetically modified food and the $2.5 billion refurbishing of four nuclear units in Pickering—taxpayer dollars that could be better used to build 1,000 wind turbines. Urban sprawl’s another issue without a strong government protagonist. According to de Jong, “Toronto needs to be redesigned into 500 pedestrian communities that are linked by light rail. The private automobile is a misbegotten technology, even with fuel cells.”

Indeed, the Greens are in a position to challenge. They’ve reached five per cent in pre-election polls. Says party member Dan King, “We’re no longer counted as ‘other’ by the political pundits. We’ve risen out of obscurity.” They’re also offering a long-distance telephone service to encourage people to do business over the phone instead of flying to faraway places and to raise funds for the Green platform.

The Green Party’s ten key values are: sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics, gender equality, diversity, personal and global responsibility and ecological wisdom. The Green Party is radically different from the Tory, Liberal, or even NDP ideology. For instance, they would support Quebec’s sovereignty if the province voted to separate.

“Greens think that all over the world all kinds of groups should have self-determination.”

He thinks the Quebeccontroversy has to do with a “large national government that doesn’t want people to be in charge of their own affairs.”

The Greens believe in more decentralization, which would allow for different communities to deal with their unique problems locally. Also, one might be surprised to read some of the smaller points in the Green’s policy plan. Even de Jong says he’s not familiar with all of them and does not recall the one that seeks to banish the four basic food groups and replace them with a vegan diet.

“We’re not a party of dietary habits,” says de Jong. But food is important to their policy, and the Party endorses small family farms over large factory farms, which it feels are responsible for Mad Cow Disease among other ailments.

It also has a response to SARS. The Party’s June 2, 2003 press release stated, “Not only would [the Green Party] restore funding for our current system, it would expand our system to include support for preventative health care, alternative health care and a provincial pharmacare program.”

Despite latest events, the Green’s focus is always about the environment as a whole and our collective responsibility to sustain it. De Jong sees an economically viable way of doing that. “The key to everything is green economy: ecological tax reforms, shifting taxes off of what we want onto what we don’t want. We need to encourage industry to go green to avoid taxation. We consider ourselves the green Adam Smith. Start the market and then companies will go green.”

For more information, visit the Green Party of Ontario’s Web site – www.greenparty.on.ca

Photograph by Bouke Salverda
GPO images courtesy and © copyright the Green Party of Ontario