Did someone say environment?

Liberals are looking over their shoulder, but it’s not the NDP’s breath they feel

by Andrea Reimer

As British Columbia winds its way ever closer to the May 17 provincial election, environmental issues have emerged as a surprise focus for the governing party. In amongst the BC Liberals’ shock and awe press release campaign over the past month is an average of one new green initiative every day, ranging from protecting drinking water to a renewable energy task force.

Given their unprecedented rollbacks in environmental laws and conservation staff and aggressive expansion of dirty industries during their reign, this sudden course change may seem a little surprising, until you read it in the language governments understand best. Apparently, polling is telling the BC Liberals the same thing the Green Party has known for quite a while: the government with the biggest majority in BC’s history is losing a significant number of voters to the upstart Green Party.

Not that we haven’t seen this phenomenon before. In 2001, the provincial NDP government had a well-publicized death-bed conversion too. In the final three months of the NDP’s ten-year tenure, they fast-tracked the creation of dozens of parks, got around to placing a moratorium on grizzly bear hunting and signed an accord for protection of contentious valleys in the Great Bear Rainforest. The latter was particularly ironic given that protests over the logging of old growth forests in that area four years earlier had led to the NDP branding environmentalists as “enemies of BC.”

The instinct for political survival runs deep and all irony aside, the NDP were sufficiently convinced by quickly rising support for the Green Party that going green themselves was necessary if they were going to retain even one or two seats in the Legislature after the last election. While the BC Liberals are guaranteed to elect ten times that number in this election, their survival as a government may come down to a similar number of seats. Whether those seats will be decided by Green Party voters is anyone’s guess, but what is clear is that neither recently governing party really understands much about those voters if they think that dangling last minute enviro-goodies is going to change their respective electoral fortunes.

It’s not rocket science to see where the Green Party is coming from. One need only look at the history books. In 1972 the world’s first Green Party formed in the Australian state of Tasmania under the name the United Tasmania Group. Although environmental issues did provide a catalyst for the group getting together as in BC, Tasmanians have a long history of battles between frustrated people and fat cat logging corporations and they quickly expanded to include the peace movement and social justice advocates. Over time the coalition has grown even further to encompass electoral reform, anti-globalization and safe food champions, to name a few. Most importantly (Liberal and NDP staffers get your pens out here), the Green Party attracts voters who are looking for a party that has a commitment to the future, that looks beyond a four or five year term of office, and is unencumbered by interests that have traditionally looked at short term gains.

And throughout its global history, the Green Party has shown it is nothing if not patient. In took eight years for the Tasmanian Greens to elect a member to the state legislature, but their most significant victory came the next year when, on the day he was released from jail for peacefully protesting logging in an old growth forest in 1983, Dr Bob Brown was elected to the state legislature. In his twenty-year-long political history Brown has gone on to become a global hero both within the Green Party and beyond. He has won awards from such diverse sources as The Australian newspaper and the BBC, who named him the “Most Inspiring Politician of the Year” in 1996. There’s no question his leadership on the environment is in part responsible for his accolades, but when you talk to people about Brown what really comes through is the word “integrity.”

Take, for example, Brown’s role in the Labour/Green Party Accord, a coalition that governed Tasmania for three years and change in the late 1980s when the voters handed the Green Party five seats, a balance of power in the new government. After the election, the Greens hammered out a 93-point plan with the Labour Party. The Accord was publicly signed by both parties and thousands of copies were distributed throughout the state. A good thing too, because three years into their term, Labour decided to renege on one of the key issues in the Accord by rescinding control over how much logging corporations could cut.

But Brown kept his part of the bargain and introduced a motion of non-confidence. The government fell on that vote and an incredulous Labour Party got decimated at the polls while the Green Party re-elected all five of their legislators. (In retaliation, Labour subsequently colluded with the governing neo-cons to reduce the size of their STV districts to five member ridings and shut out the Greens, but that’s a story for another column).

Names change, issues change and countries change, but around the world, the Green Party has a similar story to tell. Given the choice between hanging onto power and keeping a promise, the Green Party has generally chosen the latter. Therein lies the rub for the BC Liberals and the NDP who are both lusting after that attractive swing vote: how many politicians in British Columbia or even in Canada can claim the same strength of conviction? If either one of the major parties can find a way to capture that ground before E-Day, I’d put my money on them, but the way it looks right now, the Green Party vote is likely to stay where it is.

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