Andrew Weaver Steps Down

He's been a true stalwart of the Green Party movement in Canada. Our very own climate scientist, U. Vic's Andrew Weaver. Now he's announced that he won't be seeking re-election to the provincial legislature. This is it. He's done.

In 2013, Weaver left his post as Canada Research Chair in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria. He was elected in May 2013 in Oak Bay-Gordon Head as the first provincial Green politician in Canada, and acclaimed as the party’s leader in 2015. 

He ran with a focus of making a difference in the area of climate change, explaining he viewed the B.C. Green Party as the best vehicle to do that work.

I wonder if Dr. Weaver is throwing in the towel, giving up the fight. The latest polling results show the federal Greens going nowhere. We might be back to the Vancouver Island/Gulf Islands bastion when the votes are tallied. A failure of Elizabeth May's Greens to stage a breakthrough will mean that climate change, the climate crisis/breakdown and our national climate emergency will fade once Scheer or Trudeau prevails.

It wouldn't be much of a surprise if Elizabeth May follows Weaver out the door. She has been fighting hard for close to 14 years. Susan Riley named her the "hardest working MP on Parliament Hill."  Like Weaver, she knows that Canada and the world stand at a crossroad and the petro-state isn't likely to change course. Time is not on Canada's side or humanity's. We haven't got another four years to squander on disingenuous half-measures as we have the past four years. But sometimes the clock simply runs out.

Washington Post - Could the Green Party Spell Trouble for Justin Trudeau in October?

Justin Trudeau must be so pleased that he reneged on his promise to rid Canada of first-past-the-post elections and the consequent false majorities it has inflicted on the Canadian people. That broken promise, among the litany of his broken promises and outright lies, may be the one that matters most when we go to the polls this October.

Despite that, the Washington Post asks if the Green Party of Canada could be bad news for Trudeau in the looming election.

With the federal election expected to begin in the late summer or fall, Canada’s political parties are preparing to battle for as many of the country’s 338 ridings as they can — and prognosticators are warming up, too. Will the Liberals hold on to government? Will they retain their majority? Which issues are going to dominate the campaign? 

For months, the Liberals and Conservatives have been in a fairly close one-two race — with the latter picking up steam. Most polls have the former in front. Commentators and pundits, me included, have been saying that the smart money is on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hanging on to government, perhaps with a reduced majority. He remains popular — or popular-ish, depending on which polls you read. 

The economy is doing well on aggregate. A start-up party led by disgruntled former Conservative member of Parliament (and former cabinet minister) Maxime Bernier is set to drain support from his old crew. And the New Democratic Party (NDP), with whom the Liberals compete for left and center-left votes, are currently weak. 

But in politics, as in life, there are threats you know about and threats you don’t. And then there are wild cards. Enter the Green Party of Canada. Led by Elizabeth May — one of the hardest-working parliamentarians in the country, a deeply informed and fierce debater, and a long-term champion for doing what it takes to address climate change — the party, for years, has had one seat in the House of Commons. That tracks with the Greens’ success around the country — not much of it. Until recently. 

In the 2017 British Columbia election, the local Green Party went from one seat to three in the provincial parliament, about doubling its popular support from 8 percent to nearly 17 percent. It ran the idealist campaign: saying no to money from unions and corporations, distancing itself from the old punch-counter-punch of the Liberals and the NDP, doubling down on a clean environment platform and the need for, you know, a habitable planet. In 2018, in Ontario, Mike Schreiner made history as the first Green elected to the legislature in that province. In New Brunswick, after a wacky election, the Greens are benefiting from growing public support, drawing from the Liberals. 

And in Prince Edward Island, some are suggesting the Greens could make history by winning the election and forming government — a year out from the race, they are effectively tied for first place. Recently in Maclean’s, Jason Markusoff profiled the party, asking, “Where in Canada will the Greens win next?” 

The Greens are clearly a growing force. 

Federally, in November, Green Party leader May was polling at 11 percent as preferred prime minister — tied with the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Now her party is hovering around 7 percent on the aggregate polling numbers. That’s good news for them and potentially bad news for Trudeau. As David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, put it on Twitter: “Many, including me, say a weak NDP helps the [Liberals] in 2019. But if the Greens pull 8-10% of the vote, that’s tough for the [Liberals].” 

I think he’s right. He concludes, “I’m starting to think that @JustinTrudeau’s greater threat is @ElizabethMay, not @theJagmeetSingh.” Agreed, again, although I’d add that the combination of the two is a particularly serious challenge for Trudeau, especially if either — or both — parties perform well in some of the 34 ridings the Liberals carried by 5 percent or less in 2015 (out of 70 such nail-biter contests in total). 

The Liberals may not be past their best-by date yet — Canadians typically grow tired of federal governments after a few rounds — but they’ve been in government long enough that running the smiling 2015 “Hope and hard work” campaign will be tricky. They’re no longer the scrappy underdog on a quest to unseat the embattled, mean Conservative prime minister. They’re now the ones who broke a promise on electoral reform. They’re the ones who have struggled to build a pipeline — they had to buy the project from the private sector for it to even have a chance — that opponents claim is inconsistent with the government’s environmental agenda. They’re the ones pushing a (morally right and necessary) carbon tax backstop against the will of several (morally wrong and intransigent) provinces. They’re also the target of routine, increasingly nasty attacks from the Conservatives. And now they’re facing a growing scandal over alleged involvement by the prime minister’s office in an attempt to protect the Montreal firm SNC-Lavalin from prosecution over its alleged business practices in Moammar Gaddafi’s Libya. 

The Greens, on the other hand, are rising across the country. Modestly, sure. But notably. They don’t come with baggage. They can run the optimist, hopeful-crusader campaign underwritten by credibility as guardians of the sacred environmental trust — as the environment, day by day, is becoming a more salient issue for voters. Plus, May (as I said, a strong debater) is set to take part in the leaders’ debates in 2019 thanks to rule changes. She’ll be a force onstage. All of that is good news for the Greens and bad news for the other parties. It’s also good news for voters who want and deserve a range of credible options on the ballot.

They've Already Shown You Their True Colours. And You'll Vote for Them, Why?

My party has only one voice in Parliament but it's a voice against which all the rest are to be measured and, when you do that, you get to see them clearly for what they are, their true colours.

In today's Toronto Star, columnist Tom Walkom calls out Mulcair and Trudeau for what they are - spineless opportunists for whom serving themselves will always trump serving Canada.


So far, the only opposition MP with enough guts to critique the content of the Conservative government’s new anti-terror bill is Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

She said Monday in the Commons that it would turn CSIS into a “secret police force.”

She also asked if the bill’s remarkably broad definition of crimes against the security of Canada included anti-pipeline protests (and got no answer).

Now that experts have had a chance to plow through the omnibus bill, other critics are surfacing.

In a statement released Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association asked the most trenchant question: Why are these extraordinary new security powers needed?

“There are still no answers as to why our existing laws and powers didn’t work — or if they didn’t work,” CCLA executive director Sukanya Pillay wrote.

She also pointed out that criminalizing something as vague as the advocacy of terrorism could have a chilling effect on academics and journalists.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has gone even further, saying that Bill C-51 would create “an unprecedented expansion of powers that will harm innocent Canadians and not increase public safety.”

In a release, it said it is alarmed by proposals that would expand the amount of time a terror suspect can be jailed without charge and that would allow judges to impose stringent conditions — including house arrest — on people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Stripping a person’s liberty where no crime is committed or suspected runs counter to our “most basic principles of fundamental justice,” the B.C. association wrote.

But none of this stopped the Liberals or New Democrats from supporting Harper's odious bill.  Walkom cuts to the chase.

Why are Canada’s usually obstreperous opposition parties so meek? Alas, they are afraid — afraid that if they criticize the substance of Bill C-51, Harper will paint them as soft on terror.

Yes, they're afraid.  Mulcair and Trudeau had to choose whether to stand up for Canada and oppose this egregious assault on our democratic freedom or buckle to Harper's will out of fear.  If they're this spineless in opposition you can be certain they'll be worms if they ever get power.

It was precisely this political malignancy that The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote of just a few days ago.


We are told at every election to hold our noses, forget the deficiencies and betrayals and vote Labour yet again, for fear of something worse. And there will, of course, always be something worse. So at what point should we vote for what we want rather than keep choosing between two versions of market fundamentalism? Sometime this century? Or in the next?

Perhaps there was a time when this counsel of despair made sense. No longer. The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Trudeau and Mulcair just wiped their boots on you.  This country has no need of their kind or their parties.

h/t Lorne, Politics and its Discontents

Will the Greens Back Trudeau, Shun Mulcair?

Tom Mulcair and the NDP will need all the help they can get for the 2015 election.  It's too bad Tommy burned his bridge to the Green Party.

“Over the last two years, I found Justin Trudeau to be collaborative and friendly,” May told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.

For the Saanich–Gulf Islands MP, collaboration is important. During the Green party’s convention last summer, she received a mandate to seek cooperation with the NDP and the Liberal party to defeat Stephen Harper and the ruling Conservatives.

Her experience so far with New Democrats has been “discouraging”. Last December, she wrote to NDP and Liberal MPs on the subject of electoral cooperation.

“It was a personal and confidential letter, but the NDP made it public and attacked me for sending it,” May recalled. “And Tom Mulcair prohibited his members from answering my letter.”

Although Mulcair and Trudeau have both stated they are not interested in the idea of an electoral alliance, the Green leader believes she may have a better chance of success with Trudeau.

“I think he’ll be much more open to cooperation…at least with the Greens, than will Tom Mulcair,” May said.

I don't know what it is with Mulcair but he comes across as a guy who has never seen a bridge he didn't want to set afire.

A Sensible Liberal When the Party Most Needs One

The Liberals are lucky.   They have a leadership candidate that could actually help them and the country.    No, it's not Trudeau and it's not Hall-Findlay or Garneau.  It's Joyce Murray of Vancouver.

Murray, unlike her rivals, wants to restore progressivism to the Liberal Party, something that has been consigned to obscurity since Ignatieff opened shop.   Unfortunately the wanna-be Latter Day Ignatieffs that fill the leadership ranks remain decidedly centre-right.

Here's a Murray idea that deserves consideration.   The Libs could join forces with those of us from the Green Party.   Our leader, Elizabeth May, is for it.

Had Liberals and Greens united behind a single candidate in last November's byelection in Calgary Centre, Murray says they could have prevented Tory Joan Crockatt from eking out a narrow victory with just under 37 per cent of the vote.

The Green Party actually has a robust policy platform that Liberals and uncommitted voters alike could embrace.   They're actually the very sorts of things you might have heard from Liberals of twenty or thirty years ago.  If the Libs insist on hitching their wagon to sub-prime fossil fuels and what even Allison Redford calls the "bitumen bubble" they're heading down a dead end road.  It's time for them to wake up, do themselves and the country a favour, and go Green.
 

Steve's Cheatin' Heart

Stephen Harper has a Nixonesque regard for rules - if he doesn't make them, they don't matter .

That point is driven home in Elizabeth May's book, Losing Confidence. From the Toronto Star:

Elizabeth May felt like a schoolgirl when she glanced over at the powerful man sitting beside her and noticed he had broken the rules.

The Green party leader had fought hard to be included in the national televised debates during the campaign for last October's election, and remembers participants were told they would be provided with blank index cards for taking notes, but they were forbidden to bring their own background material.

"Stephen Harper's staff took care to print out background notes on index cards, but they picked the wrong-sized cards. And no one writes in printer font. Looking over from my seat, I remember the shock of realizing he was cheating," May writes in her new book. "I felt like I was back in grade school. Do you 'tattle' on a cheater? Now, all I can think is 'What were his staff thinking?' It is clear they thought he wouldn't be caught."

Steve, cheating on a debate? Looking the Canadian people straight in the eye and gaming hell out of them?

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/617893