Last week, I started a short series on the idea of the balance of power. The current minority NDP government will be supported in the legislature by three Green Party MLAs.
This arrangement is not a coalition. A coalition would mean that the Greens would be part of the government. This agreement simply means that the Greens will vote with the NDP on key votes in the house, including things like the throne speech and the subsequent budget. For other legislation, the Greens will look to support the NDP on a case-by-case basis. Thus, the Greens hold the balance of power because the NDP cannot maintain confidence in the house without them.
Green party members, whether federal or provincial, are often made up of a wide range of individuals who have concerns about the relationship between human beings and the environment. As I mentioned last week, those concerns can span conservationism to deep ecology.
In brief, and again this week I rely on the textbook by Dickerson, Flanagan and O'Neill volume entitled, An Introduction to Government and Politics, "conservationism is the attempt to manage natural resources so that human users, including future generations, drive maximum benefit over a long period of time." They cite the introduction of the "discipline of forestry" and the creation of national parks "movement" as part of the rise of conservationism.
At the other end of the spectrum, "deep ecology represents a fundamental break with liberalism, and indeed with all other ideologies because it is "ecocentric" - that is it posits the entire natural order, not human happiness, as its highest value." Across this broad range of ideas, the environment can be understood as something we use and protect but still control or it can be thought of as a place in which we work and live but that has its own intrinsic value.
Political parties that adopt social movements as their base have to deal with the range and scope of interests and values that are pervasive within their membership. In many cases, this need to aggregate all of the interests makes it difficult to make the party broadly relevant to a general population while at the same time not disenfranchising those who are the base supporters.
Green parties around the world and in Canada have had to work tirelessly to get their voice into the political conversation and to be treated as mainstream. Elizabeth May, who was the leader of the national Green Party staunchly asserted her right to be included in the federal leadership debates. She was included in 2008 but shut out of the 2011 and 2015 debates. In B.C., the Greens have been part of the leadership debate for a number of years. B.C.'s political culture has been much more open to environmentalism as an important social movement for many years.
As I mentioned last week, the B.C. Greens have to "reconcile their ideology with the realpolitik of holding the balance of power." You can see from their platform that they have devised policies that are broadly social democratic but that start from the assumption that we are "stewards of the environment." This idea has a long history but puts us in mind of seeing ourselves as responsible for, and to, the world around us.
The Greens also have a mission to support sustainability which, as a political idea, is somewhat more complex than stewardship. Sustainability is an idea that brings together stewardship with governance. The Green platform says that they wish to "reset the relationship between people and government, and communities and government." In the real world of global economy, the Greens argue, it is apparent that both the environment and people can be harmed by the structure of modern capitalism.
The idea of inequality caused by global markets has become an important part of local, national and international political dialogue. The disenfranchisement of the many workers is, at least in part, what brought Donald Trump into power in the United States. But the answer to the problem of inequality is quite different from the viewpoint of a party built on environmental stewardship and sustainability than it is from a traditional conservative or liberal viewpoint.
So what we should expect from the Greens over the coming months is a defence of policy aimed at what they see is a necessary, "fundamental shift" in the way that government operates to restructure the inequity of globalization.
