If you’re looking for yet another story alleging the Liberals areresponsible for the recent economic turnaround in B.C. you may as well stop reading right now.

Every four or eight years in B.C., some of us look around and are so appalled bythe major party choices that we are compelled to tilt at windmills by engaging in quixotic efforts to start new parties. (Even Socred politicians did it — leaping into the guise of a newly-minted Liberal Party).

I’m an ecologist. Many of my colleagues in the B.C. conservationcommunity have been at the forefront of the emerging Green Partyprovincially and nationally. In a state of deepening despair in 2001, many voted for them, and their alternative message.

Then we collectively watched in utter shock and disbelief as theenvironmentally-impaired thinking of Gordon Campbell crystallized in aseries of legislative megaton bombs being dropped, year after year, for four long years, effectively eliminating lifetimes of hard-won victories. On this continent, Campbell’s scorched earth policy is arguably only exceeded by the international menace of the Armageddon President south of theborder.

The issue here for me is not the value of Green Party ideas andprinciples. Rather it is two-fold: first, whether these ideas will ever be heard andexamined; and second, given the potential for taking votes away from Carole James and the NDP, what effect this will have on progressiveconstituencies (many difficult to form social-environmental coalitions), and B.C.’s greatly loved environment and wildlife.

Sure the Greens are running in every riding and getting more media coverage, but it is horse-race reporting; their environmentally responsible ideasremain as invisible to the general public as Liberal MLAs at anall-candidates meeting on Vancouver Island.

I can’t buy Green Party leader Adriane Carr’s seemingly “no immediate cause for concern”premise for risking yet another four years of a Campbell government as a tradeoff for electing the first (two at best) Green Party MLA. Is one, possibly two votes in the legislature the breakthrough we honestly need or will thewell-intentioned Carr have traded party survival for dealing with thisgrowing ‘state of emergency’ brought on by the Campbell regime?

In my view it would be the worst kind of pyrrhic victory imaginable, to have twoseated gadflies at the expense of 50, 60, 70-something earth bashersrevved up and ready to ‘slash and burn’ for another term.

We all now know our premier and his party voted for the recent cynical election spending binge to buy our votes — B.C. Ferry privatization, privatization of Crown Lands at a record pace, creation of a loophole for BC Hydro privatization, passing Bill 29 (probably thebiggest mass layoff of working women in Canadian history), government rollback of collective agreements, and lowering the minimum wage for training to$6.

Notwithstanding the origins of the aforementioned travesties, do wetruly realize that under our current “first past the post” system, voting Green serves only to assist in putting more B.C. [so-called] Liberals into thelegislature for another four years of counterscience and law-breaking? Is that really what we want?

Before you decide, pause and look what Campbell and his party achievedtogether in just one term (not an exhaustive list) of environmental deregulationalone:

  • approve a fossil fuel plant at Duke Point
  • pave way for coal fired power plant
  • remove the provincial moratoria on the grizzly trophy hunt and offshoreoil and gas exploration
  • permit offshore seismic testing
  • give industry yet more fossil fuel subsidies
  • give the oil and gas industry more subsidies
  • weaken pesticide protections
  • weaken B.C.’s main pollution act
  • reduce conservation enforcement to 15 per cent below 1995 levels (even with recent election hiring promise)
  • secretly kill Golden Eagles
  • extend mining subsidies
  • secretly forgive salmon farm fines
  • force salmon farming on local governments
  • approve fish farming of new species in open netpens
  • gut public forest protections
  • weaken private forest protections
  • allow record raw log exports
  • allow logging in endangered Spotted Owl habitat
  • pass “Working Forest” enabling legislation
  • overrule the Clayoquot Resource Board
  • override rule of law in project approvals
  • weaken urban salmon stream protections
  • commercialize and build roads through parks
  • open Southern Rockies to ATV travel
  • allow another ski resort and heli-skiing tenure in critical mountain caribou habitat
  • allow logging in parks and
  • fail to conclude the Great Bear Rainforest conservation plan against the consensus of stakeholders and mid-and-north coast communities.

But all is not lost.

Rather than panicking every four years, getting all wound up in anessentially hopeless campaign, and then, when the results aredisappointing, lapsing into disillusionment and inertia, we must begin thinking seriously about how to intervene successfully in our political system. It’s time for us to confront reality and to grow up politically.

Surely we have all learned something from the Nader vote-splitting mistake that has inflicted two terms of George Bush deregulation and war. Thefirst lesson to be learnt is “doing together what cannot be done alone.” We must rehabilitate and reanimate the NDP, the only party truly in reach ofdefeating Campbell and tirelessly assert a progressively advancing andenvironmentally responsible vision and agenda — between elections.

The grassroots NDP advocacy and adoption of the Earth Charter, thePrecautionary Principle and One Member One Vote is a solid start. So istheir current election platform. So is the backing of former prominentGreens (like Joan Russow, the former national party leader, Clayoquot Sound Greenpeace organizer Tzeporah Berman, and Happy Planet owner NDP candidate Gregor Robertson).

One final aside, whether we vote for a Single Transferable Vote(STV) or not on May 17th, the proportional representation referendumremains thoroughly disconnected from who will be sworn in as the nextgovernment.

The Campbell government deserves to be defeated. If not for years ofenvironmental rollbacks or the colossal assault on health care and education, or for the imminent threat of more of the same, then for their immensearrogance.