[R-G] Canada’s Greens: an aspirant establishment party

[Anthony Fenton]

Canada’s Greens: an aspirant establishment party
By John Mackay and Graham Beverley
8 October 2008

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/grns-o08.shtml

As many as one in every ten Canadians who participate in the October  
14 federal election will cast their vote for the Green Party, or at  
least so claim the opinion polls.

Whether the Greens do in fact more than double the 4.5 percent share  
of the popular vote they captured in the 2006 federal election remains  
to be seen. But taking advantage of increased popular interest,  
heightened media attention, and new party-financing legislation that  
provides them with a financial subsidy for every vote they won in  
2006, the Greens have been far more active in this federal election  
than any previous one.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May secured a seat at the table in last  
week’s two nationally televised leaders’ debates, over the initial  
opposition of the Conservatives and the social-democratic New  
Democratic Party (NDP).

May has proclaimed the Greens “an anti-establishment party” and a  
“movement for change,” while likening her party and its program to  
“successful” Green Parties in other countries, particularly the German  
Greens.

The Greens are benefiting from popular disaffection with the  
traditional parties, all of which have participated in the dismantling  
of public and social services, and from increasing concern with  
environmental issues, particularly global warming or climate change.

But far from offering any genuine alternative for working people, the  
Green Party is an unabashed defender of capitalism and an aspirant  
establishment party. They are contesting the current election in a  
quasi-electoral alliance with the Liberals, the Canadian ruling class’  
traditional party of government. The Liberal governments of Jean  
Chrétien and Paul Martin, which held office from 1993 to early 2006,  
were the instrument through which Canadian big business imposed  
massive social spending and tax cuts, gutted unemployment insurance  
benefits, and launched the expansion and rearmament of the Canadian  
Armed Forces.

The May-Dion Pact

In April 2007, May and newly elected Liberal Party leader Stéphane  
Dion announced a pact under which the Liberals agreed not to stand a  
candidate against May, who is challenging Tory Defence Minister Peter  
MacKay in the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova. In return the Greens  
promised not to oppose Dion’s re-election. But the real purpose of the  
pact, from the Liberal perspective, was that it constituted an  
endorsement by May and the Greens of Dion’s environmentalist  
credentials and signaled their support for the election of a Liberal  
government. The joint statement issued by Dion and May to announce  
their pact declared that “a government in which Stéphane Dion serves  
as Prime Minister” would “work well with a Green Caucus” to promote  
“action on climate.”

May has claimed there is no truth to a La presse report that there is  
a secret understanding between the Liberals and the Greens that calls  
for her to issue an appeal in the final days of the election campaign  
for voters to cast a “strategic vote” for Liberal candidates, at least  
in some ridings, so as to prevent the re-election of the Conservatives.

But during the campaign she has given several interviews in which she  
effectively supported the election of a Liberal government, even if  
the rallying of electors behind the Liberals in a bid “to stop Harper”  
resulted in the Greens failing to elect a single MP.

May told the weekly newsmagazine Maclean’s “she prefers no Greens be  
elected if it meant the end” of Stephen Harper’s Conservative regime.

Maclean’s quotes May as saying, “It’s not a partisan calculation. It’s  
just that what offends me the most is Mr. Harper continuing in the  
direction he’s taking us. ... I’m making it very clear we have to  
elect Green MPs and that Green MPs facing a Harper bench would be far  
worse than no Green MPs facing a Liberal minority bench. ... I don’t  
understand how anyone who understands the climate crisis wouldn’t feel  
that a Harper victory was more damaging than any other set of  
outcomes. I don’t understand why [Bloc Québécois leader Gilles]  
Duceppe and [NDP leader Jack] Layton wouldn’t also stand by that.’”

Both the Liberals and Greens advocate the imposition of a consumption  
tax on carbon emissions that would be offset by cuts to corporate and  
personal income taxes. The two parties only disagree on the size of  
the requisite “green shift,” with the Liberals proposing a carbon tax  
that would ultimately raise $15 billion annually and the Greens one  
that would produce $50 billion per year in tax revenue.

Dion has promoted the Liberals’ “green shift” as a program to boost  
corporate Canada in the struggle for markets and profits, by promoting  
energy efficiency, providing business with lower tax rates, and  
positioning Canadian business to take a leading role in the developing  
of “green technology.”

Elizabeth May and the Greens share Dion’s perspective. May frequently  
quotes her “good friend” former US President Bill Clinton as saying  
that the environmental crisis “presents this generation with the  
single largest economic opportunity in the history of human enterprise.”

Courting Liberal and Tory MPs

While allying with the Liberals, the Greens have also sought to win  
over dissident Liberal and Conservative MPs. In late August,  
independent MP and former Liberal politician Blair Wilson announced he  
had joined the Greens, becoming the first ever Green member in a  
Canadian legislature. In jumping to the Greens, Wilson, who had been  
suspended from the Liberal parliamentary caucus for violating the  
Federal Election Act, was seeking to salvage his own career by  
appealing to the concerns around climate change in his British  
Columbia riding.

Previously May had courted avid tax-cutter Garth Turner. Turner, who  
was kicked out of the Tory caucus after criticizing Harper’s  
appointment of a Liberal defector to the cabinet, weighed May’s offer  
of joining the Greens for several weeks, before opting for the safer  
choice of becoming a Liberal.

May has also wooed longtime Nova Scotia Conservative Bill Casey, who  
was kicked out of the Conservative caucus after he voted against the  
last federal budget on the grounds it broke a government commitment to  
his province. May has proclaimed Casey an “honorary Green” and her  
party is not standing a candidate against him as he attempts to win re- 
election next Tuesday as an independent.

May’s attempt to casting herself as a “non-politician” and “outsider”  
notwithstanding, she has spent years working the corridors of Ottawa  
and Canada’s provincial capitals. She was executive director of the  
Sierra Club of Canada from 1989 to 2006. Prior to that, she was a  
policy adviser to Tom McMillan when he was the Environment Minister in  
Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government. Two years ago,  
May publicly lauded Mulroney, whose government sought to introduce to  
Canada the aggressive anti-working class agenda of Britain’s Margaret  
Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan, as Canada’s “greenest” prime  
minister.

May has promoted the Greens as something of a successor to the  
Progressive Conservative Party. [The current Conservative Party is the  
product of a merger of the right-wing populist Canadian Alliance and  
the Progressive Conservatives, the Canadian elite’s traditional  
alternate party of government, although a tiny fraction of “Red  
Tories” balked at joining the new party.] May told Toronto’s City TV  
that the Greens are akin to the Progressive Conservatives in that they  
are fiscally “small c” conservative, while attentive to social justice  
issues.

Further, in keeping with her protestations that the Greens are “not a  
left wing party,” May has professed her personal opposition to  
abortion and argued in favor of “income splitting,” a hobby horse of  
social and fiscal conservatives because it would provide a huge  
financial incentive for one member of a high-income couple (most  
likely the wife) to be a full-time parent.

The German example

The Canadian Greens touting of the European Green parties is both  
revealing and apt. The German Greens began as a middle-class protest  
party, espousing pacifism and social reform. But since they entered  
Germany’s government in a coalition with the Social-Democrats in 1998,  
the Greens have moved sharply to the right, abandoning their pacifist  
views to become enthusiastic promoters of German international  
military deployments. In the face of massive popular opposition the  
Greens have, for example, championed Germany’s involvement in the US  
war in Afghanistan.

In 2003-4, the Green-SPD coalition implemented its so-called Agenda  
2010, the most far-reaching assault on social and welfare benefits in  
the history of modern Germany.

The Canadian Greens’ platform for the 2006 federal election made no  
mention of the leading role the Canadian Armed Forces were, and are,  
playing in the Afghan War.

Soon after May replaced the ex-Progressive Conservative party  
functionary Jim Harris as Green Party leader, the Greens issued a call  
for Canada to end its counter-insurgency role in Afghanistan. But the  
Greens are in no way opposed to the US-imposed government in Kabul.  
They propose Canada maintain “a continued small Canadian military  
presence in Kabul” as well as “provide police training through the  
RCMP for the Afghan police force.” The Greens call for NATO to cede  
its place in Afghanistan to a UN peace-keeping mission, ignoring the  
fact that the current NATO occupation of Afghanistan has the UN’s  
blessing.

The Greens’ platform promotes the idea that Canadian capitalism can be  
a progressive force in the world—“the planet needs Canada.” It  
advocates Ottawa “decrease,” not end, “our contributions to NATO war  
efforts.”

Paving the way for future Canadian military missions, if only they are  
under the banner of the UN , the Greens say that Canada should be a  
leader in “peace-making,” the euphemism used to justify Canada’s  
participation in the 1991 Iraq War and the subsequent decade-long  
embargo against Iraq.

To be sure, much of the Greens’ appeal is bound up with its claim to  
be the environmental party and the party advocating the most urgent  
action on climate change.

The centerpiece of the Green election platform is its carbon tax  
scheme. The burden of this plan would fall on working people, since  
consumption taxes favor those with incomes large enough to save and  
the tax on carbon emissions would ultimately ripple through the  
economy, raising the cost of virtually every commodity,

The Greens tout the fact that a host of big business representatives  
including the Conference Board of Canada have endorsed the principal  
of a carbon tax. They could also add that big business economists have  
long advocated increasing consumption taxes, which are by their very  
nature regressive, and reducing corporate and personal income taxes,  
so as to further shift the burden of taxation from “investment and  
savings” (i.e., big business and the rich) and onto working people.

The Greens cynically pledge to use some of the windfall revenue from  
their carbon tax for social spending and the alleviation of poverty.  
At the same time, however, they claim that a carbon tax will combat  
the effects of climate change by fiscally discouraging the emission of  
greenhouse gases. This presents a contradiction: how might the Greens  
institute their paltry reforms from tax revenue that is designed to  
shrink? One is left to simply assume that, once the environmental  
crisis is miraculously solved by the market, the cuts to income and  
payroll taxes will remain and social spending will atrophy.

The idea that introducing a price mechanism can solve the mounting  
environmental crisis is absurd. Humanity’s productive capacity, the  
vast expanses of infrastructure, natural resources, technology, and  
labour power that make up the economy, are controlled by a tiny  
bourgeois elite and directly subordinated to the interests of capital.  
The current environmental crisis is the direct result of the  
subordination of these immense forces to the interests of private  
profit and the division of the world into rival national-blocs of  
capitalists who compete for markets, resources, and pools of labour to  
exploit.

The Green Party in no way challenges these social relations; indeed,  
its solution to the environmental crisis is to work through the  
market, maximizing “efficiency” and lauding Canada’s “highly  
innovative corporate culture.” Under a thin coat of “progressive”  
paint, the Green Party’s carbon tax is much more focused on the  
environment for Canadian big business than on the massive crisis which  
today confronts humanity internationally.

The Green Party should not be seen as some sort of “alternative” to  
the established parties; it is simply another shade in the spectrum of  
bourgeois politics. The only plausible way to effect the technological  
revolution necessary to avert environmental disaster is the  
appropriation of humanity’s productive forces by the international  
working class. Production must be organized through a scientific,  
rational, and democratic plan in the interests of society as a whole,  
rather than in the interests of capital. This is the program fought  
for by the Socialist Equality Party.