Priorities for Ontario – Greens out front at 81%
http://www.prioritiesforontario.ca/
“In April 2007, the Priorities for Ontario Coalition released a detailed set
of policy recommendations aimed at addressing critical environmental issues
like water and air quality, clean energy, climate stability, forest
protection, toxic and waste reduction and curbing urban sprawl. We are now
releasing a summary of the positions of the four main parties on these
priorities to help voters make an informed decision on Oct. 10th.”
The Green Party got a “yes” on 81% of the analysis, next is NDP at 62%, Liberal 35% PCs
12%.
An excellent editorial on today’s Ottawa Citizen
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/views/story.html?id=90914384-8d99-4284-901f-f3331ba46011&k=57768
Simply an amazing article, and it is a shame that Frank de Jong is only mentioned once, since Mr. Mintz’s recomendations are exactly in line with GPO tax-shifting proposals.
Green Mintz
| The Ottawa Citizen |
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Shifting Canadian taxes to encourage growth and entrepreneurship, while discouraging pollution, is an idea so obviously overdue that any politician who doesn’t propose it should have to explain why.
It’s no surprise that some business-oriented environmentalists have been pursuing this idea, but now we find the likes of eminent management professor Jack Mintz, the former president of Toronto’s C.D. Howe Institute, on board. We all should be arguing about how we promote green industry, not whether we should.
In a meeting with the Citizen’s editorial board last week, Ontario Green Party leader Frank de Jong used an inviting slogan: “Tax what you burn, not what you earn.” He makes a legitimate complaint that companies and individuals get to use finite natural resources — from gravel to water to clean air to land — practically for free, while governments tax away the proceeds of entrepreneurship and risk and labour. It should be the other way around, he says, to promote the efficient use of resources and let people whose work makes money keep more of the profits.
Mr. Mintz, a taxation professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, comes at the problem from the other direction, arguing that Canada’s personal and corporate tax rates are too high and are harming investment and economic growth. Canada’s effective tax on capital is 30.9 per cent, Mr. Mintz found, while the average in 80 other industrialized countries he looked at was only 20.6 per cent. If you’re making a new business investment, he found, there are 69 other countries that will tax you less to do it. Personal taxes are too high, too, particularly in the lowest bracket, hurting the efforts of low-income earners to pull themselves out of working poverty and into financial comfort.
A bunch of regular old tax cuts would be OK with the C.D. Howe Institute, but Mr. Mintz recognizes the need to replace at least some of the lost revenue, and so he advocates a sensible environmental-damage tax to do it. Chief among them is a tax on fuels — everything from gasoline to coal to nuclear — that would vary according to the amount of pollution each generates, perhaps including its contribution to climate change.
There is an important debate yet to be had comparing taxes on carbon emissions versus emissions-trading schemes, as a way of fighting climate change. Both have merits, and Mr. Mintz advances all the arguments for a carbon tax, including that everyone would pay it (not just big emitters) and that what Canadians would pay to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be predictable rather than varying over time. Certainly, making a carbon tax revenue-neutral for the governments charging it by cutting other taxes to compensate makes the idea more palatable than a carbon tax on its own.
Regardless of the mechanism, it’s clear that green tax-shifting is an important means of transforming Canada’s economy to make it both more sustainable and more competitive internationally. Serious politicians who want Canadians’ votes in the next election should have their ideas and their research ready.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
A mostly good article from yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen.
The best quote, I think, is that the GPO is “running more credible local candidates than the New Democrats”.
David Reevely . Easier to be Green
David Reevely, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The old-left roots of Ontario’s Green party are still showing, but the party makes more sense with every election.
The Citizen’s editorialists have the privilege of seeing most of the candidates up close, as they come in for group sessions as part of our process of deciding whom we’ll endorse for election. We started inviting Greens a few elections ago, and it’s been fascinating to watch them change.
For the first time, I think they’re running more credible local candidates than the New Democrats are. Both parties have a few draftees who are just showing their parties’ flags in no-hope ridings and of newcomers who talk about their own parties as “they” and “them” instead of “we” and “us.” But none of the Green would-be MPPs I’ve met the last couple of weeks have been as ignorant of local affairs as the NDP’s Edelweiss D’Andrea, who’s running in Ottawa South and was shocked to find out that the city’s light-rail project had been cancelled.
The Greens are increasingly small-business owners and engineers, fewer and fewer of what Green leader Frank de Jong himself jokingly calls “nuts, fruits and flakes.” (He hit the Citizen’s boardroom last Friday.)
De Jong admits he started out as one of them, a music teacher drawn to the party of tree-hugging and year-round sandal-wearing. But he’s learned the hard way that people like that, however committed, don’t win elections. They’ve been joined, though, by castoffs and renegades from other parties — disaffected Tories, mostly, but Liberals and New Democrats, too, who want to make more fundamental changes in the province than those parties advocate.
De Jong speaks convincingly about how government policy encourages a polluting industrial culture. The natural resources we own in common (like clean air and fresh water and, thanks to a quirk of history, most mineral wealth) are practically free for the taking by anyone who can use them, even though they’re finite. But with our tax policies, we charge people to be productive — we tax personal income and corporate profits and impose sales taxes when somebody makes something we want to buy. De Jong describes this as privatizing public wealth and socializing private wealth, and says it drives people and companies to be wasteful with resources and stingy with labour.
As it happens, this is very nearly the same problem the industry-friendly C.D. Howe Institute complained about in a report on tax policy just last week. The institute sees it as a tax-efficiency problem, not an environmental problem, but the solution is the same: cut taxes on production, the institute says, and raise them on consumption and pollution.
The Green leader also talked to us about garbage, a distinctly unsexy subject unless you happen to live in the shadow (or the stench-plume) from the Carp Road landfill, or wonder where the city is going to find $100 million to open a new dump somewhere after the Trail Road one fills up sometime in the next 10 to 20 years.
He’s the only even semi-mainstream politician I’ve heard talk about a problem that’s well-known among environmentalists but somehow nowhere on the public agenda: all our recycling and other trash-diversion programs are half-assed, after-the-fact measures that have a difficult time dealing with products that aren’t actually designed to be recycled. Think of a drinking box, made of paper, plastic and metal — all things easily enough recycled by themselves, but glued and sealed together they make a specialty item that’s exceptionally difficult to dispose of anywhere but a landfill.
What to do about it? Here the Greens have trouble. De Jong, saying that industry retools every four years on average, figures Ontario could ban within 12 years the sale of any product not designed to be recycled or composted. This is a bit of old-style goofiness that ignores both the massive bureaucracy needed to judge the recyclability of, well, everything, and Ontario’s dependence on imports to supply us with the consumer good we’re talking about.
And it is when the Greens go off the environmental message and into non-green social and economic policy that the nuts, fruits and flakes come out to play.
They want a $10.25 minimum wage in Ontario, for instance. The argument is that nobody should work full-time and still be poor, which is appealing on the surface but ultimately makes as much sense as saying that a paperback book, any paperback book, should cost $10.25. The price of a book depends on the book and what real people are willing to pay for it, and the wage for a job depends on the labour and what real employers think it’s worth.
“Sometimes we like to out-NDP the NDP,” De Jong says, rather lamely.
The smart, sensible types might be winning the battle for the soul of the Green party, but the fight’s still on.
David Reevely is a memberof the Citizen’s editorial board.
E-mail: dreevely@thecitizen.canwest.com
A wonderful article from today’s Star…maybe the media is starting to come around?
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/259265
Greens about more than bicycles
September 24, 2007
Carol Goar
When Frank de Jong, leader of Ontario’s Green party, was 18 years old, his father died. His mother, left with seven children on a dairy farm, couldn’t afford to send him to university.
But de Jong and his six siblings all got post-secondary degrees, thanks to bursaries from the Ontario government.
“At the time I thought: This province really cares about me. I felt a sense of belonging. So I got a good education and became a teacher.”
Thirty-three years later, de Jong wants to restore that spirit of fairness to Ontario politics.
He doesn’t think public housing or food banks or income support programs are the way to do it. In the short term, they might be necessary, de Jong says, but the real answer lies in redistributing wealth so that every citizen has an adequate income and a sense of worth.
The key to achieving this, according to the Green party leader, is to overhaul the tax system, shifting the burden from those who earn a living or build a business to those who consume non-renewable resources. “We need to share the Earth’s bounty more equitably,” de Jong says. “There is no moral or fiscal justification for poverty.”
He admits that low-income Ontarians have trouble understanding his anti-poverty plan, which would drive up their electricity and heating costs. “But I can’t talk about poverty without looking at the root causes.”
He also acknowledges that living sustainably can be hard for those struggling to make ends meet. They can’t buy solar panels, hybrid vehicles, new appliances or organic food. “But they can turn off lights, use fluorescent bulbs or walk to the store,” de Jong points out. “They can save money by saving energy.”
His prescriptions leave anti-poverty activists puzzled at best, fearful at worst.
They’re not looking for abstract schemes to restructure the economy. They want solid assurances that low-income families will have enough money to pay the rent, buy groceries and keep the lights on.
For the rest of the campaign, therefore, de Jong will focus on the immediate relief his party would offer the disadvantaged. It includes:
A $10 minimum wage.
A pledge to bring welfare rates up to the poverty line.
A crackdown on employers who exploit temporary or contract workers.
A substantial investment in early childhood education.
A reduction in tuition fees for universities and colleges.
Rebates to protect low-income consumers from rising electricity costs.
More apprenticeships for the jobless and underemployed.
On some matters, however, the Green party refuses to compromise.
De Jong would not build subsidized housing. He believes this is wrong. He would require municipalities to shift property taxes from buildings to land. This would induce developers to build more units on less land, he says, bringing down the price of apartments. “People would be able afford their own lodging if the tax structure was fixed,” he says. “There is a market solution to housing.”
Nor would he bend to public pressure to take social services off municipal property taxes. “That will just drive up home prices,” de Jong says. “We should do the exact opposite of what (Premier) Dalton McGuinty and (Mayor) David Miller are doing: Raise the carrying cost of land. Make the landowners pay more.”
These are controversial – and little understood – policy stances.
Because the Green party grew out of the environmental movement, many voters view it as a vaguely benevolent force in Ontario politics.
Because it has never elected an MPP, many citizens consider it a safe place to register their dissatisfaction with the traditional parties.
It is unfortunate that de Jong was excluded from last week’s televised debate. Electors need to know more about him and his platform.
The 51-year-old teacher may look like the candidate of bicycles and biomass. In fact, he is asking Ontarians to rethink the way they live, work and share the benefits of citizenship.
Carol Goar’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The Green Party and garbage, but in a good way
Stop making garbage, Green party leader says
Better product design will help reduce need for landfill sites, he says
By Dave Rogers , ottawa citizen
Published: Friday, September 21, 2007
Ontario should aim to eliminate garbage through better product design, instead of expanding landfills and using waste to generate electricity, Ontario Green party leader, Frank de Jong, said Friday.
Speaking to the Citizen editorial board yesterday, Mr. de Jong said Ontario should aim to eliminate not be a consumer society that generates more waste than it can handle.
Mr. de Jong said plasma gasification – the heating of garbage to produce gas for generating electricity – is really garbage incineration that requires government subsidies and causes air pollution.
“We will always need clothing, household items and manufacturing tools, but the challenge is to make it as sustainable as possible,” Mr. de Jong said. “But we don’t have a garbage crisis – we have a design crisis.
“Every product sold in Ontario should be designed from the outset to be repairable, recyclable, recoverable and compostable. With proper stewardship, we wouldn’t produce anything that needs to be gasified. We could probably get to zero garbage in Ontario in a dozen years.
“Everyone knows that incinerators always produce toxic emissions and even when you scrub it, you end up with 30 per cent of the volume with more toxic materials than the original waste,” Mr. de Jong said. “It has to be disposed of with even more complicated and expensive systems.
“Landfilling to date is half the price of incineration, but we shouldn’t use landfills, either. There should be no such thing as garbage, because that is like throwing resources into a hole in the ground. It is like burying money.”
Mr. de Jong said he opposes plasma gasification because it requires large amounts of energy and produces concentrated waste.
Ottawa is experimenting with generating electricity from garbage. Plasco Energy Group has a $32-million Ottawa plant that will be used to test area generation technology.
The gasification process uses a sealed system that breaks down solid waste at an intense heat without burning it. The plant does not have a smokestack because no combustion takes place. The gas produced is refined to remove most impurities.
Plasco Energy president Rod Bryden said yesterday he opposes earlier forms of plasma gasification because they require heavy government subsidies and produces little electricity.
Mr. Bryden said current technology to be tested in Ottawa will convert 46 per cent of the waste into electricity, compared to 18 per cent in older systems.
© ottawa citizen 2007
A nice article from the Ottawa Sun
‘My goal is to become premier’ Green party leader de Jong aims high
Andrew Thomson, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, September 22, 2007
Frank de Jong predicted during the 1999 campaign that his party would have an MPP at Queen’s Park within the decade. Next month’s election will likely be the last chance for the leader of the Green Party of Ontario and his followers to make that prediction a reality.
They’ve set out to convince voters the party is as much about health care, the economy, and education as their traditional focus on the environment and sustainability.
And, compared to previous elections, this is their best chance. The Greens sit at six per cent support, according to a recent Ipsos Reid poll for CanWest News Service. Other polls have gauged their support in double digits. In the 2003 provincial election, the Greens won 2.8 per cent of the vote. They earned just 0.7 and 0.4 per cent of the vote in the previous two elections.
Ontario Green party leader Frank de Jong, who visited the Carp Fair on Friday, said his party is coming of age in the province, with policies on a wide-range of issues in addition to its environmental stand.
Bruno Schlumberger, the Ottawa Citizen
“As a new party, it’s taken us some time to get people on the ground in every riding; you can’t just snap your fingers,” Mr. de Jong said in an interview. “I think it’s clear now that we’re in for the long haul.
“Our objective is to win the election. My goal is to become premier.” Mr. de Jong remains confident even after being shut out of Thursday’s televised leaders’ debate by the sponsoring consortium of broadcasters. His strategy is the same as Dalton McGuinty’s, John Tory’s, or Howard Hampton’s: travel the province and make platform announcements.
Except that, in Mr. de Jong’s case, he’s been known to ride his bicycle hundreds of kilometres on the campaign trail or in search of candidates since becoming leader 15 years ago.
“There’s no magic bullet,” he explained. “(But) you need people on the ground who are credible and articulate.” The party seeks the same attention attracted by its federal counterpart since Elizabeth May became leader and the environment appeared to mushroom among voters’ concerns.
Not surprisingly, it has a detailed plan to address climate change in Ontario. The Greens would immediately implement a two per cent carbon tax on oil, natural gas, and coal imported or extracted for use in the province. They would give grants to municipalities investing in green building technology. They would promote more organic farming and water conservation. They would mimic the tough mandatory emissions standards introduced in California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. They would ban logging in Algonquin Park. They would make the Ontario Building Code and property taxes more enviro-friendly.
And,as in 2003, there’s a pledge to force consumers to pay a larger share of the cost of electricity, with the intention of reducing smog, pollution, and resource waste with lower health care costs to boot.
But Mr. de Jong has been quick to move beyond the environment to broaden his party’s voter appeal.
The Greens are especially emphasizing promises to scrap the McGuinty government’s health premium and lower personal and corporate income taxes by shifting the financial burden onto resource users.
They would also raise the minimum wage to $10.25 an hour, lower the voting age to 16, and invest $400 million to promote local agriculture consumption.
And while the Progressive Conservatives pledge to fund faith-based schools, the Greens want to nix any public money for religious education — including Roman Catholic boards. Fifty-three per cent of voters support the concept of a single public system, according to a recent Ipsos Reid poll.
“That’s been our policy all along,” Mr. de Jong said. “We didn’t create the issue.” The Greens are also pledging to abolish standardized testing and the Ontario College of Teachers.
“We’re a much more sophisticated party,” he said. “We have more numbers in our platform, more concrete targets,” Mr. de Jong said after releasing the Green manifesto — 33 pages of promises ranging from six new statutory holidays (Earth Day included) to more money for Northern Ontario.
Mr. de Jong, 51, grew up on a dairy farm near Guelph with six siblings, the child of immigrant Dutch farmers, before obtaining a music degree at the University of Western Ontario.
The public school teacher ran in several federal and provincial elections while living in Ottawa during the early 1990s. Mr. de Jong also helped form a loose affiliation of Greens across Ottawa-Carleton, and ran for municipal office in 1991. He ran in Capital Ward, losing to Jim Watson, future mayor and now the minister of health promotion in Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet.
Mr. de Jong broke the 10 per cent (of the vote) barrier in a 2005 byelection won by new Conservative leader John Tory in the Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey. That number slipped to 6.2 per cent the following year in the race to replace Liberal Gerard Kennedy in Parkdale-High Park.
This year he is running in Toronto’s Davenport riding, hoping to unseat Liberal MPP Tony Ruprecht.
The Green party’s chances on Oct. 10 might be enhanced by the concurrent referendum on adopting a mixed-member proportional system for the Ontario legislature, something Mr. de Jong has long advocated.
“I think the arguments are solid that it’s a better system,” he said. “It gets rid of strategic voting, throwaway votes, artificial majorities.”
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
Likeable Leaders – but where’s Frank?
http://www.thestar.com/article/258364
Voices: Likeable leader
September 19, 2007
We asked you which provincial leader do you think is the most likeable: Dalton McGuinty, Howard Hampton or John Tory. Here’s what you had to say.
I don’t find any of them likeable. Most politicians are pathologically lying grand-standers with delusions of statesmanhood. However, I’m not voting for who I like – liking a politician is not/should not be a requirement to agreeing with a party’s platform.
Matt Keefer, Peterborough, Ont.
Dalton McGuinty and likeable in the same sentence make an oxymoron. The man is unbalanced and unpleasantly smug. Both Tory and Hampton are likeable and decent men.
John Chuckman, Toronto
I’d definitely go with Howard Hampton, because the other two parties consistently screw things up anyway. The NDP cares about the environment and the people and advocate way more than the other two parties.
Janice Ashby, Toronto
John Tory is by far the most likeable leader. He stands for his principles and does not have the history of broken promises and doublespeak that are the legacy of the current premier. Howard Hampton is a close second. Although I do not agree with his policies, he is a very respectable and honest man.
Jerrold Landau, Toronto
I’m offended you have not included Frank de Jong. I like Frank de Jong and what the Greens stand for.
Jacquie Fraser, Etobicoke
I am absolutely appalled that the survey did not include the leader of the green party. I cannot believe that at a critical time such as now with continuous scientific evidence about global warming that the one party that stands up for the little guy that has no voice (animals, trees, planet earth), you have somehow seemed to have forgotten to include his name.
Ali Nazifi, Toronto
While many may feel that John Tory is an aloof man of privilege, I have met him and found him to be anything but. He is friendly, personable and most importantly, believable. Howard Hampton is probably the last man I’d vote for, but I give high marks for his honesty, passion and determination – he is what he appears to be. As for Dalton McGuinty – from the first moment I ever heard him speak, I found him evasive and hard to believe.
Jon Fraser, Toronto
I happen to like Frank DeJong of the Green Party best. From what little I’ve seen and heard from him, he seems to walk his talk, and isn’t full of it. Why is his name not on the list?
Linda Sepp, Toronto
Wrong question. Asking who the most likeable leader is reduces our democracy to a popularity contest between personality cults. We should be asking each other what kind of Ontario we want and which team of politicians (if any) can best actualize our collective vision.
Simon A. Dougherty, Scarborough
I was disappointed by your question as it does not give us the choice of the leaders of, say, the Green party or a better choice of ‘none.’ To be honest, McGuinty and Tory gave themselves a pay raise last holiday season while Hampton has no concept of economics in light of his party stance on raising the minimum wage, just to name a fault of each of them.
Jason Bayda, Vaughan
I don’t find any of them likeable. I’m having a hard time deciding which one will get my vote.
Carolyn Hood, Toronto
Actually I prefer Frank DeJong on the likeable leader scale. Therefore, I decline to participate in your “likeable” poll.
John Dewar, Keswick, Ont.
I think an old adage applies here, better the devil you know. Let’s face it, Howard Hampton is a nice guy but his party hasn’t learned form the Rae regime and they will never govern this province. Mr. Tory continues to associate with the dregs of the Harris government of renown (those who weren’t drafted to work for Harper) and he has nothing positive to say about anything. All-in-all, McGuinty’s term has not been that bad. There was a lot to fix and I think we should stay the course.
Will Reid, Scarborough
Dalton McGuinty seems like the most normal of the bunch. Howard Hampton is always yelling and carping and not suggesting anything. John Tory seems aloof and self-aggrandizing and pompous. McGuinty strikes me as the kind of guy who would mow your lawn when he’s out doing his own.
Angus Steele, Toronto
I don’t find any of them likeable; what’s that got to do with whether one of them will make an able and effective leader?
Chris Cosby, Scarborough
It’s sad that likeability is evidently being considered as a factor in whether or not someone can run a province. I’d rather someone who can make the tough — and necessary — decisions, than someone who can smile brightly and provide a glib sound bite for the camera. Voters should look past this sort of thing and vote on platform, policy, reliability, and perhaps character. But likeability? No.
Carla Antonelli, Toronto
Dalton McGuinty – he is an honest man. While there are claims of broken promises, Dalton strives to make Ontario a very competitive province in the global economy. Especially in education for our young people.
Krishna Singh, Scarborough
Howard Hampton is the most likeable leader in the current election. He speaks out for working families who have to spend a lot of their hard-earned minimum wages in order for their children to attend our “free” education system. All Canadian children should be able to attend school without their parents having to find money for school supplies. They should have easier access to post-secondary education too. They are our future.
Howard Raper, Brechin, Ont.
Howard Hampton is the most likeable because he is standing up for working families.
Emily Shelton, Toronto
Personally I find none of the leaders to be the most likeable. Lack of personality coupled with a distinct lack of credibility makes for a less than exciting choice. And why not include the leader of the Green Party as one of your choices?
Rob Jewitt, Cobourg
Politicians can simply groom themselves to appear “likeable” to further their own personal agenda. To rate politicians on their likeability merely measures their potential to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. Recent history as shown that likeability is not necessarily indicative of the best candidate. Were we really using our common sense when we elected Mike Harris?
David Boyle, Toronto
Dalton McGuinty is the most likeable; he truly comes across as an average professional you might meet at a little league game or in line at the movies. That said, he still looks uncomfortable in his own skin, and doesn’t project a strong innate sense that he’s a leader.
Dennis Jordan, Milton, Ont.
I would answer Frank de Jong, but he’s not on the list. Why is the media consistently omitting the Green Party leaders from debates and polls?
Jason Paquette, Toronto
I’m not sure what The Star’s criteria is for “likeable”, but if I were picking the party with the best policies and grasp of Ontario’s problems, I would hands down choose Howard Hampton. John Tory’s idea of funding private religious schools is preposterous. Dalton’s hypercritical stance on supporting the Catholic board is unethical.
Tor Sandberg, Toronto
Howard Hampton is most likeable because he’s a real person. John Tory is too smooth by half, and Dalton McGuinty comes across as a robot.
Gary Carper, Toronto
Are those three my only options? Then I will politely pass.
Alexa van Hoof, Scarborough
Would it really be that hard for you to include Frank de Jong in the poll? For shame Toronto Star.
Paul Richardson, North York
Why isn’t Frank de Jong of the Green Party included on this list? Again, we see media bias in political reporting, even in the guise of a poll.
Mary-Margaret Jones, Toronto
Why does The Star insist on not including Frank de Jong as a leader when the Greens are only a hair behind the NDP in the polls? If Frank got coverage that could also change.
Cameron Topp, Hamilton
Great article frrom the Star on the GPO
http://www.thestar.com/article/258091
The televised leaders’ debate – the pivotal point in any election – takes place tomorrow night, but Frank de Jong won’t be there.
De Jong is the leader of the provincial Greens, who are nudging double digits in the polls. While organizationally challenged and underfinanced, the Greens have moved from being a joke party to “a player on the political landscape,” in de Jong’s own words.
But de Jong did not get an invitation from the networks to participate in the leaders’ debate because, among other things, his party does not have a seat in the Legislature.
That’s a pity, because de Jong and the Greens actually have some interesting things to say.
The Green platform was released last week, and the media focus was on the relatively trivial promise to add six new statutory holidays to the calendar. But the platform includes many more substantive planks, including:
A major “tax shift” away from income (personal or corporate) and toward consumption, including a carbon tax. The health tax would be repealed and a carbon tax of 2 per cent would be levied on oil, natural gas and coal.
An overhaul of property assessment to tax buildings at a lower rate than the land on which they sit.
A sharp hike in electricity rates to reflect the “true, unsubsidized cost” of generation.
Abolition of funding for all faith-based schools, including Catholic.
Restoration of school boards’ power to levy taxes, up to 5 per cent of their budgets.
Abolition of standardized testing and the College of Teachers (the disciplinary body for the profession).
A lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16.
A ceiling on “excessive overtime” to spread the workload.
This is a decidedly eclectic mix of policies. Some planks could be called left-wing, while others are far-right, including the tax shift, which is an idea espoused by the libertarian Cato Institute in the United States. And some are just plain self-serving, including the education planks, which seem tailored to de Jong’s day job as a public school teacher.
The major environmental groups have given the Greens the cold shoulder because they see their platform as eschewing government regulations for more “market-oriented” policies – an accusation that de Jong does not deny.
“We endorse the invisible green hand,” he says. “We know regulations won’t work. The market always trumps regulations one way or the other.”
But it is the “mainstream” parties that are most incensed by the Greens’ rise in the polls – which is arguably coming at the expense of all three of them. They think that voters are moving toward the Greens because they are attracted by the label without really knowing what’s in the party platform.
De Jong rejects the implication that Green voters are ignorant of what his party stands for. “We say it as loud and clear as we possibly can,” he says.
I’ll close with an anecdote that validates de Jong’s view: In a recent election, an NDP candidate I know made a point of knocking on all the doors in the riding with Green signs and telling the residents what was in the platform of the party they were supporting. The answer was invariably: “Yes, we know, and we like it.”
In other words, the Greens, with their unique combination of environmentalism and libertarianism, may have tapped into a vein of the voting population that is being served by no other party.
Ian Urquhart’s provincial affairs column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Email: iurquha@thestar.ca
Is it just me or is the press being a bit nicer to us this time around…
…well except for the Leaders’ debate, of course
http://www.thestar.com/OntarioElection/article/257103
Greens in a good spot after first week of race
Sep 16, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
With just one week of the formal Ontario election campaign out of the way, most sensible people aren’t yet paying attention to the claims of rival political parties. But if I had to pick a winner for the week, it would be Frank de Jong’s Greens.
This is not because the Greens will sweep the province on Oct.10. They will not. They may not see a single candidate elected. But media and public are beginning to take them more seriously. For a party on the margin, this is great step forward.
True, de Jong has been barred again from the televised leaders debate. That privilege is still reserved for the big three – Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, Conservative chieftain John Tory and New Democratic Party Leader Howard Hampton.
But not all are taking their cues from the networks. Last week, CBC Radio’s Metro Morning interviewed what it called the four main party leaders – Hampton, McGuinty, Tory and de Jong.
Meanwhile, major newspapers are according the Greens real coverage, something that big media does not do for other minor parties like the Communists or Family Coalition.
On Thursday, for example, Hampton and Tory both released important parts of their platforms. The Conservative leader spoke of spending $1.3 billion to clean up emissions from the Nanticoke coal plant on Lake Erie. The NDP reiterated its promise to boost the minimum wage immediately to $10 an hour. Yet neither story merited a mention on the Star’s front page. By contrast, de Jong’s promise to legislate six new statutory holidays did.
The Star is not alone. Factiva, the Dow Jones media database that includes all stories published in major and mid-size Ontario newspapers, recorded 58 hits for de Jong and the Greens last week. During the first week of the 2003 Ontario election, the equivalent number was eight.
By comparison, the NDP’s Hampton scored 154 Factiva hits this past week, compared to 229 during week one of the 2003 campaign.
All of this may be ephemeral. The Greens were running at about 6 per cent in public opinion polls before the 2003 election. But when the day of decision came, they garnered a mere 2.8 per cent of the actual vote.
Still, de Jong does possess an advantage that he did not have four years ago. This time, the province isn’t gripped – at least not yet – by a throw-out-the-bums mood. Faced with a choice between a Liberal leader who seems conservative and a Conservative leader who seems liberal, it is more laid-back.
Normally, the NDP would benefit from this what-me-worry attitude. Ontarians tend to swing to third parties when they think the stakes are not too high.
But many voters still remember the Bob Rae NDP government of the early `90s with distaste (that became evident last year when Rae failed in his bid to win the federal Liberal leadership). For such voters, the danger of supporting the New Democrats is that they might win.
The Greens, on the other hand, appear to present a no-risk option, particularly for those who aren’t too concerned by de Jong’s market-oriented and somewhat draconian platform (he wants to boost electricity rates dramatically in order to conserve energy).
While new, the Greens are now familiar enough to be respectable. And since they are so unlikely to win power, they appear to offer voters a costless way to thumb their noses at the political establishment.
Which, for a fourth party, is not a bad place to be.
A nice article regarding our platform release
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/OntarioVotes2007/News/2007/09/13/4494701-cp.html
Greens pledge to put tax burden on resources, add six new holidays
By MARIA BABBAGE
2007-09-13 TORONTO (CP) – Six new statutory holidays, a phase-out of the controversial health tax and a much bigger hydro bill are among the many changes Ontario voters could expect if the Green party is elected Oct. 10.
The party would also scrap the Catholic public school system, increase electricity rates to help slash energy consumption, and ease personal and corporate taxes by shifting the burden to resources and environmentally damaging activities, party leader Frank de Jong said Thursday.
They’re among many promises aimed at garnering broader appeal for a party long identified solely by its strong environmental mandate, even though recent polls suggest the Greens are trailing the third-place NDP by only a small margin.
It’s also the clearest signal yet that the Greens are stepping up efforts to reach out to voters of traditional parties, coupling such promises as their tax-shifting plan and investments in northern and rural development with the more predictable pledges to ban construction of nuclear reactors, phase out coal-fired plants and meet Canada’s Kyoto obligations.
“I think we see ourselves as neither left nor right,” de Jong said after riding his bicycle to the provincial legislature to unveil the party’s platform.
“I suppose the antagonism between left and right is sort of obsolete when we’re addressing climate change and issues that are much bigger than the left-right, old-fashioned government.”
NDP Leader Howard Hampton says he’s not scared of losing support to the Greens.
“People who want to see a responsible environmental alternative are voting for the NDP,” he said in Toronto.
De Jong also dismissed Premier Dalton McGuinty’s repeated warning that a vote for any other party than the Liberals will usher in a Progressive Conservative government, saying his party has managed to attract some Tory votes as well as Liberal ones.
“We are a fiscally conservative party,” he said. “We would never run deficit budgets. We want to reduce income taxes, reduce business taxes because we know that’s the best way to keep the economy going.”
While the Green party is making headway in changing the perception that it’s a left-wing party, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will win seats in this election, said Chris Gore, a politics professor at Ryerson University.
However, they seem to be succeeding in attracting voters from both ends of the political spectrum, he added.
“I think that they’re certainly gunning for anyone and everyone,” he said.
One of the party’s more attention-grabbing promises involves eliminating Ontario’s health-care tax – which can cost workers up to $900 per year – over four years.
In addition, the Green party says it would reduce personal taxes by $2.3 billion and corporate income taxes by $1 billion over four years. Workers would also get six new statutory holidays, including Earth Day and Remembrance Day, which the Greens say would boost productivity.
But that doesn’t mean the Greens are tax-cutters, de Jong noted.
“I’m sorry, there’s no free lunch in Ontario,” he said.
“You’ll be paying the same tax, only you’ll be paying it on resources and pollution and sprawl instead of on our incomes, which has a multiple benefit.”
A Green government would find other ways to make up the cash, including imposing an immediate two per cent carbon tax on oil, natural gas and coal used in the province that would grow to eight per cent over four years. Companies taking water from the province would also face a tax of $100 per million litres, increased to $400 over four years.
De Jong said the tax shift would create a “win-win” situation, making workers cheaper to employ while making pollution, resources and sprawl more expensive. That, in turn, would encourage both businesses and individuals to make better decisions for the environment.
In essence, Ontario residents would “pay for what you burn, and not for what you earn,” he added.
Changing prices does alter consumer behaviour, said Mark Stabile, director of the University of Toronto’s school of public policy and governance.
“You can reduce taxes on individuals and then have them pay more in prices,” he said.
“We’re not saying you can’t use oil or you can’t use other things that may harm the environment, but that if you’re going to use them, you’re going to have to pay a certain amount to help offset that harm.”
