I was walking on air for a couple of days, thinking Mr. Turner would quickly run into the arms of the Greens. Although the constituents at his weekend town hall meetings marginally voted for him to sit as an independent, the Greens in Milton were a strong second place. It would have been a tough few weeks, but he could have convinced his riding that they would be better served under a Green banner. After all, some of the most critical issues in the region– the imminent expansion of Dufferin Aggregates on the Niagara Escarpment and rapid growth demand a strong Green voice. According to the Milton Rural Ratepayers, the community is growing by 8.6% a year and will grow from 47,000 to 72,000 residents by 2009. Sadly, I could find very little on garth.ca on how Mr. Turner feels about these issues, although he recently re-wrote the Garth Turner “Citizen’s Guide to a Better Environment” which contains the following telling statements:
“Canada’s Conservative government has just finished writing the most comprehensive and environment-friendly action plan of the last twenty years, aimed at addressing the serious problems of global warming, deteriorating air quality and threats to our fresh water.
We have made the wise choice not to pursue the path of the Kyoto Agreement which would have seen Canada send billions of dollars to other countries in order to purchase pollution credits. That complicated and flawed plan would have cost taxpayers a bundle, while actually doing nothing to address our own environmental issues.”
Maybe when he wrote the above he had taken a few sips of the Kool-Aid but had not downed the whole glass? I dunno. Hopefully he will at least become a Green-friendly independent while the Harper government hangs on, and in a few months, if things look right maybe he’ll become a Green for real.
What I find sad about this entire episode is that Garth Turner seems to have replaced the discipline and ideology of Harper’s NeoCons with his own ideological faith in “digital democracy” — a misplaced belief that through technology voters will tell him what to do — and that what they say will always be the right course of action. Ha! Don’t get me wrong, Turner should be commended for opening a communication channel with his constituents. But active “listening” should not be conflated with blind obedience to the wishes of the few who choose to bend a politician’s digital ear. Sometimes good old-fashioned leadership is required. Sometimes a leader must articulate both the spoken and unspoken issues of her constituents.
In any case, Green History has been knocking loudly at Garth’s door and so far he has not bothered to answer.
October 24th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
I heard a brief clip in which he said it was going to take him some time to decide whether to join a party or remain an independent - weeks, at least.