Friday, October 3, 2014

Why Green?

Why Green?

We are facing a federal election in the fall of 2015.  As it stands it appears that the choice will be between more of the same, or more of the same; a continued progression of conservative policies aimed at maintaining the status quo as far as possible.

Yet the crises that the world is facing, from global warming to bee deaths to micro bead plastics, are the kind of crises that the status quo does not know how to address.  They are all products of our industrialised society.  Unless we take serious steps to change our industrialised society we will not succeed in solving these problems.

Many of us can agree that the current conservative government has broken faith with Canadians.  On too many occasions the government has just been too insulting to large segments of our society.  From the judiciary to our foreign service officers, to the research communities both in and outside of government, to the CBC, the fabric of our civilised society has been treated with disdain and disrespect, not to mention the extreme abuse that has been served up to our parliamentarians in the guise of non-answers in the house.

So how can we engineer a civilised revolution?  How can we ensure that the next government will be productive and civil, and will restore our long-held view that Canada is a trustworthy international citizen?

The solution I offer is to vote Green, to vote for the Green Party of Canada.  Not because we have the solutions, but because we have the only philosophy that will enable the solutions to be found.

The Green Party is the only party that publishes its founding principles, principles that are more than just platitudes.  We stand for:
  •       Ecological wisdom: the ecological wealth of this planet is what sustains us; we ignore it at our peril;
  •       Social justice: we are all equal before the law and must be treated as such;
  •       Participatory democracy: we stand for a fully participatory approach to democracy where all views are respected and represented in our governments;
  •       Non-violence: we do not consider bullying or violence in any form an acceptable way of conducting either our internal or external affairs;
  •       Sustainability: we need approaches to our economy that will enable its sustainability well in to the future.  Sustainability is not necessarily growth, but the ability to do tomorrow what we did today; and
  •       Diversity: respect for the diversity of the human population, in its multitude of different racial, sexual and religious characteristics. 

Above all else, we believe in the dictum that, “the economy is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.”  This may be considered to make us the “one-issue party” that we have been accused of being.  Yet, this issue is what enables the Green Party to envision a future that will exist for all of us.  It is a future that none of the other major parties, can conceive, because their vision one and all is of continued economic growth, year over year increases in the GDP, without concern for the health of the environment that inevitably sustains all of us.

By adopting this view of our condition, by applying the principles we claim, the Green Party will be able to provide a healthy future for the country.  It presents a party with the panoply of policies that give it a full spectrum platform, not just a one issue party.

Vote for us, and this not not happen. But this will happen if you choose to vote strategically, for the other guy who smells the least.


I encourage you all to think seriously over the next few months, and there aren’t many before we’ll be at the national polls again, as to how to vote to resolve our dilemmas.  And I encourage you all to think seriously of voting Green, for the future of Canada and the world.

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