Why I will be voting Green

Let’s face reality: the Green Party isn’t going to win the 2013 BC Election. They might win one or two seats. They’ll probably get 9-10% of the popular vote.

And that is why I’m voting for the Green Party on Tuesday.

I don’t like the first past the post elections we have in BC and Canada. It penalizes smaller parties and rewards larger ones. We always have calls by the NDP to not split the anti-Liberal vote or calls by the Liberals to not split the anti-NDP vote.

I think smaller parties deserve better say. It’s a shame that the electoral reform referendum failed in 2005 and again in 2009.

I’m voting for the Green Party in hopes that the smaller parties’ voices get a little louder. Getting 10% of the vote but 0% of the seats isn’t fair.

So why the Green Party and not the BC Conservatives? Greens are more leftist, and they don’t promote a future that’s based on fossil fuel burning. Vancouver is aiming to become the world’s greenest city by 2020, and BC should aim to become the greenest province.

They have some wingnut ideas about Smart Meters and BC Hydro (they say they’ll instruct BC Hydro to provide customers with various concerns with a wired-in Smart Meter, then say they’d place BC Hydro under the BC Utilities Commission so that the provincial government can’t interfere in the operations of BC Hydro — these two things appear to be at odds with each other), but I’m willing to let those slide.

It’s a strategic vote. I know my candidate won’t get elected, but I hope that enough people province-wide will vote Green (and enough people on Vancouver Island vote Green to elect a couple to office) so that smaller parties can get a little more recognition.

Why not the BC NDP? when I did the CBC Vote Compass the Greens and NDP were tied at the top for my results. The NDP are going to win my riding whether or not I vote for them. My Green vote is a safe one. If I lived in a riding where the Liberal stood a chance, I’d probably vote NDP, but I don’t, so I won’t.

Of course, the election isn’t for another couple of days, so I might change my mind…

Why I won’t be voting Liberal

On 11 May 2013 the Vancouver Sun published a list of 20 hot topics in the
upcoming BC election with the positions of the four major parties. Based upon
their responses, the BC Liberals have put a lot of their eggs in the Liquified
Natural Gas basket.

The BC Liberals are proposing that LNG be expanded greatly in BC over the coming
years, and the revenues from that will be fed into a BC Prosperity Fund. This
Prosperity Fund is listed in four of the twenty topics:

Housing/poverty: No specific housing promises, but creating of an
LNG-funded BC Prosperity Fund will help ease affordability problems.

Energy/pipelines/LNG: Preconditions demanded before support for Northern
Gateway, Kinder Morgan; LNG to fund new BC Prosperity Fund. Support Kitimat
oil refinery, new fracking rules.

Balanced budgets/debt: Limit government spending growth to GDP; create BC
Prosperity Fund for debt reduction; 50% of excess revenues to debt reduction.

Crown corporations: A third of new BC Prosperity Fund revenues to pay down
BC Ferries debt; accelerate paydown of BC Hydro and Port Mann Bridge debt.

The province currently gets some revenue from LNG. However, over the last eight
years, natural gas revenues have been overestimated five of the last eight years,
with an average error of $584 million. The most recent budget originally
overestimated natural gas revenues by $65 million before Finance Minister Mike de Jong corrected them.

With these kinds of errors in estimating natural gas revenues, the BC Liberals
are gambling on BC’s economic future. Not only that, they’re doing it with a
fossil fuel, in the same month that carbon dioxide levels have passed 400ppm.
We need to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we dig up and burn, not increase.
The BC Liberals are proposing burning and polluting our way to prosperity, which
in this day and age is the last thing we should be doing.

This isn’t the only reason I’m not going to vote for the BC Liberals, but it’s a
fairly major reason.

Why I won’t be voting NDP

I’m a big supporter of the NDP. I voted for the NDP in the last federal
election. I’ve considered becoming a member of the federal NDP. I agree with a
lot of the NDP’s policies.

But I won’t be voting for them in the 2013 BC election.

I really like what they’re doing around electoral reform, specifically their
promise to ban union and corporate political donations.

I really like that they’re opposed to the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan
pipelines.

I really like that they’ll increase the corporate income tax rate to 12%.

I really like that they’re going to expand the carbon tax to oil and gas
operations, and use a portion of the carbon tax revenues to fund transit and
green programs.

Judy Darcy, the NDP candidate for New Westminster, called me to talk about their
plans for better community healthcare centres, improving families’ access to
health professionals. That nearly won me over.

But I’m still not going to vote for them. They’re a very close second choice,
though.

I’m not voting for them for two reasons:

One, they’re going to win in my riding of New Westminster). In the 16 elections since 1953, the CCF/NDP has won 15 times and the BC Liberal party once. New Westminster is a safe NDP seat. Even the unofficial burger poll has the NDP well ahead. Me not voting for the NDP isn’t going to make a lick of difference in New Westminster.

Two, they don’t go far enough on electoral reform. They’re entrenched as one of
two major parties in BC, and they don’t want to give that up. I would love it if
they revisited some form of proportional representation, but there’s no mention of
that in their platform.

Those two reasons are why I won’t be voting NDP on Tuesday.

Wherein I describe “fractally wrong” using Christy Clark as an example

I like to use the phrase “fractally wrong”. Loosely, it means “wrong no matter
how deep you look” or “wrong no matter how many ways you look”. It’s best served
up with an example.

British Columbia Christy Clark was recently featured in a Vancouver Sun article.
Let me pull some quotes from that story to describe “fractally wrong”:

Driving across Vancouver’s west side, wearing a dirt-stained Whitecaps hat, yoga
pants and a black Lululemon sweater, Christy Clark is just another mother
driving her son to school.

She’s been on the road since 5:10 a.m., having taken 11-year-old Hamish to an
early morning goalie clinic across town.

In her son’s bag is the pizza and Krispy Kreme doughnut Clark packed for his
lunch. Left on the dining room table at home is the raffle-ticket sign-up form
that still needs to be completed.

At times, the two seem more like sidekicks – siblings even – than they do mother
and son. And especially so the morning when the two were on their way to
Hamish’s goalie clinic.

“Let’s see you go through this red light,” Hamish challenged as they pulled up
that morning, at 5:15 a.m., to an abandoned Vancouver intersection.

“I might. Don’t test me,” Clark replies.

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

“Should I?”

“There’s no one.”

“Would you go through? You shouldn’t because that would be breaking the law,”
she says.

And with that the car has already sailed underneath the stale red stoplight and
through the empty intersection.

“You always do that,” says Hamish.

Of course, the obvious first level of wrong is that she blew through a red
light. With her son in the car. At her son’s urging. That’s pretty wrong.

But then you dig deeper. She did that with a Vancouver Sun reporter in the back.
That’s stupid, and another level of wrong.

But then you dig deeper. She apparently always does this. That’s another level
of wrong.

But then you dig deeper. “In her son’s bag is the pizza and Krispy Kreme dougnut
Clark packed for his lunch.” Honestly? Her son is athletic (as is evidenced by
being in goalie camp) but gets horrible nutrition for lunch? That’s pretty
wrong.

But then you dig deeper. Her son’s eleven. He’s old enough to pack his own
lunch.

But then you dig deeper. Krispy Kreme is an American company. Why not Tim
Hortons? That’s pretty wrong.

But then you dig deeper. Yoga pants? Vancouver ended up third-worst dressed city:

There is one reason, and one reason only, why we’ve decided to include
Vancouver on this list of the sartorially damned: yoga pants.

At least the sweater she’s wearing is from Vancouver company Lululemon. That’s
about the only thing that’s right in this fractally wrong vignette.