At the beginning of his political life, Harris felt at home in the Progressive Conservative Party. It seemed like a natural fit: his father was well-known in Toronto business circles, and he was educated at Lakefield College School, the institution northeast of Toronto attended by Prince Andrew and sons of wealthy Canadians. But his epiphany at Queen’s eventually weaned him from an obsession with the politics of fiscal restraint, and he formally joined the Green Party in 1989. Even so, he still seems more comfortable around men in pinstripes than young people in hiking boots and rain slickers. In fact, Strategic Advantage, the company he runs out of an office a few blocks from his home in Toronto’s east end, is essentially just Harris working as an inspirational corporate speaker. He has written four business books that dwell at length on leadership, and on his firm’s corporate slogan: “We work to change the world by changing ourselves and by helping our clients change.”
His website boasts a long list of clients, including Mobil and US defence contractor Honeywell, both of which have been the target of environmentalists. The workshops he offers don’t often deal with the ecology or the economics of sustainability. Yet Harris says his work as a corporate cheerleader and his leadership of the Green Party are compatible. “It’s all about change,” he insists. “How do organizations change? How do companies change? The Green Party is all about creating a more sustainable society, and to do that we have to change.”
So how did Harris, a forty-three-year-old businessman who now relies on key advisers who once worked for the Conservatives, take control of the Green Party? And how did he manage to blow out many of the party’s environmental and social democratic principles and replace them with a market-driven agenda while earning the party more than a million dollars in election financing?
The answers have a lot to do with the fact that in 2003 the leadership of the Green Party was available to virtually anyone who wanted to take it over. The membership was disillusioned, the party was broke and had no organizers, functioning structure, or real presence outside of Ontario and British Columbia. Things were so bad that when the interim leader who preceded Harris tried to step down, not a single candidate came forward. For Harris, who was elected party leader in 2003, the move wasn’t so much a hostile takeover as it was a business deal — buying up a franchise that was on the verge of bankruptcy, investing new money, and bringing it back to life. Whether the platform stayed true to traditional left-leaning Green values wasn’t the issue. Succeeding at the polls was.
From the perspective of a patron relaxing in the summer sun at an outdoor café, the environment, other than the occasional whiff of exhaust spewing from a passing car, might not appear to be in that bad a shape. But we are living in an age of extinction every bit as profound as the one that led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs about 63 million years ago. According to a British study released last year, the population of many butterfly species has declined by 71 percent in recent years and bird species by 54 percent.
East-coast fishermen understand the meaning of extinction more than most Canadians after watching the cod fishery collapse in the early 1990s. Now it’s the Inuit of the eastern Arctic who are looking on helplessly as the caribou, a critical source of food, slowly slide into oblivion. Perhaps the most high-profile case is that of the BC spotted owl, which has all but vanished, with only fourteen adult birds left in the province — the only Canadian region in which they are found. Yet British Columbia has no endangered species act, and Ottawa’s toothless Species at Risk Act only covers animals living on federal lands, such as national parks.
So dismal is the situation in Canada that the North American Commission for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Canada twenty-seventh out of thirty industrialized nations in terms of enacting and enforcing laws that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. This would likely come as a surprise to many, who believe that Canada has environmental laws that are at least stronger than those in the United States. But in May, the Commission for Environmental Co-operation of North America — a nafta watchdog group — reported that while the United States was making progress on environmental pollution, Canada was falling behind. And late last year Johanne Gélinas, Canada’s commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development, wrote a scathing report in which she concluded that Ottawa’s failure to take stronger action on the environment reflects a “lack of leadership, lack of priority, and lack of will.”
Given the sorry state of Canada’s environment, the Green Party’s electoral success — winning 4 .3 percent of the popular vote — would seem understandable. Yet on the whole, environmental groups have largely failed in their efforts to influence government policy. In the United States, the inability of environmentalists to effect real change prompted what would become a widely debated article by Michael Shellenberger, an activist, and Ted Nordhaus, a pollster, called “The Death of Environmentalism.” The article, presented to the Environmental Grantmakers Association in 2004, argues that the movement has become divorced from larger issues of broad public significance and, as a result, “the environmental community’s narrow definition of its self-interests...undermines its power.” The article has not only led to deep divisions in the US movement, but it has also illustrated differences among Canadian environmentalists on how to force Ottawa to halt ecological decline.
Because of its success, it might seem logical that the Green Party would be the electoral arm of the environmental movement in Canada. But according to Elizabeth May, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, there is virtually no relationship between environmental organizations and the Green Party. “It’s not a movement that’s prone to say ‘How do we enhance our political power base? Maybe we should have our own party.’ I mean, that kind of conversation doesn’t ever happen in the environmental movement.” Most of the country’s 2,000 environmental organizations don’t even see themselves as lobby groups, says May, with “maybe a dozen ever meeting with an MP.”
In other countries, especially in Europe, Green parties have attempted to achieve political power by broadening their definition of “environmental” to include foreign policy, and social and economic issues. Last year in Rome, Green parties from thirty-two countries found enough common ground among their diverse memberships to form the European Green Party. Working together, they established a single platform and managed to capture thirty-five seats of the 624-member European Parliament in the June 2004 election. While not as radical as many of its federated members would like, the European Green Party’s policies are still broadly socially democratic and critical of corporate globalization. The party also calls for a guaranteed minimum income across Europe, a ban on all genetically modified organisms (gmos), and making manufacturers responsible for the entire life cycle of their products.
By comparison, the Green Party in the United States is unambiguous about its left-wing political stance. It has both a black and a women’s caucus. If elected, it would withdraw the United States from nato and norad and from all free trade agreements. It also calls for a full month’s vacation time for all workers each year and for removing the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. This relatively consistent left tilt distinguishes the Green Party of Canada as one of the few national Green parties — the German Greens are probably closest ideologically — in the developed world to have moved to the right politically. And unlike Europe’s unified Green Party, there is virtually no communication between the party in Canada and its more radical counterpart in the United States.
The conservative positioning of the party under Harris may also explain its unusual approach to policy development. Members can comment on party policies on a website but those policies are actually determined by the national office. There has been no formal policy convention, nor does the party rely closely on the expertise of environmental organizations. “We pretty much get asked by all the parties to comment on their environmental policies, certainly by the ndp and the Liberals,” says May. Leading up to the 2004 election, she told Harris: “‘If you want a more detailed, robust platform, feel free to ask in the coming months.’ We never got any pickup on that [offer].” But when the Sierra Club came out with its report card favouring the ndp, says May, Harris called them ndp hacks.
Harris may simply have disagreed with the political bent of the Sierra Club’s policies. According to Nelson Wiseman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto: “In Germany the position of the Green Party has shifted from being radical to almost mainstream. That’s the challenge facing the Green Party of Canada. And [Harris’s] shift to the right is seen as a way of gaining increased credibility, so as not to be seen as the dope-smoking fringe.”
In the process of mainstreaming policy, Harris has driven many traditional Greens from the party, who, from his perspective, would have happily remained on the political fringe rather than abandon their cherished left-wing policies. There are some in the party still opposed to Harris, but many others — especially in Ontario and Alberta — support his eco-capitalist solutions. In the simplest analysis, Harris would end subsidies to polluting industries, such as tax breaks for oil companies, and redirect the money to social programs and initiatives to dramatically increase energy efficiency. Harris rejects the heavy hand of government intervention in the belief that if consumers are given environmentally correct options, they will make decisions that will change corporate behaviour. One of his strongest supporters outside of the party is Wayne Roberts, a prominent Toronto environmentalist and co-author of Get a Life: A Green Cure For Canada’s Economic Blues. According to Roberts, Harris has always been interested in the economics of the environmental movement. “This accounts for his desire to mainstream the Greens,” explains Roberts, “which many holier-than-thou types equate with being moderate or right wing. But in his gut instincts he is a Green, in the same way most ndpers have a gut instinct for the disadvantaged.”
