Archive for News

Here’s today’s press release from the Green Party of Canada regarding the coup in Honduras:     Read more »

The stresses we put on the planet are a product of individual demands on resources multiplied by the number of us there are.  Ecologists are well aware of this and used to discuss it when I was a child.  One of the reasons these concerns were dropped politically is because population control can be used as an excuse for a lot of nasty policy — racist immigration reforms, draconian meddling in personal fertility and tax structures that punish children who are in no way to blame for being alive.

Still, plenty of sensible voices lament silencing of the issue, which is serious.  And many of these have been unhappy about the Green Party’s refusal to address this issue.  I’ve heard this concern expressed at the door at least four times while canvassing – and I’ve been proud to say that at the last Green Party of Canada AGM, we adopted a sensible population policy that recognizes the problem, yet proposes to address it in ways that are non-intrusive and which enable rather than punish the most disadvantaged people on the planet.     Read more »

With the election of Barrack Obama in the United States, they have slightly improved their climate change policy, enough for Canada to beat them out for last place among the G8 countries in a joint evaluation by the World Wildlife Fund and the Insurance giant Allianz.     Read more »

In late March 1964, my parents went to visit the newly unveiled Brazilian capital of Brasilia.  My mom, pregnant with me, returned to Uberlândia, where my father’s family lived, to their great relief.  Brazil had just suffered the military overthrow of their elected government, and my mom and dad, seeing the sights in the capital city, hadn’t even noticed.

Like the recent military coup in Honduras, Brazil’s coup was bloodless.  But it ushered in twenty years of political repression, journalistic censorship, disappearances, a pattern of torture, and even amid a time of burgeoning economic growth known as the “Brazilian miracle”, a rise in infant mortality, the collapse of the education system and the polarization of society into a small group of ultra-rich and a huge class of desperately poor.  The Brazil that I came to know as a teenager was a Brazil teeming with urban poor clustered in shantytowns of unimaginable squalor.     Read more »

In my canvassing, I’ve so far encountered three people who told me that they supported every policy of the Green Party except our opposition to nuclear, which they feel will be a necessary part of the solution to climate change.     Read more »