Green Party of Canada leadership hopeful Dimitri Lascaris has released his environmental platform ahead of the leadership vote, slated to begin on September 26th online. From the candidate’s website:
The global ecological emergency is an existential threat. The climate crisis is already grave but is only one part of the broader picture of our broken relationship with nature. It also includes equally grim biodiversity loss, pollution and the wider ecological imbalance in our relationship with other species that is implicated in the zoonotic virus behind the current pandemic.
The Canadian economy rests fundamentally on extraction – mining agriculture, forestry and fishing. It is heavily invested in fossil-fuels, and makes an outsize per capita contribution to climate warming. As a country with a very large resource footprint, Canada has a critical role in responding to the ecological emergency.
The coming decade is likely our last chance to act. If we are to ensure human survival, to thrive and to bequeath to future generations a healthy and liveable planet, we must act in a socially just and internationally cooperative manner.
This platform proposes an eco-socialist approach to ensure this chance does not slip away. The climate emergency requires us to reorganize our society and its relation with nature. Our current arrangements burden the earth with growing economic and social inequities. Human societies must be reorganized for sustainability, restoring the commons while leaving ample scope for well regulated and appropriate private enterprise, large and small, particularly family owned and local firms.
By socializing key industries and regulating the economy in a just, transparent and democratic manner in cooperation with other levels of government, the Green Party under Dimitri will promote steps on a number of fronts.
- Fossil Fuels
- Achieve net-zero carbon emissions in Canada by 2030
- Phase out fossil fuels rapidly
- End tar sands oil extraction
- Ban fracking
- Socialize the fossil-fuel industries so redundant workers are reskilled for comparable employment
- Mining and Forestry
- Regulate mining and forestry for ecological sustainability and social justice
- Reduce raw exports and reduce output to match Canadian processing capacity
- Socialize corporate operations within 10 years
- Transportation
- Transform today’s emissions-heavy and inadequate transport system
- Introduce a national strategy for ecological, convenient and affordable inter- and intra-city road, rail, air and water transport.
- Conservation and Biodiversity
- Increase Canada’s protected land and water bodies to at least 40 percent by 2030 in cooperation with Indigenous peoples
- Set out plans and targets to reverse biodiversity loss.
- Ending Animal Cruelty
- Recognize animals as sentient beings, not property
- Regulate livestock farming and other activities to eliminate cruelty to animals.
- Agroecology
- Reorient agriculture away from massive and vulnerable monocultural corporate operations
- Promote small scale, resource- and energy-light, organic and resilient agroecology farming
- Promote soil health through permaculture and regenerative techniques that result in public and environmental public health.
- Pollution
- Cease exporting Canada’s waste
- Establish a national waste management strategy
- Enforce polluter pays
As young and old climate strikers insisted last year, the ecological emergency was already upon us when the pandemic highlighted another critical dimension of it. We can no longer go on abusing the nature that nurtures us. Our socialistic and internationally cooperative response will repair humanity’s broken relation to nature. It is also the essential foundation for just green wellbeing the world over.
The time is now.