Federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May would work with any other party in a minority Parliament with a serious climate plan—and even thinks she could influence Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives to drop their crusade against carbon pricing “if it means the difference for them between governing or spending more time in opposition,” The Canadian Press is reporting today.
The news breaks just days after a major policy split emerged within the Greens, with party leaders in two provinces calling for a faster tar sands/oil sands shutdown than the federal party platform proposes.
“People change their minds when they see the dynamic of a way a Parliament is assembled and maybe think, ‘Killing carbon taxes isn’t such a good idea if the only way I get to be prime minister is by keeping them,’ ” May said, envisioning the influence Greens could wield if no party held a clear majority after the October 21 election.
“I think it’s really important to communicate with Canadians how our democracy works and that a minority Parliament is the very best thing, if, and this is a big if, you have parties and MPs in Parliament who are committed to working together,” she added.
“By ‘working together’,” CP adds, “she specifically means to slow climate change with policies that drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, don’t build any more oil pipelines, and replace fossil fuels with renewable energy as fast as possible.”
But forming an alliance with the party most closely allied with Canada’s fossil industry might not be what May’s supporters have in mind as a path to power.
Last week, “Alex Tyrrell, leader of the Green Party of Quebec, is spearheading the dissent and calling on the federal Greens to change their environmental platform ahead of the national election October 21,” the Toronto Star reports. “In an interview Wednesday, Tyrrell accused federal Green Leader Elizabeth May of being too soft on the oilsands because her party’s platform would allow the industry to continue operating for decades to come.”
Earlier this month, Tyrell launched a website, GreensRising.ca, urging May to change the platform to support a “rapid shut down” of the tar sands/oil sands in the first mandate of a Green government, “while investing heavily to support the estimated 140,000 people who work in the industry,” the Star states. Saskatchewan Green leader Shawn Setyo supports the call, and the Star says nearly 500 people had signed a petition on the site as of mid-last week.
“It’s very important for us as a Green party that we oppose the tar sands in the strongest way possible,” Tyrrell told the Star. “The Green party didn’t get this far by moderating itself.”
The website quotes Deputy Green Leader Daniel Green of Montreal, who believes the party can change its platform before the election if it chooses to. “As a party we want to be challenged,” he said. “If people tell us that we can go even further and prove it to us, we will. As Elizabeth said, it’s kind of a placeholder, there are things in our Mission Possible energy transition proposal that could be augmented. We will look at the details, the devil’s in the details, and we are prepared to do it. So we’re inviting the listeners to challenge us.”
The site documents May’s support for longer-term tar sands/oil sands production and accuses her of “misrepresenting the facts by downplaying the significance of tar sands emissions.”
In a phone interview with the Star, May “defended her party’s plan as a ‘hugely ambitious’ blueprint for political action to slash emissions in accordance with what the international community of climate scientists has called for,” writes Ottawa-based reporter Alex Ballingall. “The plan seeks all-party co-operation to tackle the crisis of climate change and rapidly reduce emissions by 60% below 2005 levels by 2030—double the government’s current target—and then to net zero by 2050.”
She said the plan “would also halt all new development of fossil fuels in Canada—including multi-billion-dollar natural gas export projects—and stop all oil and gas imports from other countries,” Ballingall adds. “In their place, May proposes that Canada use energy that’s already produced here for domestic needs while the country shifts to 100% renewable energy. By 2050, the Greens would ensure all bitumen produced in Canada would be used only for the petrochemical industry, but May said the country will need to stop burning fossil fuels ‘well before’ that.”
“As we go off of fossil fuels, we should use Canadian oil so that we also give Canadian workers transition time” to other industries, May said. “We have to have unleashed a lot of disruptive technologies that mean, by 2050, people won’t be looking around for gas stations because there won’t be any.”
It’s not like carbon pricing at anything like the levels currently proposed would do anything to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Wouldn’t Scheer would have to buy into the entire Green Mission Impossible to deserve the party’s support?
Oops, meant to write Mission Possible.
It might be Mission Impossible!!
Wow, what a way to spin her comments. She said that she would support any party that gets serious about climate change. You make it sound like she’d only support the cons. Not that they have a climate change policy that amounts to much (pun full intended).
That’s interesting, Otto and Sherry, thanks…I thought carefully about how to write the headline, and what was in my mind was not how to spin it. May said she would work with any party, but from the news report we summarized it was pretty clear that the media conversation focused in on the most controversial or improbable part — in other words, the most newsworthy part — of the commitment. Which presented a choice for us in the way we curated the story: Do we follow the news report where it leads and run the risk of sensationalizing what may have been a nuanced conversation? Or soften the headline and stand rightly accused of spinning on behalf of one party, in this case the Greens? Since we weren’t in the briefing, I did what we always try to do and followed the source material where it led.
A question for Otto: will the Lib carbon tax reduce global GHG emissions, or meet Canada’s Paris Accord targets? One answer from 13, yes thirteen government organizations across Canada – PBO, PAO, attorney-generals…is NO!!! What say, Otto??
BTW…it is NOT ‘tar sands’…that is the expression the celebs some politicians use, who are not up to speed with the correct technology, or just want to disparage the OIL SANDS to kill a big contributor to Canada’s energy economy…
Duane, I’ve edited this comment because we don’t publish personal attacks.
I’ll invite readers who’ve been more immersed in the carbon tax conversation to fill in details on the federal government’s backstop carbon price as one of the key tools in the toolbox for reducing emissions, and on the jurisdictions where carbon pricing is already working well. It isn’t a one-stop solution, because there is no single solution to the climate crisis. Which is why we can’t afford to set aside any valid or viable part of the response, carbon pricing included.
Interesting medical fact of science, as a friend likes to say — somewhere on file, I have the documentation that “tar sands” was actually an industry term until a PR consultant sat the engineers and technicians down, asked them if they’d taken leave of their senses, and insisted they re-spin their product with terminology that wasn’t so…tarry. That’s when they started referring to “oil sands” and looking for someone to blame for their original terminology. On The Mix, we refer to “tar sands/oil sands”, to try to somewhat clumsily suggest that what we do about them — and how we can all build a genuine, positive transition for anyone in the industry whose job hasn’t been “de-manned” and handed over to a robot yet — is a whole lot more important than what we call them.
This is the most misleading headline. It verges on irresponsible journalism.
Sherry, please see my reply to you and Otto on this page.
I am trying to be fair because I have a high regard for this site, Mr. Beer, but it comes across to me and some others, too, as if, in trying not to spin in support of the Greens, you have taken the same stance as the NDP.
Of course you are not responsible for how your article is received; nevertheless, NDP supporters have responded as if this piece and particularly the headline were license to issue even more vitriolic and ill-informed attacks on the Greens and Elizabeth May. Unfortunate.
Thanks, Ms. McMurran, for your comment and for acknowledging that we’re responsible for reporting the news, fairly and accurately, not for the way our material is received. We knew this story was controversial. But she made the statement, and that made it a legitimate and necessary post to publish. We’re partisan for fast, effective, comprehensive climate action, not for any political party anywhere. That means it would have been blazingly inconsistent of us to “protect” May from her own words and her party’s internal politics — which is essentially what we’re hearing in the pushback we’ve received — unless anyone thinks we would or should do that for anyone else.
Does anyone out there think we should let up on the flagrant gaps in Andrew Scheer’s climate plan, such as it is, or on his party’s direct coordination with fossil interests leading into the campaign? I hope not!