A dose of common sense from the Green Party: Brave young candidate urges economic belt-tightening

By Jon Ferry
Monday, April 27th, 2009
The Province
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I couldn't believe my ears Friday when listening to a radio debate between the provincial candidates in Vancouver-Fraserview (listen to the Friday, April 24th 1:00pm show here at CKNW or here on YouTube). Asked by a caller about the current paramedics' strike, Jodie Emery, the Green Party candidate, was far from supportive of the union's position.

Indeed, the 24-year-old Emery, wife of pot prince Marc Emery, urged the workers to exercise some wage restraint. She made the point that, in these hard economic times, "we all need to sacrifice a little -- there's not an unlimited government bucket of money."

It was the kind of fiscally conservative comment that wouldn't exactly endear her to B.C.'s powerful union lobby. And I thought it was politically brave, to say the least. So I phoned Emery after the Christy Clark show on CKNW to confirm I hadn't misheard what she was saying. And the photogenic editor of Cannabis Culture magazine confirmed every word of it.

"As the economic situation worsens, it's not time to be asking for more money from anywhere," she told me. "It's time to make sure that everybody gets through this at least OK and, you know, we need to all tighten our belts."

Emery is right. If this province is to get through the Great Recession without too much grief, everybody is going to have give up a little, including public-sector workers with relatively decent wages and benefits.

It's something my parents, who lived through the Great Depression, understood well. But then they were green long before it became a fashion statement. They grew their own vegetables, made their own jams and composted. They knew about making do with what you had, and not whining or complaining.

It took a bubbly young Green Party candidate, however, to resurrect this concept. And it got me thinking that, while the mainstream parties are going through their usual motions and meltdowns, the energetic Greens are coming up with some interesting ideas.

In its Green Book, the party says it wants to create a business climate "in which more locally owned business across a range of industries can prosper."

It wants to diversify our power-generation sources and reduce our dependence on gambling and oil-and-gas revenues. And it wants to encourage greater participation in our democracy -- and reduce the power of the premier's office.

A lot of its ideas, though, are cuckoo. And you get the feeling a Green convention would be about as much fun as a convent get-together, with everybody worrying about whether the straws were organic.

That said, at least the Greens seem to believe strongly in something, which is more than you can say about the NDP and the Liberals, unless, that is, you consider speeding evidence of political passion.

No, the Greens' main weakness is their intolerance of those who, like me, question the hysteria surrounding alleged human-induced global warming.

During a Province editorial-board meeting last week, Green Party Leader Jane Sterk referred to us as "deniers," as in Holocaust deniers, highlighting the shameful bigotry of so many eco-zealots.

Besides, don't they know marijuana smoking itself contributes to climate change?