You’ve heard of the bourgeoisie? Now there’s the “Turquoisie” — the Jim Harris blue-greens.
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Or did the Blues get the Greens?
Flushed with electoral success, Canada’s Green Party would seem to be on a roll. But leader Jim Harris’ right-wing, market-based election platform and his ruthless internal manoeuvring have raised the hackles of the party’s “deep” Greens.
Are the Greens headed for a major split at their annual party convention, to be held in Calgary at the end of August? We’ll know the answer to that question later this month.
According to Charles Campbell, a long-time Green party member, Thunder Bay resident, and former chair of the federal Green party’s policy committee, in an e-mail he sent recently to dissident greens on their active, anti-Harris New Green e-mail list, Jim Harris has moved the federal Green party so far to the right that it’s barely a ‘green’ party any more …
“Jim Harris’ vision is centralized control of the party administration with the participation of two or three of the thirteen provincial and territorial fiefdoms. It is driven by borrowing against future funding and has as its goal the creation of a personality cult around the Leader. Its approach to policy is to hide our history and create a neo-con vision of green economics driven by how profitable ecological business can be.”
In his thoughtful and provocative article for rabble.ca, former B.C. Green party activist Stuart Hertzog suggests that the Green party’s new-found leniency towards corporations may stem from Harris’ corporate consulting activities, including Harris’ work for Agilent Technologies, Barclays Bank, Centra (now Terasen) Gas, Deloitte & Touche, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Munich Re, NEC, and Worldwide Express, to name just a few.
Hypocrisy would seem to be the order of the day for Jim Harris, the leader of a Canadian Green party whose corporate ties are in conflict with a global Green movement whose roots extend deep into the global anti-corporate movement. A right-wing agenda which mixes corporate business with green politics — is this what Canadians, and most members of Green Party Canada, are looking for in a leader of an alternative national political party?
