Stephen Rees's blog

At today’s meeting of Vancouver City Council, all three Green Party councillors voted with the NPA.

Vancouver city council has decided to oppose the additional school tax by the province on homes valued at least $3 million.

Council voted 7-3 to ask the B.C. NDP government to withdraw the tax that will take effect in 2019.

Casting the affirmative votes were Councillors Rebecca Bligh, Melissa De Genova, Sarah Kirby-Yung, and Colleen Hardwick of the Non-Partisan Association; and Adrianne Carr, Pete Fry, and Michael Wiebe of the Green Party of Vancouver.

This is the last straw for me. I will no longer send any money to the Vancouver Greens, nor will I count myself a supporter. I will allow my membership to lapse.

Provincially the Green Party is working with the NDP – and I, like many others, have had to concede that the working arrangement is clearly better than continuing to have a BC Liberal government. But that means not saying what needs to be said about LNG – which earns the province little in the way of revenue, and employs very few people, but depends on fracking which produces far more fugitive methane than the industry admits. Worse than that it also is built on the case of liquefying the gas using hydro power – which is supposed to cut its carbon footprint, but seems to ignore the damage that  building a large scale earth dam on dodgy foundations will do, and the abysmal track record of major hydro projects both environmentally and economically.

Moreover, I have had to put up with the Leader of the Green Party promoting Uber!

Enough.

Elizabeth May, federally, seems to be the best of a bad bunch but even she has been pushing for more oil refineries in Alberta.

We have a very short time to turn the world around in its present track – which has seen ghg increases this year. The IPCC and the US federal government have made it clear. We cannot go on like this.

Since the Green Party at local, provincial and federal levels seems not to understand that human caused climate change is our biggest problem, I can no longer call myself a Green Party member. We have to stop producing oil, gas and coal altogether, and we need to be working hard to replace those energy sources by renewables and by the reductions in consumption that will be possible if we embrace energy efficiency and well understood Transportation Demand Management techniques such as promoting transit expansion over highways!  It is actually easier now to do this as both solar and wind power are cheaper than fossils. We have plenty of capacity in our highway and urban road systems, as long as everybody understands they cannot drive a big SUV or pick up truck for each trip by one person over quite short distances. Cut the parking requirements, build walkable cities, spend money on LRT not freeways. This is not rocket science and we do not need any of Elon Musk’s crazy “innovations”. We know how to do this because we used to do this not so long ago. It is not about more tunnels or atmospheric railways – it is streetcars, buses and bicycles.

Next week the NDP is going to reveal its strategy for the Massey Tunnel “replacement”. If it isn’t a rail based additional tunnel then I will not be cheering for that either!