Next Year You Really Should Vote Green

The 2019 election isn't far off but the outcome seems preordained. Barring some disaster the Trudeau Liberals are expected to win another false majority. That will make Justin the prime beneficiary of his craven and utterly self-serving decision to renege on his promise of electoral reform.

Even if I'm wrong and Justin doesn't hang onto power, we'll have a false majority Conservative government, the flip side of the coin.

Sure they're different, a little bit here, a little bit there. One might smell a bit worse than the other but that's not really important.

What matters, I submit, is the urgent message delivered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest report. Remember, that's a "best case scenario" report as jarring as it seems. Still it warns that globally we must slash greenhouse gas emissions a staggering 45% by 2030, just 12-years from now.

Twelve years. In Canada that's three electoral cycles for false majority governance. That is not much time to get it right.

Here's why I suggest neither Liberal nor Conservative deserves your vote. They both promise conflicted leadership at a time that demands the utmost clarity to secure, so far as that still remains possible, the future of our children. Both will sell out our country.

Trudeau champions a relatively pointless carbon tax. He's bragging about numbers that are woefully inadequate, a small fraction of what's needed. Still it's a gesture and that's better than Andrew Scheer's backwardness. But that's not enough reason to back the Liberals.

It's what Scheer and Trudeau have in common, what they agree upon (albeit with minor differences) that matters. That begins with bitumen. Both are bitumen boosters, committed to flooding world markets with as much of the toxic, filthy, high-carbon, low-grade ersatz petroleum as possible.

Trudeau will at least talk about cutting Canadian GHG emissions - too little, too late as that may be - but, when it comes to bitumen, they're both doing what Big Tobacco did in the States. When the tobacco/cancer link started cutting into sales, Big Tobacco flooded foreign markets, particularly Asia with their cancer sticks. And Trudeau and Scheer would have us flood those selfsame markets with our own.

While that may take the government off the hook for the emissions load represented by every supertanker of bitumen burned overseas - and that is precisely the way they treat it - it's called "global" warming. It doesn't matter where that crud is burned. There's only one atmosphere.

What Justin Trudeau has shown us over the past three years is that he's not to be trusted. He'll lavish us with grand promises and then simply walk away from them.

I can't argue that it's time for the Greens to govern Canada. Not yet. It is, however, time that Canada was not fettered by ineffective false majority governments. We need consensus government to deal with the unparalleled challenges that confront us today. Since we cannot have electoral reform under Trudeau or Scheer, our only chance is to deny either party a false majority and instead elect enough Greens that we have minority government with the Greens holding the balance of power able to defeat the government on a confidence motion if they keep stalling on climate change.

We need truly disruptive change in the way we're governed federally and provincially. Let's start in 2019.