Methinks they doth protest too much

Layton A Hypocrite About Deal, May Says

From the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald article by Stephen Maher:

"There’s something wrong with Jack Layton if he’d rather open up discussions with the Taliban than the Green party," Ms. May said.

The NDP has angrily denounced Ms. May and Liberal Leader Stephane Dion for agreeing not to run candidates in each other’s ridings. Ms. May says she has tried many times to persuade Mr. Layton to discuss similar co-operation, but he refuses to talk with her.

It’s strange, given that Mr. Layton is happy to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ms. May said.

"We know that Mr. Layton meets regularly with Stephen Harper," she said. "As a matter of fact Stephen Harper has praised Jack Layton as the leader of the opposition with whom he meets most often and finds the most co-operative."

But Karl Belanger, Mr. Layton’s spokesman, brushed aside her comments.
"If, and that is a big if, she ever gets elected to Parliament, we might answer her silly attacks," he said.

It was pointed out to me that the term 'silly' is a word used little to describe men, except maybe to try to emasculate a man, and that when used to describe women it is a sexist term.

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NDP makes issue of Elizabeth May in the leaders debates
Two NDPers say yes; two say no.

From the Globe & Mail article by Brian Laghi:

MP Peter Stoffer, while agreeing with Mr. Layton that his party should run a candidate against Ms. May in the riding of Central Nova, said he thought she had the right to take part in the debate.

"I have no problems with her being in the televised debates, regardless of what happened in Central Nova. I honestly believe that she should have the right to be in the televised debate."

Meanwhile, Jim Laxer, a former party leadership candidate in the early 1970s and a political scientist, said he supports the idea of not running a candidate against Ms. May. A pact could help unite the opposition against Mr. Harper, Mr. Laxer said.

"I kind of think the deal is interesting because it's got some potential for a way for opposition parties who don't want to be divided up by Stephen Harper," he said.

He said Mr. Harper is dealing with the opposition against him piecemeal, which makes it difficult for the opposition to coalesce.

Mr. Laxer also said Ms. May should be part of the debate.

"I think she should be in the debate, but based on some kind of rule like 5 per cent [of the vote]," he said.

Mr. Laxer said the Greens, with 660,000 votes in the last election "clearly deserve a member of Parliament. . . . People should think of this on a higher level."

The party was not represented at the debates during the last election. Only parties with seats in Parliament and a comprehensive national platform were allowed last time.

Mr. Layton has said that the television networks decide who can take part. Typically, however, the networks require the agreement of all party leaders over who should be in on the contest.

Interestingly, a poll from January of this year showed that Canadians want the Green Party leader in debates.

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NDP urged 2004 deal, ex-Green leader says

From the Toronto Star article by Susan Delacourt:

OTTAWA–Former Green party leader Jim Harris says NDP Leader Jack Layton sought a deal with him before the 2004 federal election, so he's baffled why New Democrats are suddenly saying that it's wrong for the Greens and Liberals to co-operate in the next campaign.

"Methinks they doth protest too much," Harris said in an interview yesterday, describing a meeting he held at a College St. café in Toronto with Layton before the 2004 campaign.

But according to Harris, Layton asked for the Greens not to run candidates in 2004 and to endorse the NDP instead. A 2004 newspaper story makes mention of the meeting and includes confirmation from an NDP strategist that Layton was looking for the Greens to back his party.

Layton, however, recalled yesterday that it was Harris looking for the NDP's support. "He asked for the meeting," Layton said, noting that Harris brought a list of demands, one of which was a request for the NDP not to run candidates against Greens.

That's not how Harris remembers things. He said he had gone to Layton to ask for his backing in getting into the televised leaders' debates during a future election campaign. Layton replied that Greens would need to do something for the NDP in return for their support. According to Harris, the question was something like: "Why don't you just not run any candidates and endorse the NDP and me?"

Harris said he couldn't see what the Green party would get out of that proposal.

Sometimes I'm left baffled and exhausted from trying to figure out whether the old-line political parties are being honest or just playing chess games. Our country still desperately needs transparency and accountability in our government, and I expect that electing Green MPs will help make this happen.

The Greens, under heavy fire, have to be careful and continue to respond to attacks with a pro-green message, rather than an 'anti-other' counter attack. Non-violence is one of the key values of the Green Party, and that includes non-violent communication.

Still Busy...

So I thought I'd be able to take a break from my work with the Party, but unless I choose to leave some work undone, I must continue to devote at least two hours each day volunteering my efforts. So far I've been able to maintain a balance with my family and other interests, and with the holiday season beginning I'll have to work in some late nights to keep on top of things.

As the Alberta Provincial Representative on Federal Council I've been working with the Prairie Organizer to get the Party ready for a possible spring election. Over the next few weeks Mark and I will be continuing to strengthen the Southern Alberta Organizing Task Force and we hope to hold a training session near the end of January for candidates, EDA executives, and more. A change that will occur soon (and that will put more work on my desk) is that Mark MacGillivray will be ending his time as Prairie Organizer. He's done so much here in Alberta that I'm convinced we couldn't have done as well as we did in the last election without him. Mark signed me up a little over a year ago, and I'll forever be grateful for being introduced to the Green Party of Canada. I'm happy to say that Mark will be sticking around and helping out. Check out his website and forum at greenerpolitics.com!

Federal Council has been working to create committees made up mostly of general members to help in organizing certain areas of the Party. This Party really is different; council asks members what they think will work, committees of mostly general members is suggested, motions are drafted with input from the membership, and viola! Council does what the membership suggests. So far so good!

Here in Crowfoot the EDA is still getting settled in with our new executive. As CEO I am doing my best to coordinate our efforts, and stand back when not needed to let our capable members do what they know needs to be done. We're having a lot of fun and we are ready for the next federal election. At the recent nominations contest I was elected to be our local Green Party candidate again. With my experience of already running, a larger team to work with, and a bit more funds at our disposal, I'm sure we'll continue to increase our support.

The news lately has been very interesting. Elizabeth May is getting a lot of news coverage. Today we announced our efforts to be included in the next televised leaders debates. Please go to Demand Democratic Debates for more info and to sign the petition to have the Green Party included.

One last thing - I was reminded this week to walk the talk regarding living spiritually. After a heated exchange in an online political forum I spent a day reflecting on my 'tone of text' (it's really difficult to get emotions across online without being misunderstood once in a while) and I went back to offer an apology. Using non-violent communication is a great way to interact with others. I reset my headspace, and this has been a valuable learning experience for me.

Stop Bias Against Green Party by Tom Axworthy - PLUS: Environmentalism & Christianity

Enjoy this wonderful article, and please explore the links to a number of other articles exploring environmental stewardship & Christianity at the bottom of this post!

Environmentalists should be welcomed to political table, says Tom Axworthy

Stop Bias Against Green Party - by Tom Axworthy
Sep. 24, 2006

"Scientists, like the Greens, have been worried about climate change for decades. New to the movement are evangelical religious leaders: In February 2006, 86 of them declared "Love of God, love of neighbour, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action."

It is time the Canadian political and media establishments stop discriminating against the Green party and the ethic it represents. If we are serious about preserving the planet and if we care about fair play, Canadians must demand the Greens be welcomed to the political table.

The basic premise of the Green movement is that "all life in the planet is interconnected and that humans have a responsibility to protect and preserve the natural world." Founded in Canada in 1983, the tiny minority of Greens in the 1980s were right about the impact of the fossil-fuel economy on global warming. As the science on climate change has become more mainstream, so should the Greens.

Global warming means that extra-solar radiation is being trapped at the Earth's surface; the rise in average temperature is only the signal that something profound is going on. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's most authoritative scientific body on the problem, has documented the steady rise in global temperatures and attributes most of it to human activities.

James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, believes that in 10 years we will be at the tipping point — there will already be too much carbon dioxide in the system...

(article snipped)

...Last week, satellite images revealed dramatic openings in the Arctic ice big enough to allow a ship to sail to the North Pole. Scientists, like James Lovelock, creator of the GAIA Hypothesis, are deeply concerned.

He wrote this year "the climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology labs of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years."

Scientists, like the Greens, have been worried about climate change for decades. New to the movement are evangelical religious leaders: In February 2006, 86 of them declared "Love of God, love of neighbour, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action."

These traditional allies of President George Bush have broken with him on the issue of climate change. They argue that change is real, that the poor will be hardest hit (as happened with Hurricane Katrina) and that Christian moral convictions demand a response. An evangelical-scientific alliance to force business and government to exercise responsible stewardship could change politics in a hurry.

If the Greens have been right on one of the largest issues of our time, they have also been dogged in building support. In the 2006 election, they won 4.5 per cent support by running candidates in all 308 ridings. Yet the established parties and the networks have not allowed the Green leader to participate in televised debates.

The Bloc Québécois, which runs no candidates outside of Quebec, gets hours of television time; the Greens are shut out. This has to change. If Canadians are ever to make the leap from a consumer society to a conserver society, the job of public education will be tremendous. For reasons of substance (to create a large environmental coalition dedicated to change) and for reasons of ethics (to give a national party a fair chance), Elizabeth May, the Green leader, must be included in the next debates. The new leader of the Liberal party should refuse to participate in any debate that excludes the leader of the Greens. To prevent climate change, we must change the current climate of denial; a starting point would be giving the Green party the respect it deserves.

Thomas S. Axworthy is chairman of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University.

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Politics, ecology, economics, Green Party, Christianity, environmental stewardship... all of these subjects are related to the others. Maybe I'm tackling too big a topic in this post, but I enjoy exploring how my political endeavors relate to my spiritual & environmental efforts.

Environmentalism can compliment economics, and in fact care of our ecology is a necessary element in having a functioning economy that is sustainable. The Green Party has given this thorough consideration and has an excellent plan regarding our economy in relation to ecological considerations.

The following is a list of interesting articles exploring environmental stewardship & Christianity. There seems to be two opposite schools of thought: a side that in part supports a free market and/or growth, and a side that supports more government involvement and/or sustainability. Both frame their definition of stewardship under each model. I think both extremes are just that - extremes, and the most reasonable concept of environmental stewardship for the Christian, or anyone else, is somewhere in the middle and draws aspects from both schools of thought.

(note: the titles below will link to the full articles.)

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Stewardship and the Environment
"...Many Christians are suspicious of the affinity groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network have with mainstream statist (or outright pagan) environmentalism, but they have not been trained in an appropriate response. Thus, after being browbeaten with the stewardship lingo, they leave the field of battle to the theological liberals and political statists...
...One approach in dealing with the new “stewardship” advocates is to inquire about the criteria for good stewardship. How do we know when we have been good stewards? How do we know when the tradeoffs between garden-tending and “being fruitful and multiplying” have been made appropriately? Is it better to use a 40-acre plot of land for wildlife habitat, for a farm, for a pharmaceutical plant, or for housing? The evangelical environmentalist material I have read so far would not rule out any of these possibilities. How can that decision be made, without resorting to the crucial information provided by that hated system of free market prices? The answers should be revealing..."

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An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation
"...The earthly result of human sin has been a perverted stewardship, a patchwork of garden and wasteland in which the waste is increasing. "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land...Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away" (Hosea 4:1,3). Thus, one consequence of our misuse of the earth is an unjust denial of God's created bounty to other human beings, both now and in the future..."

The above declaration seems to be written in the spirit of love, and I recognize the good will within it, but I don't completely agree with the logic and statements contained within it. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting document.

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Eco-Myths - Don't believe everything you hear about the church and the environmental crisis.
Myth 2: It's Not Biblical to be Green (Calvin B. DeWitt) "...I am amazed to hear Christians sometimes say that biblical faith has little in common with the environmental cause. Even worse, some evangelicals fear that teaching people to enjoy and respect creation will turn them into pantheists..."

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Stewardship Without Prices and Private Property? Modern Evangelical Environmentalism’s Struggle to Value Nature
"... Christians are right to seek ways to improve stewardship over nature. Yet those who are most vocal in their advocacy of stewardship seem intent upon neglecting critical sources of information about the allocation of natural resources. Numerous evangelical scholars and entire denominations give far greater weight to governmental intervention as a method of stewardship than to free-market pricing...
...schemes of central planning are no substitute for the market’s role in calculation. Statist environmentalism, however dressed in rhetoric of “justice” or “Christian stewardship,” is untenable because it lacks the necessary information to make resource allocations. Pursuing “eco-justice” or conservation of nature without protecting private property and the price system is “zeal without knowledge.” Being a Christian does not give one access to new revelation on the ideal allocation of resources."

This article is pro-libertarian & free-market, and anti-socialism & government regulation. It seems to represent the argument for government regulation in a way that is weaker than reality and mostly unappealing, and then argue against that representation. Despite this bias it is interesting reading. See the list of official denominational statements on the environment included in the original article .

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Stewardship and Economics: Two Sides of the Same Coin

"...examples display the shared biblical origin of the terms economics and stewardship. Economics can be understood as the theoretical side of stewardship, and stewardship can be understood as the practical side of economics. Here in the Midwest, over the course of the winter we’ve heard a number of news reports about the dilemma facing households over the rise in home heating costs. Often, the decision must be made to pay only one of two bills, to pay the heating bill or buy food. Dire situations like these are ones in which tough economic decisions are made by the heads of households. Far from being a discipline that explains all of human existence, in the biblical view, as we saw in the case of the shrewd manager, economics is the thoughtful ordering of the material resources of a household or social unit toward the self-identified good end. Thus, if we hold a biblical view of economics and stewardship, we will not be tempted to divorce the two concepts but instead will see them as united. On a larger scale, then, economics must play an important role in decisions about environmental stewardship. Economics helps us rightly order our stewardship. The fact that some advocates for political action on global warming are now attempting to propose economic arguments for their position is a positive step toward reconciling these two often estranged concepts..."

This article is basically about the concept of eco-economics. Click here and here for links to info on a great book exploring this concept.

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Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action
"...Over the last several years many of us have engaged in study, reflection, and prayer related to the issue of climate change (often called "global warming"). For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority. Indeed, many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians. But now we have seen and heard enough to offer the following moral argument related to the matter of human-induced climate change. We commend the four simple but urgent claims offered in this document to all who will listen, beginning with our brothers and sisters in the Christian community, and urge all to take the appropriate actions that follow from them..."

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Preserved Garden or Productive City? Two Competing Views of Stewardship
"...The first position, understood as the preservationist view of stewardship, is manifest in the Evangelical Environmental Network’s Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation. This view emphasizes the pristine state of creation before the fall into sin, and understands this “garden” to be the ideal toward which we are to bend our efforts. The failure of humankind lies principally in its inability to both sustain creation’s fruitfulness and preserve creation’s powerful testimony to its Creator...

...The second position is evident in The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship. This view emphasizes “productivity” and “proliferation.” The “productivity” view of stewardship stresses the unity between the biblical mandate both to “be fruitful and increase in number” and to “rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Gen. 1:28 NIV). The adherents to the Cornwall Declaration affirm human “potential, as bearers of God’s image, to add to the earth’s abundance,” and recognize the identity of human beings as both "producers and stewards."

Again I have to say that neither concept is entirely exclusive of the other. The preservationist view could be said to be supportive of "producers & stewards", but that the word producers doesn't allow for consumption of huge amounts of resources in an unsustainable manner. The proliferation view seems to fit with what the Bible states, and even in the parable told by Jesus (see full article) it appears that one is being told to 'develop and grow your assets'. While the economy is important in both views, and it's smart to make prudent personal investments, (my house has appreciated - hooray!) in the big picture of the world economy we can no longer grow; the human population is too large (it would take three earths for every person to consume resources at the rate that we do in North America), our resources and energy sources are being depleted rapidly, and environmental degredation is everywhere. The economy is a subset of ecology, and only through realizing this can we move forward together with a plan to improve the quality of life for everyone on our planet.