Angry in the Great White North

The controversy is simple to frame.  David Suzuki was quoted as saying that the Green Party is holding back political progress on the environment by its very presence. 

Except that's not what he said on September 10.  Nor did he say it a second time on October 21.

So despite what people keep hearing him say, David Suzuki is saying something entirely different. He explains:

The upshot of what I've been saying is that I can't wait until there is no Green party. It bugs me to see an issue as important as the environment being treated like a political hockey puck. It's an issue so important that it should transcend partisan politics. All the political parties should treat the environment as the top priority. If they did, they wouldn't need to argue about it during a campaign; it would just be a given.

Let's not argue about the environment.  It should be outside of politics.  We should just have some unelected environment commissar spend money on environmental initiatives without worrying about the electorate and such.

Yeah, right.  Get real.  But then again...hold that thought.  We'll circle back to this in a moment.

But what about the Green Party?

So, am I against the Green party? Do I think it has no role to play in the current Canadian political scene? Of course not. Having Green party leader Elizabeth May participate in the televised leaders' debates helped keep the environment on the agenda, and the collective voice of Green party candidates across Canada was an important one that needed to be heard.

The problem is that David Suzuki has not addressed his previous statements:

"I can't wait until there is no Green party," Suzuki said he told its leader Elizabeth May.

"As long as there's a Green party, the implication is that the Greens somehow have a stranglehold on this issue; they're the ones that worry about the environment so the other parties can worry about other things. I don't think it's a ghetto subject."

If the Green Party is compartmentalizing the environment and the votes of environmentalists, then the Green Party is causing a problem.  Isn't it?

But finally, it's starting to make sense.

David Suzuki, in his latest statements, suggests that the Green Party's role is to make noise.  Elizabeth May ought to have been in the debate.  The candidates needed to be heard.

But David Suzuki does not say that the Green Party ought to be getting votes.

Now this is in part because David Suzuki the private citizen is also the embodiment of the David Suzuki Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization that must avoid favouring one party over another.

But I also think it is a telling omission.  The Green Party has a "collective voice".  By pretending to be a political party, the Green Party gets to participate in political debates during election time, and so the environment gets mentioned, ad nauseam.  But there is no such thing as a pretend party.  It is a real party, with people who are working hard to votes from other parties. 

That seems to be something David Suzuki doesn't like.  Like all good philosopher kings, David Suzuki thinks democracy is a toy to keep the uneducated masses amused while he and others deal with the important things without the interference of elections and votes.

He says it clearly.  The environment is not a subject for political debate.  So the collective opinion of Canadians, expressed through the democratic process, is not relevant to action on the environment.  But we're not at that state of enlightened environmental absolutism, and until we get there, the Green Party plays the role of that voice.

It's role is not to win votes, and David Suzuki is expressing his frustration that, in actually winning votes, the Green Party is reducing the environment to just another political issue.

Elizabeth May understands that.  Several times during the election she made it clear that the Green Party was not to win votes (except in Central Nova, of course, where she was running).  Instead Green Party supporters were supposed to cast their votes for the Liberals or the NDP, whatever made sense to keep the Conservatives out of power.  The she got in trouble, each time, from Green Party members who didn't get the memo, and thought their job was to actually fight an election.

So now we understand David Suzuki.  The Green Party is supposed to speak to environmental issues during an election.  But the idea that we ought to be allowing Canadians to be voting on environmental issues is offensive to David Suzuki's sensibilities.  That's why we don't need the Green Party some day.  Or elections, I suppose.