Short Answers to the Most Popular Questions about the Greens

Some people want to get answers to policy questions in greater detail than a leaflet can provide. Unfortunately, door-to-door canvasing is about trying to reach as many people as possible, so we simply cannot answer many questions there. So the Mike Nagy campaign did some informal polling to create a list of the most often-asked questions by Guelph voters. We’ve listed them below in their order of interest and tried to answer each of them in a concise manner using official GPC policy.

Small Scale Enterprises:

Greens believe that the current economy’s rules have been “fixed” to benefit businesses that are highly centralized and work on a global scale: Walmart instead of Acker’s Furniture and Budd’s Department Stores. Underlying all of this is the fact that government has failed to make business pay the real environmental and social costs of doing business. For example, by bringing in a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system to put the cost of global warming onto the “bottom line”, Greens believe that it will no longer make economic sense to ship logs to China where they can be made into cheap, disposable furniture that is then shipped back to Canada. Instead, we think that when the price of global warming is factored in, it will make more economic sense to hire Canadians to make quality furniture here and cut out the fast-growing transportation fees.

The Cost of Gasoline:

Gasoline prices are never going to go down. So instead of pointing fingers and making a lot of empty noise, Greens believe that the government needs to step in and help people make the transition to a world where people use a lot less of it. A large part of this is going to involve building public transit that will help people get off their automobile addiction. Unfortunately, this is going to cost a lot of money and it needs a “critical mass” of riders to be viable. So part of getting as many Canadians “on the bus” in the shortest possible time-frame will be by institution of a revenue-neutral tax shift through a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system. The carbon tax will allow the government to dramatically reduce the income taxes that citizens pay (i.e. the “tax shift”). This will allow people to follow whatever lifestyle change makes the most sense, such as purchasing a more efficient car (such as a Smart Car or hi-bred), move to a home closer to public transit or workplace, telecommute or give up their car altogether in order to absorb the cost of using public transit.

Just to put this effort into a context, a quick “back of the envelop” calculation shows that people in Guelph pay something like $267 million a year for private transportation. (i.e. roughly one car per every three people in a population of roughly 100,000 is 33,334 cars times about $8,000 a year.) If people were willing en masse to make the lifestyle changes necessary to move from auto dependency to public transit, this enormous pool of money could be freed up to build a top-notch public transit system both within urban centres and between rural villages. This would mean not only a good bus system in Guelph, and fast, regular trains to Toronto, London, and K/Waterloo, but also regular buses to Elora, Rockwood, Galt, Hespler, etc. The only thing that is missing is will on the part of government to institute the “carrot and stick” policies—such as a tax-shift and cap-and-trade system—that would move the population to make the necessary lifestyle choices. The Greens believe that a properly-designed tax shift plus a cap-and-trade system would provide the structure that Canadians need to make this change as painlessly as possible.

Homelessness:

Greens are in favour of both direct government investment in public housing and the extension of tax benefits to encourage the private sector to build low-cost housing. But Greens also believe that it is misleading to frame the explosion of people living on the streets as “homelessness”. In many cases the problem is rather more of “community-less-ness”. That is to say, many people on the streets are the mentally ill, chronic substance abusers and others who have simply “failed” to thrive in an increasingly competitive society. The reason why they are on the streets is because many of the informal connections of friends and family that used to support people have been stripped away by an economy that demands that people move often, spend long hours commuting, and which has put most people in faceless suburbs or apartment complexes where no one knows their neighbour. Without this informal social safety-net, a small stumble by someone can become a free-fall to absolute destitution.

The Green party responds to this “community-less-ness” crisis on both a big scale and small. On the larger scale, Greens believe that a more sustainable economy would create a less volatile, more locally-based economy where people would have more secure, long-term employment. At the same time, we also support the creation of more co-op, equity co-op, co-housing and other forms of housing that foster the informal community relations that sustain people who have trouble keeping up in the free-market rat-race. It not only takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to help the mentally ill, the addicted, the disabled and others who have problems keeping up with everyone else.

Illegal Drug Use:

Greens believe that the current “war on drugs” is not only a colossal waste of money, it has clearly failed. So instead we favour a harm reduction policy. The first plank of this would be to legalize the use of cannabis through legislation that would restrict production to small growers, sale through a government agency like the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (to standardize quality and restrict sales to minors), and levy a significant tax against it (to fund other harm-reduction programs.) In addition, a Green government would invest in a wide range of proved harm-reduction strategies such as safe-injection sites, expanded treatment programs and a comprehensive review of legislation governing all other substances currently restricted under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Manufacturing:

Greens believe that the flip side of “crisis” is “opportunity”. To that end, we favour a national strategy aimed at creating good-paying, “green collar” jobs. We would do this by being “early adopters” of new technology through our support for a tax-shift and cap-and-trade regimes. If someone needs to see the value of being an early adopter for ordinary workers, they need look no further than to see that while GM is laying people off in Oshawa, Toyota is investing $2 billion in Woodstock and will be hiring thousands of workers. As well, in the middle of an economic slowdown created by high oil prices, Bombardier Canada is making big profits and has huge back orders in its passenger rail division. (Shamefully, however, Canada is not one of its customers.) With the right tax incentives and government programs, Greens believe that Canada can find its own niches where our manufacturers will be world leaders.

One part of how we would do this is by shifting taxes off of income and onto carbon. This would create both a “stick”—through increased energy costs—to push both businesses and individuals into investing in new energy conservation technology. It would also create a “carrot” in that a cut in taxes would free up capital to invest in this new technology. The only real way to create good paying jobs is to increase productivity. And this only comes from new technology. (The reason why autoworkers make so much money per hour is because of the robots they work beside.) Our tax shift would allow and encourage companies to make the investments in productivity today in order to create the good jobs of tomorrow. Since Guelph is part of the “technology triangle” and already has a large number of high-tech firms, we would be ideally positioned to take advantage when this new industrial sector emerges.

Creating Real Competition:

Ordinary consumers benefit greatly from open competition. Unfortunately, the totally free market envisioned by Adam Smith has rarely—if ever—been achieved. Instead, organizations have repeatedly attempted to limit competition through various organized price-fixing schemes. Currently laws are on the books and the government does sometimes catch businesses fixing prices. There have been convictions for gasoline retailers, cement manufacturers, paving contractors, etc. Beyond these narrowly-defined examples of price-fixing, however, there is a deeper level of market inequality where one sector of the market is so concentrated that it can pretty much set prices. To cite one famous example, it is said of Walmart that the only thing worse than not getting a contract to sell to them is to get one. That is because once one ramps up production to service that market the business becomes totally dependent on it—which means that Walmart can start dictating how much it will pay for the product. (We already know about this sort of inequality in Guelph, where Walmart pretty much ignored our local development plan because it could afford to appeal anything they didn’t like to the OMB.)

Greens see these structural inequalities all over the economy and have no “magic bullet” to answer them. Instead, we would support a series of mechanisms that will help roll them back over time. For example, Greens support the use of open source software, the “copy-left” legal framework and collaborative business models to break up the dangerous monopoly that Microsoft has gained over the software market. We also believe that our global free trade treaties should have strong “fair trade” provisions that would help small farmers break free from the control exerted over them by large trans-national corporations and the middle-men who service them. (For an idea of how such a program would work on a micro-level, take a look at a local Guelph success story: Planet Bean.) As a general rule, Greens also believe that extremely centralized, giant corporations are usually highly dependent on cheap energy. If the full cost of transportation were levied—as with a carbon tax—we believe that regional and localized businesses would be able to out-compete these dinosaurs and increased competition would result.

Nuclear Power:

Greens believe that nuclear power is no answer to the problem of climate change. While we have grave concerns about the long-term storage of nuclear waste, the vulnerability of nuclear plants to terrorist attack and accident, and, the role that nuclear power has played in the proliferation of nuclear weapons—our primary concerns are economic in nature. Nuclear power is tremendously capital intensive. It requires a very centralized (i.e. wasteful and vulnerable) power distribution system. Construction requires enormous lead times. And nuclear power has proved to be extremely expensive. The government of Canada recently walked away from its Maple reactor system after investing hundreds of millions in a design that simply cannot be made to work. As well, a significant chunk of Ontario citizen’s electricity bills consists of so-called “stranded debt” which is simply bad a bad debt that was run up building nuclear power plants.

Greens are not in favour of immediately shutting down existing nuclear power plants, but we believe that the hidden subsidies that the government shells out to the nuclear industry (such as insurance waivers, direct subsidies to Atomic Energy Canada, etc) should be removed. The money saved should instead be put into conservation—which study after study has shown to be far more cost effective and five times as effective in creating jobs. As well, we need to create alternative energy in the form of solar, wind, geothermal and other small-scale, decentralized systems. Working on many small projects would not only create more jobs, they would also create a more “robust” energy system—one that would be far less vulnerable to terrorism or foul weather.

Energy Conservation:

The Green Party would ban all non-energy star appliances by the year 2015. Big industrial facilities (or “Large Final Emitters”) would be eligible for special “green mortgages” that would help businesses respond to the increased costs associated with cap-and-trade costs—-based on their relative carbon intensity.

In addition, a Green government would institute a crash program to retrofit 100% of Canadian buildings to a high level of efficiency by the year 2025. These would be funded through tax-deductible Green Mortgages for home retrofits; a national program to retrofit public buildings such as universities, hospitals, etc; and; 100% capital cost allowance for businesses.

Finally, all new construction would have to have a zero net energy by the year 2025. The federal government—in conjunction with the provinces—would change building codes to dramatically raise efficiency standards that would include: mandatory of solar hot water heating systems and pre-wiring for solar electrical panels on the roof. Plus mandatory solar power panels once cost of installation drops below $2 per watt. In order to ensure compliance, after 2010 all homes must be rated for energy efficiency before they can be sold or rented.

Foreign Policy:

The Green Party believes that the best way that medium powers like Canada can preserve their independence is by strengthening the international rule of law. To this end, we support institutions like the International Court of Justice and regulations like the Land Mines Treaties, the Geneva Convention, the International Treaty Against Child Soldiers and the Convention on Cluster Munitions. In addition, we would seek to go beyond these important first steps to support the creation of a United Nations rapid reaction force that would be able to quickly intervene in the world’s humanitarian “hot spots”—like Darfur and the Congo—without having to wait for a military power to volunteer their forces. Finally, the Greens would like to step back from the “militarization” of our foreign aid in order to get back into the business of promoting peace through humanitarian assistance.

With regard to the unfortunate war in Afghanistan, the Greens believe that a rapid with-drawl would lead to a blood bath as the Taliban would seek “pay back” on those elements of the nation which have chosen to either help the UN-mandated NATO troops or take advantage of liberalization (e.g. women.) Instead of a rapid pull-out, the Greens would escalate the training of Afghan army and police units. We would also seek to bring in more neutral forces—especially from Muslim nations—in order to lessen the “clash of civilizations” feel of the conflict. For the same reason, we would seek to put the foreign forces under a United Nations command. (We recognize that in the past U.N. command has been very bad for the forces on the ground—such as in Rwanda—so we would only push for this if at the same time the UN military command structure was substantially reformed.) Finally, a Green government would seek to “dry up” support for the Taliban by attempting to “reel in” the war on drugs and instead create a legal market for Afghanistan opium.

Alternative Energy for Ordinary People:

As Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute would say, the best source of alternative energy to be tapped is what he calls “negawatts”. These are the “low-hanging fruit” of energy conservation. That is to say, at this point in time it makes a great deal more economic sense to spend money on conservation than on developing new energy sources. This will not only give the country “breathing room” for the transition to a sustainable economy, it also means that after we have made this investment people will be able to afford the increased cost that energy will have once we make the transition to alternative energy system.

The important point to understand is that a sustainable Canada will not be a “business as usual” world powered by solar cells and windmills. Instead, it means that we are going to have redesign society in order to build in efficiency as part of the initial design criteria. This means more public transit, much better insulated homes, high-efficiency appliances, locally grown food, and a society based on quality of life rather than material consumption. This is going to involve an enormous number of decisions in people’s day-to-day life—which is why the Green Party believes that instead of developing a centralized plan, it makes more sense to introduce price mechanisms such as the tax shift and cap-and-trade—and let the individual find the best solution for their particular life. We are convinced that once the price mechanisms are in place, private enterprise will quickly create wind, geothermal and solar power—-which is what has been the experience both in Europe and recently in Ontario (where both electricity conservation and alternative production has wildly exceeded the government’s expectations.)

Sustainable Heating and Food:

The Green Party’s tax shifting mechanism will substantively change the way people heat their homes and shop for food. For example, by lowering people’s income tax and levying a carbon tax instead, people will find that locally grown, in-season food will become much cheaper relative to imported—which will have significantly increased transportation and storage costs. People will return to eating Ontario apples instead of citrus fruit and bananas. In a similar vein, people will find that if they use their increased take home pay to insulate their homes, they will more than offset the increased cost of natural gas or fuel oil. If they opt for a carbon neutral electricity source (like Bullfrog Power) and/or heat with either a wood stove or a pellet furnace, they will find that they will not have to pay carbon tax at all.

Once people get used to paying the real cost of the way they live their lives, we will probably find a significant economic boom as people use both their increased pay and savings to hire local tradesmen to insulate their homes. In addition, local manufacturers will find themselves involved in a race to create and sell the most energy efficient appliances. Local farmers will finally be able to make a decent income because they will be able to out compete cheap imports from outside of the country. Locally-owned grocery stores will be able out-compete the huge chains because they will be able to purchase their produce and meat from local farmers—which cuts out the huge energy costs that come from shipping food around the world. Finally, people will also embrace risk-sharing programs such as Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) systems which again will benefit from the much less energy-intensive distribution systems. Such systems will not only produce food, but eventually biomass for home heating as well.

Fair Taxation:

The Green tax shift is not only revenue neutral, in that the proposed carbon tax is not designed to raise more money than it offsets in terms of reduced income tax, but it is progressive as well. That is to say, even though the total pool of money raised will be the same, some individuals will end up paying more and some will pay less. It is very important that the transition to a sustainable society does not end up being made on the backs of the poor.

This will be achieved by a variety of mechanisms. For example, the tax shift would involve raising the minimum income that a person may earn before they have to pay income tax, plus the individual rates that a person pays based on income. This means that the working poor will have a disproportionately larger share of the tax shift than the wealthy. In addition, money would have to be set aside in the tax shift to ensure that programs are set up to ensure that those who rent low-cost housing to people on social assistance are able retrofit their housing stock. (If we simply gave out all the money as increased benefits—which are needed anyway—it would simply be creamed off by landlords to pay for their increased energy costs. ) With regard to businesses, the tax shift would result in an advantage for the locally-based, small operations that would be most nimble when it comes to adapting to the new economy because it is easier to source their resources locally. At the same time, however, the tax cuts will have to be offset by the creation of a pool of resources that will allow the government to set up low-cost “green mortgages” that will offer them the capital needed to purchase the new energy-efficient machinery. As you might imagine, costing all of these measures out will require the resources of the federal bureaucracy—which is why no party outside of government will be able to produce an accurate number each and every aspect of the program.

Fair Trade:

Greens are not opposed to free trade, per se. Done in the right way, it can be a tremendous source for good in the world. But our current agreements—such as NAFTA—have dramatically undercut the hard-won gains of labour and environmental groups. This is because they have led to a “race to the bottom”. The example we would rather emulate is the European Union, where free trade has instead created a mechanism where nations are forced to raise their internal standards to meet the agreed upon norms.

In pursuit of this, a Green government on taking office would issue our six month’s notice—under the existing NAFTA framework—that we are willing to opt out unless the agreement is renegotiated to create stronger environmental and social justice standards. Since the USA imports most of its oil and gas from Canada under the NAFTA framework and the probable next US president—Barack Obama—has already made noises about re-opening the agreement, we will probably never have a better bargaining position than now to do so. In addition, a Green government would also bring a similar attitude to negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO). It would also inform any discussions that a Green government would have with South America about a Free Trade Area in the Americans (FTAA). Since the Green stance is much closer to the existing consensus of South American nations than that of the USA, it would probably help us forge closer ties the emerging economies South of Mexico. Finally, a Green government would initiate a global discussion about creating a set of Corporate Rights and Responsibilities that would eventually be the basis for creating a global fair trade agreement.