(Hint: there’s only one political sign on Marina Boulevard. It’s for Rachel Blaney NDP, and it’s in front of our house.)
Not that there’s an actual choice: the runner-up will be the same Conservative as last time and she and her party are electoral poison.
The Greens ran 3rd last election, with fewer than half the votes of the Con. They’ll be lucky to do as well this outing.
The Liberals, running the same good candidate as in the Trudeau Surprise of 2015 actually lost a significant percentage and ran 4th in 2019, just a few hundred votes behind the Greens. This election’s candidate is only just in the field, and has no riding profile...
And the rest don’t count at all.
In this election, however, my vote for Rachel won’t be a vote for the federal NDP. I’ve never been more disappointed in the party. The details of my disillusionment don’t matter much; suffice it to say that all they’ve given Canada over the last two years is behaviour, seeking headlines by aping Con talking points about a mirage of “scandals” and accusing the Prime Minister of failing to do all manner of things no Prime Minister of Canada could do without provincial agreement: dental care? Provincial. Pharmacare? Provincial. Long Term Care? Provincial. Etc.
Anyway, for me there’s really only one issue this election: reducing Canada’s greenhouse gasses before the planet burns up. (Yes, I’m all for the $10/day childcare proposal, and jobs and the economy and Covid are extremely important, but none except climate change is #1.)
As António Guterres says,
“The evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions are choking our planet & placing billions of people in danger. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible. We must act decisively now to avert a climate catastrophe.”
In Canada, that means getting a handle on our use and extraction of fossil fuels.
The Liberals have actually put us on the path to improvement, with and without the assistance of the provinces (the same path Gordon Campbell put BC on 15 years ago, Christy tried to eviscerate, and John Horgan improved on) by putting the entire country on a plan to slowly increase the cost of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, the so-called “carbon tax”.
But the carbon tax doesn’t address the single biggest contributor to Canada’s global warming, which is greenhouse gasses released by bitumen extraction in the tar/oil sands. So Prime Minister Trudeau called the bluff of the other parties on this file: (from Mitchell Beer’s energy mix.com)
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s promise yesterday to cap oil and gas sector emissions at today’s levels and set five-year targets to reduce them beginning in 2025 amounts to the end of fossil fuel expansion in Canada, the country’s leading climate advocacy network told The Energy Mix Sunday evening.
The Liberals are essentially planning to end fossil fuel expansion,” said Caroline Brouillette, domestic policy manager at Climate Action Network-Canada. “It’s really good to see them finally name that elephant in the Canadian climate policy room.”
The details of the Liberals’ plan will make all the difference, and will be the key to a 1.5°C-compliant future, Brouillette said, stressing that a real phasedown aimed at bringing the country’s emissions to net-zero by 2050 will mean reducing oil and gas production and exports.
And the other parties? What are they proposing? The Conservatives promise to resurrect Northern Gateway, implying increased tar sand activity and more tankers off the BC coast, not to mention an enhanced chance of spills. Their "carbon tax proposal" actually rewards people for using more gasoline and never gets large enough to make a difference.
The NDP, if I read that policy statement correctly, dislike tar sands, dislike pipelines (except for the natural gas one to Kitimat) and thinks Trudeau just talks and never acts and doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister. Bottom line: they’re in no position to actually do anything, because they cannot form government. Consequently, Mr Singh’s refusal to say he wouldn’t prop up a minority Con government is chilling, to say the least.
The Greens? Irrelevant.
It’s really difficult to be a third party in Canada with our “first past the post” electoral system but other iterations of the federal NDP caucus have managed to manoeuvre that fine line between support for government initiatives we can agree on and criticism of things we cannot.
Not this one. This one apparently decided early in the last mandate that aggression would lead to electoral success, and the NDP hounds haven’t stopped baying their uncivil bile since. From this vantage point that looks indistinguishable from the CPC and their tactics, which in turn look very Republican. (I give you Charley Angus, on the WE charity file, or the recent comments on Afghanistan, which entirely ignore the fact that we haven’t been involved there since 2014 and that Afghanis have been coming to Canada ever since.)
Not my kind of NDP at all, and I blame the leader. (full disclosure. I was never a fan: https://occasionaljustus.blogspot.com/2018/03/letter-to-my-mp.html)
If the consequence of the NDP attacks are that the Liberals are diminished by the piling-on and the Conservatives take our riding, which is a real possibility, some of us are going to be very pissed indeed.
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