In a Green Canada, every month is May
Sunday, August 27th, 2006
Yesterday the Green Party of Canada elected Elizabeth May as their new party leader. Given the fatigue that many Canadians feel for the old left-right, liberal-conservative binaries, let’s hope that May will bring something new to Ottawa politics. It would be about time.
After all, here in southern Ontario, there is very little healthy green space left. Conservatives and Liberals alike have encouraged endless growth and watered down laws designed to encourage sustainable land use. With a surging GTA population now living in L.A.-style sprawl, air quality is terrible and we no longer have the capacity to adequately deal with the region’s sewage or the chemical soup we call “storm water”. And let’s not talk about the even bigger issues of global warming and fossil fuel depletion (Harper is certainly trying not to). Liberal and Conservative governments continue to run this country like a pyramid scheme: keep bringing in new bodies to devour resources in order to expand the infrastructure to bring in more bodies to devour resources… The Ontario Liberal “Places to Grow” plan calls for an additional 4.4 million people to move to this region over the next 25 years. Most of this growth is expected to come from immigration and is presented as a fait accompli — although groups such as Immigration Watch Canada are calling for dramatic reductions in immigration intake.
It will be interesting to see how May and the Greens tackle the problem of immigrant-driven growth, given that the current population of Canada may be approaching the carrying capacity of the country. Certainly population will have a major impact on Canada’s ability to meet what ever kind of greenhouse gas emission policy the Harper regime manages to come up with. May has announced she will run in Cape Breton during the next election. She should have more than a fighting chance, given her credentials and the good work she did to get the Feds to relocate residents affected by the Sydney tar ponds. Let’s hope so. Ottawa can use all the political biodiversity it can get.
