The Green Party's Radical Edge and Last Night's Paroxysm of Madness

So I went to an Elizabeth May event last night in Montreal to see how the Green Party would represent themselves. Personally, I think that no currently elected party is capable of making real progress on environmental policy change under present circumstances. I believe that everyone, Liberal and Conservative alike, has fumbled the ball on this policy issue. Before last night, I would not have minded at all if Elizabeth May had won a seat were she ran and gotten one or 2 seats for the Greens in the House of Commons. This would push the issue of environment even further and force real action on climate change and air pollution. Surely, however, having read their platform, they can be considered nothing but a one-issue party. Even before the experience I had last night, I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable knowing that the Greens had the swing votes in, say, a crucial foreign policy issue.

However, after last night's event, I have to say they've definitely scared me off. I'm not sure if the attendance last night was representative of Green party membership, but if it was, I can say with confidence that I would never vote for them. For one thing, they're ridiculously interventionist. Last night, Elizabeth May said that "economic growth must be limited to an environmentally sustainable level". What does this mean? Who knows. She then declared that "corporations had no rights" and that the "only circumstances under which [she] supported capital punishment is when corporations break the social contract". So much for the claim that the Greens aren't to the left, centre or to the right, but rather a party that is moving on forward. It also further debunks the myth that I had been hearing around town about the Greens being more classically liberal.

The panel in which E-May was speaking included a man named Dmitri. He was a ecologist, and a pessimistic one at that. He was under the impression that climate change was already irreversible and that our world was doomed. The man clearly was a lunatic and didn't know anything about what he was talking about. He said that he was engaged in local politics and is known in his circles as 'the great decentralizer'. He then encouraged us to "bang on the doors of the house of representatives and the senate to put pressure on our federalist system." And, I might add, he's from Montreal.

The eccentricities of the night did not stop there. It seemed to me that question period following the talk was a paroxysm of madness. "The end is nigh," declared an emotional teenager. Another woman stood up in the balcony and announced she was a Green party candidate running in rural Quebec. She stated that she believed that the world would be over by 2012 because of climate change. She asked Elizabeth May whether it would be politically harmful to her campaign if she told people this when canvassing.

A man stood up and mumbled incoherently for half an hour on Haiti without asking any sort of question. Another erroneously alluded to a biblical story (the one where Jesus knocks over the cages of the people trying to sell animals for sacrifice in front of the temple, while gauging the prices) and from this, extrapolated that anyone who supported capitalism was an 'anti-Christ'.

Oh no, it didn't end there. There was a woman that went to the front and declared that she assumed we were all in favour of the $10 minimum wage. "Well," she said, "since we're all in favour of a minimum wage, we might as well also have a maximum wage". Tax any wages over the maximum wage by 100%, she declared. This was not the most shocking thing. The most shocking thing was that she got a round of applause.

Finally, there was this man that declared his unwavering support for matriarchy. He went up to the front of the room and said in a soft voice that he was a Mohawk Indian. He said that we had been destroying mother earth. He further went on to say that the only way to rebalance the world was to kick all the men out of our "so-called democratic system" and replace them with women. Talk about misandry.

For me, the only thing that got me to hang onto any respect for May was that I would see her cringe when Dimitri tried to put his hand on her shoulder, or roll her eyes when there was a particularly ridiculous proposition. For the most part, she refused to respond to the more extreme comments. It was a fun night for me because I got to listen to the preposterous ideas being thrown up in the air, but if this was representative of Green party support, then the Greens are in a whole lot of trouble.