Leader

A Message from Elizabeth May

Welcome to the future. Welcome to the Green Party. I hold a vision of this blue green planet, safe and in balance. At the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, we are emerging to a new reality. We are ready to make the next leap – as momentous as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote. We are ready to make the fundamental shifts that allow us to live in balance with our life support systems, respecting each other, achieving social and economic justice, peace and democracy.

Only the Green Party grasps the future. The Green Party is the only federal party capable of avoiding the phony short-term issues that dominate our politics to focus on the long term. The Green Party of Canada is committed to nurturing families and communities. As leader, I am very committed to integrated policies that focus on the welfare of the child, starting with pre-natal nutrition all the way to safe playgrounds and neighbourhoods, to affordable and accessible university education. We must stop designing our cities around the car and start designing them around the child.

We will press for economic policies that ensure our prosperity and security in real terms. Ecological fiscal reform (tax shifting) is key, reducing taxes on things we want, like jobs and income, while taxing things we don’t want, like cancer-causing chemicals, greenhouse gases (GHG) and air pollution. Our policies are fiscally responsible, involving new taxes offset by reductions elsewhere.

We will press for the protection of our health care system, while addressing the "other side" of health care - prevention. We will work to reduce and, where possible, eliminate exposure to substances that cause cancer, infertility, learning disabilities and reduced immune function. And we will challenge the trade rules that have made the Canadian government hesitate to ban such chemicals – Chapter 11 of NAFTA.

We will advance workable solutions that demonstrate that Kyoto targets can and must be met. We will work to reduce GHG emissions by 6% below 1990 levels by 2012 (the first phase Kyoto target), 30% by 2020, 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. These are the reductions that must be made to avoid “tipping points” in the atmosphere from which civilization might not recover. We will remind other political leaders that the greatest threat to our security does not come from foreign terror cells and criminal elements, serious as they may be, but from our addiction to fossil fuels and the clear and present danger presented by the climate crisis.

We will press for anticipatory strategies and planning for those climate impacts that are no longer avoidable. We must help farmers, ranchers, fishermen, tourism operators, the forest industry – all Canadian economic sectors dependent on a climate system that is under stress – to adapt and avoid loss.

The Green Party of Canada works with the Global Green movement, with parties in 70 countries and elected members of parliament in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Together we press the nuclear superpowers to meet their obligations for disarmament, to reduce and eventually eliminate the nuclear threat. We work to shift military budgets to peace-making and peace-keeping. We work to ensure the education, health protection and economic autonomy of women and girls around the world and to reverse the dangerous trend of increasing human numbers.

The Green Party of Canada has a full platform dealing with all aspects of governmental responsibility. Read it and let us hear your opinion. I invite you to be part of the future. A better world is possible. Join us and see.

Elizabeth May
Leader, Green Party of Canada
leader@greenparty.ca