Dear Editor:
It's never been easy for a green person concerned about the environment at election time. For the most part, mainline political parties have advocated endless growth on this finite planet and have ignored the increasingly obvious evidence that we are reaching tipping points on a number of environmental fronts.
In an attempt to bring an environmentally aware perspective into the political process, I and a number of others have run for political office as Green party candidates.
Although occasionally thinking that we had a chance of winning, we mostly viewed our task as raising awareness about environmental and other issues (we have a comprehensive and well-reasoned platform) that were typically ignored in the election debate.
While we did raise awareness, we sometimes split the progressive vote. The only electoral success was the election of Elizabeth May to Parliament in 2011. By most reports, May has become the conscience - and maybe the intelligence - of Parliament. She was voted Parliamentarian of the Year by her fellow MPs in 2012.
But another change has also occurred. Perhaps as a result of raising awareness, or as a result of the threat of votes going to Green candidates, some mainstream political candidates have started to advocate progressive environmental policies. Protecting environmental productivity should be a priority for all and not a partisan issue.
In the last federal election, instead of running myself, I supported an environmentally enlightened Taleeb Noormohamed in North Vancouver, and I contributed to the campaign of Elizabeth May in the Saanich-Gulf Islands riding.
In the current provincial election, I am contributing to Andrew Weaver's Green party campaign in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, but I am voting for Craig Keating, an environmentally enlightened NDP candidate, and I applaud his leader's recent decision to make his opposition to the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion an election issue.
Jim Stephenson North Vancouver
