The ecocentric left and Green electoralism.

• Author: Orton, David
• Position: Election 2004: Green Analyses

In the June 2004 Canadian federal election, the Green Party polled over 4% of the votes. There is a discussion going on about this newly emerged "green" political force in Canada, about its social base and what policies it should be putting forth. This commentary is a contribution to the debate.

What should be the overall character of parties which call themselves Green and advocate, as does the Canadian party, that the public should embrace them as a way forward out of the Earth-threatening ecological crisis? According to Saskatchewan Green John Warnock, the Canadian party is the "most right wing" Green party in the English-speaking world.[1]

If one accepts participating in electoral politics, then what the federal Green Party accomplished was quite an achievement--running candidates in all the federal ridings and qualifying for the federal electoral subsidy of $1.75 per vote each year until the next election. The Green Party has clearly for the first time become part of the federal political landscape in Canada.

The current leadership of the party and party activists must be given credit for this achievement. More importantly, the emergence of the federal party reflects a developing green consciousness and base in Canadian society, to which many environmental and other non-party green activists have long contributed.

What should be the attitude of Greens towards conservatives who are sympathetic to ecological considerations, illustrated perhaps by the support for David Orchard in the old Progressive Conservative Party?

Orchard had about one third of the members mobilized behind him for an anti-free trade, proenvironmental platform. There are not only Red Tories but also Green Tories. The late German deep green philosopher Rudolf Bahro (1935-1997) spoke of an ecological politics cutting across all the "isms" of bourgeois society and of a "radical conservatism" or a "conservative anti-capitalism."[2]

In Canada, Robert Bateman, the wildlife artist who is also a conservative, recently spoke out against the neo-conservatives, who in his view are not conservatives at all because they destroy "cherished institutions" and wreck "havoc on our human heritage as well as our natural heritage."[3] A green political formation will therefore theoretically draw from conservatives who truly want to "conserve" the natural world, but this does not mean the resolution of the ecological question is possible within industrial capitalist society. For Bahro it...