I'll be honest. I've never heard "green shift" before the Liberal Party launched Stephane Dion's carbon tax plan using that name. Jennifer Wright's Green Shift Inc had been in business for five years. After a cease and desist letter was ignored, Wright launched a massive lawsuit against the Liberal Party for ripping off the name of her company.
The Liberal Party defense seems to be that the phrase "green shift" is ubiquitous. Liberal MP and environment critic David McGuinty stopped short of saying he invented that phase himself:
The suit also seeks a court injunction to stop the Liberals from using the phrase "Green Shift." Wright said the trademark has been approved, but has not yet been registered with the federal government.
The Liberals say they've done nothing wrong. Liberal MP David McGuinty told CTV Newsnet Wednesday afternoon that anyone can search the Internet for the phrase "green shift" and see just how often it pops up in the environmental movement. He said he was personally using the phrase in the early 1990s.
"It's a bit mysterious -- in fact, puzzling -- why (the suit) is being launched now," he said.
To the best of my knowledge, David McGuinty has not provided any evidence of his use of the phrase anytime in the last ten months, much less ten years ago.
In any case, I've always thought that odd. In use over ten years, and not even a passing recognition of the phrase?
Or perhaps it isn't in such wide usage after all. From the Facebook group Green Shift:
INTERESTING email from a Montreal-based media monitoring and analysis company (Influence Communication) - completed an exhaustive 12-month scan of all newspapers (14 000+) in 159 countries to discover that ‘green shift’ as a term has been encountered in only 62 occasions; this from over 15 million articles/editorials directly or indirectly related to the environment/climate change...etc. This contradicts recent affirmations expressed by certain political leaders.
We would like to extend a very special thank-you to Influence Communications for doing this research -- we would have pulled this all up for court but it will hopefully start to prevent the false-hoods that the Liberals have presented in their defence.
No mention is made if the research showed that David McGuinty was responsible for 50 of those 62 occurrences. On the other hand, Green Shift Inc isn't mincing words. Their position is that stating that "green shift" is a common phrase is a falsehood.
Ouch.
So on the one hand we have David McGuinty's assertion that "green shift" is as common as a lump of coal. On the other we have Jennifer Wright's research that says "green shift" is as rare as a diamond.
And Jennifer Wright is right when she says someone is lying.
