Ontario Greens on verge of breakthrough — as usual
If Ontario’s Greens break through to elect their first legislator this spring, it’ll be in a riding like Ottawa Centre, their leader Mike Schreiner said on a pre-election swing through eastern Ontario Monday.
“The ridings where we feel the strongest are ones held by a Liberal, or one of the new ones where there’s no incumbent,” he said. “And then if it has a university community … where there’s a strong sense of community and where there’s a strong local business presence, they really like the Green party’s approach to re-localizing the economy, supporting local businesses, supporting family businesses and entrepreneurship.”
We talked in a stairwell in the University of Ottawa’s student centre after a mid-afternoon town hall with four local candidates attracted a crowd that maxed out at 23. People filtered in and out of the campus pub nearby and a procession of sexual-health educators in red T-shirts slipped in and out too, trying not to disrupt anything but also not paying much attention.
So there’s a long way to go. But Schreiner, on a whistle stop tour of the province, brought hope.
The Prince Edward Island Greens elected their first member in 2015, and added a second in a byelection last November. The British Columbia Greens elected their first in 2013, then won twice the votes, three seats and the balance of power in Victoria in 2017.
“Vote for what you believe in. Vote for the future that you want,” he said.
The Greens have been about to break through for as long as I’ve been paying attention, without ever having actually done it, and they still are.
Schreiner said the party’s at all-time highs in members (about 3,500), contacts lists, volunteers and diversity among its candidates. At the U of O, Ottawa Centre’s Cherie Wong (a restaurant manager, fresh university graduate and queer young woman of colour) sat with Ottawa South’s Les Schram (a grandfather, entrepreneur and non-profit board member), Ottawa-Vanier’s Sheilagh McLean (a retired federal government humanresources officer and yoga teacher) and Kanata-Carleton’s Andrew West (an environmental lawyer with experience in both television and construction).
“People on the left wing say we’re on the right wing and people on the right wing say we’re on the left wing,” Schreiner said.
Like the three big parties, the Greens promise better-funded services for kids with autism. They want more primary health care provided by nurse-practitioners, and better medicine in rural Ontario. They want a regulatory college for personal support workers. They want dentistry and prescription drugs covered by public health insurance. They want more money for mental health and addictions treatment, more freedom for pop-up supervised drug-use sites, and jail reforms.
It’s a long and expensive list but much of it could come out of Kathleen Wynne’s mouth, or Andrea Horwath’s, or Patrick Brown’s. Maybe less of it from Doug Ford’s, but still some.
The Green platform also talks about providing incentives to businesses to invest in energy-efficient equipment and buildings, and about redirecting subsidy programs toward clean-technology companies, to “build a prosperous middle class with good green jobs.” It’s pretty familiar — though the Greens would do it right, Schreiner said.
“The Liberals have a tendency to take good ideas — many of them from the Green party — and totally screw up the implementation. It’s because they always put corporate insiders ahead of people and the community,” Schreiner said.
Take the Liberals’ multibilliondollar deal with Samsung to manufacture renewable-energy gear. Take the wind farms built by foreign corporations and reviled by their neighbours.
“I’m not trying to be anticorporate here,” he said. “I’m just saying if you don’t do this in a way that puts people and communities first, it’s not going to be done right and it’s not going to have the community support it needs.”
The party has long wanted to combine English and French, secular and Catholic school boards, and that hasn’t changed. It wants to phase out nuclear power. It wants aggressive electrification programs for transit systems. It wants tougher fuelefficiency standards for vehicles sold in Ontario, with an eye to banning new internal-combustion engines by 2050.
“It’s going to be done, it has to be done, and we might as well be a leader and not a follower,” Schreiner said. “This is the thing that really scares me about Doug Ford as conservative leader. It’s almost like he’s the defender of buggy whips back in 1900, meanwhile forward-thinking people are saying we really ought to be investing in horseless carriages.”
And the party wants a carbon tax. The Greens call their version a fee-and-dividend system: a levy on fossil fuels, with all the proceeds going into a special fund that gets divvied up among all Ontarians.
Ontario’s current cap-andtrade system prices carbondioxide emissions at about $18 a tonne. The Greens would charge about $30 a tonne, stepping up — over a few decades — to $150. Poorer people would typically pay less but get the same dividend cheques as people buying fuel for their boats and natural gas to heat their bigger houses. Many would come out ahead.
Much as Schreiner would like to get multiple MPPs at Queen’s Park, the Greens’ main mission this election is straightforward: Get Mike Schreiner elected in Guelph, where longtime Liberal minister Liz Sandals is retiring.
“I’m very happy to be open and honest about this,” he said. “We think if things go right there’s a possibility of maybe even winning two or three seats, but we’re really focused on one.
“We want to get that first seat and we want to grow our vote so we’re well positioned in future elections to get three seats, five seats and beyond.”