To Shift or Not to Shift

A little while back I had an interesting conversation with Frank de Jong, who of course, is the current leader of the Green Party of Ontario.

It's a fact--although not a well known one--that Mr. de Jong will not be the leader of the GPO for very long. In November, the GPO was set for a mandatory leadership review (one of the finer points of the Green Party) but the current leader very quietly decided to call for a leadership contest instead.

Recently, he and GPO deputy leader Judy Smith Torrie toured through Northern Ontario ridings, under the premise that they were trying to promote the Green Party's tax shift. It's far more likely that Mr. de Jong was touring ridings in anticipation for a full-on run at Elizabeth May's position as leader of the Green Party of Canada, quietly gauging what his level of support among Ontario's grassroots Green members is.

It's among Ontario's Green Party members where Elizabeth May has the least amount of support, and if another election comes and goes before next year's Green Party of Canada leadership review and Ms. May fails to win any seats (and he most certainly will fail) Frank de Jong will be in a decent position to unseat Ms. May.

During Mr. de Jong's visit to Sudbury I had the opportunity to sit at the kitchen table of a wonderful and hardworking local Green Party member and enjoy a few glasses of wine with Mr. de Jong, even though I had only days before decided to leave the party.

During the course of my long and sometimes heated conversation with Mr. de Jong, he had asked me what, in my opinion, were the key messages he needed to use to sell the party's Carbon Tax Shift to Northern voters.

My answer was simple: Northern Ontario voters rejected the carbon tax because it was unfair to rural voters, and particularly those rural voters who are most vulnerable financially. I confronted him on the basis that it was a little-known fact amongst Greens that a carbon tax would likely spell the end for rural Canada, and that the wealthiest in Canada would be the first to rid themselves of the pesky carbon tax, leaving low-income Canadians to pick up the tab.

For a while Mr. de Jong even tried to deny my claim, stating through some sort of circular logic that shifting to a carbon tax would benefit Northern Ontario. Time and time again I pushed back and refused to accept that answer, telling him that if the Green Party was going to be a party of principle then they should be more honest with rural voters about the effects of the carbon tax.

I don't know if it was the wine or the comfortable setting, but Mr. de Jong said something to me so uncharacteristic of a politician that it absolutely floored me (but perhaps tellingly, did not have the same impact on a lot of the other Green Party members around the table). He told me the truth.

Frank de Jong, the leader of the Green Party of Ontario, on a tour of Northern Ontario, preaching the benefits of a carbon tax told me, "Maybe people shouldn't be living in rural areas."

He then went on to explain to me that under the Green Party's proposals, it was all but certain that entire rural communities would have their populations be put in a situation where they would most certainly have to move to higher-density areas, leaving their culture and their way of life behind. He even suggested at one point that they could tear their houses down brick-by-brick and rebuild somewhere else, so as to not waste valuable building materials.

He spoke in glowing terms of the life he and his partner lived in Toronto, where they need not own a car or spend lots of money on wasteful home-heating, and felt that it was high-time that the rest of Canada fell into line and moved into the far-more-eco-friendly urban areas.

Incidentally, when he spoke to the local press the next day, this little tidbit of information was missing from his sales pitch for a carbon tax.

But make no mistake, the biggest proponents of a carbon tax are very aware of what the result will be for rural Canadians, in spite of the fact that rural Canada's overall impact on climate change is fairly negligible.

CKN