Two months ago in Halifax, Green Party leader Elizabeth May appeared at a Stand Up For Science rally; one of many demonstrations held across the country to protest, among other things, a Canada-wide “muzzling” of government scientists.
“You may not like the opinions you get from science, but you have to listen to science,” Ms. May told Halifax radio.
Only a week before, however, Ms. May had been at a town hall meeting in her Saanich, B.C. riding telling her constituents not to trust federal science — albeit from a different agency than the ones being defended on the streets of Halifax.
“Agriculture Canada is increasingly a corporate model for profits, for Monsanto and Cargill, and certainly not to help farmers and certainly not to ensure safe food for Canadians,” said Ms. May.
The Green Party is just doing the same things everybody else does, which is to make up an idea that matches with your ideology, and then go looking for evidence to support it
Although it was founded as the Party of Environmentalists, in recent years the Green Party of Canada has worked hard to brand itself as Canada’s only Party of Science; a noble force untainted by ideology, unswayed by politics and acting as a lone advocate for evidence-based public policy.
“We have never taken a policy on any issue for which there is not a scientific basis,” Ms. May told the National Post by phone from Parliament Hill.
But for a Party of Science, cringing members of the scientific community may hasten to note, the Green Party certainly seems to support a lot of unscientific things.
James Wood / Postmedia News fileGreen Party Leader Elizabeth May at a 2013 Calgary Stampede breakfast.
“I really think the Green Party is just doing the same things everybody else does, which is to make up an idea that matches with your ideology, and then go looking for evidence to support it,” said Michael Kruse, chair of Bad Science Watch, a non-profit devoted to rooting out false science in public policy.
In a July essay, Aaron Larsen, a Canadian-born Harvard post-doctoral fellow publicly called out the Green Party—his preferred choice at the ballot box—for its platform declaring that genetically-engineered crops are a “potentially serious threat to human health and the health of natural ecosystems.”
“Just to be clear, there has never been a single reputable, peer-reviewed study that has found any link between the consumption of genetically modified foods and adverse health effects,” he wrote.
In 2011, the Green Party grabbed headlines when Ms. May wrote on Twitter that “it is very disturbing how quickly Wifi has moved into schools as it is children who are the most vulnerable.”
While real scientific concern does exist about the health effects of cell phone radiation, world health agencies such as Health Canada have not felt the need to sound the alarm against the much-weaker radiation coming from WiFi routers, which also carry the added health benefit of not being routinely held next to the human brain.
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The Green Party also supports a Canada-wide ban on the fluoridation of public drinking water, calling it a form of forced medication that is “not medically or environmentally sustainable.”
That position goes against the recommendations of a consensus of Canadian dental organizations, Health Canada and the World Health Organization, which calls artificial fluoridation the “most effective public health measure for the prevention of dental decay.”
Ian Waldie/Getty ImagesThe Green Party also supports a Canada-wide ban on the fluoridation of public drinking water.
And snippets of unscientific thought continue to nest in Green Party literature.
GreenParty.ca, for instance, is host to a two-part blog post earnestly trumpeting the evidence for “abiotic oil,” a theory from Stalinist Russia that petroleum is not derived from biological matter, but is rather a geological substance dating to the origins of the earth.
In a April, 2011 press release, the Green Party stated definitively that the mother of a party supporter contracted thyroid cancer “from years of swimming in the Ottawa River, just downstream from the Chalk River facility.”
In an email to the National Post, the Canadian Cancer Society disputed the assertion, writing “we usually cannot definitely state that a particular risk factor is the cause of cancer, and especially so when we’re considering only one individual.”
A questionable understanding of cancer epidemiology also graces the Green Party’s current platform, where the party asserts that Canada is being roiled by a cancer “epidemic,” as in, a higher-than-expected rate of cancer occurrence. What’s more, the document claims that “no one is willing to speak of it out loud.”
But according to official Canadian Cancer Society statistics, while the overall level of Canadian cancer diagnoses has certainly increased, the agency largely attributes it as a predictable consequence of Canada’s “aging and growing population.”
Although the Greens assert that they answer solely to science, as a democratic political party they are compelled to listen to their membership.
The science can’t tell you what your policy should be
Party brass can earmark questionable proposals—such as in 2012 when the Green Party shadow cabinet preemptively pooh-poohed a proposal to solve the debt crisis simply by forcing the Bank of Canada to issue the government interest-free loans (It was ultimately defeated.) — but as appeared to have been the case with water fluoridation, there is ultimately nothing to stop a pseudoscientific plan from becoming policy.
The term “evidence-based public policy” is a bit of a misnomer, said Katie Webb, the executive director of Evidence for Democracy, the organizer of the Stand Up for Science rallies. “The science can’t tell you what your policy should be.”
A party can be “evidence-informed, but “there’s other value-driven things that will always come in to making decisions,” she said.
In the case of the Green Party—and the wider green movement in general — Ms. Webb noted that one of those things is often a general distrust of big business.
Indeed, the Green Party kicks off the agriculture section of its platform with a denouncement of corporate control of the food supply.
KIER GILMOUR / Postmedia News fileElizabeth May at the Green Party of Canada 2006 Annual General Meeting at the Ottawa Congress Centre, Aug. 26, 2006. Photo by KIER GILMOUR, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE (For National section - story by Meagan Fitzpatrick) ASSIGNMENT NUMBER 78773
In his July essay, Harvard’s Adam Larsen reported that he sent a batch of 70 independent, peer-reviewed studies to the Green Party shadow cabinet challenging their stance on genetically-engineered crops, but was told that the literature was tainted by “ties to corporate profit”.
While the political right has long been accused of picking and choosing which science to believe, the label has only recently started to be applied to the environmentalist left.
Of late, some of the starkest examples have come from the U.K. where, in the lead-up to the 2010 general election, the country’s Green Party opposed embryonic stem cell research because they feared the “commodification of eggs and embryos.”
Most recently, in 2012, Jenny Jones, the Greens’ most recent candidate for Mayor of London, publicly backed a plan to illegally raid a research farm and destroy a crop of genetically engineered wheat.
For every young-earth creationist, climate-science denier, and opponent of stem-cell therapy, there is a GMO-protester, homeopathy enthusiast, and vaccine-a-phobe
“We do not see how preventing the acquisition of knowledge is a defensible position in an age of reason,” pleaded the researchers in a public letter — but it was no use. In the end, the only thing that protected the crop from destruction was a line of British police.
“For every young-earth creationist, climate-science denier, and opponent of stem-cell therapy, there is a GMO-protester, homeopathy enthusiast, and vaccine-a-phobe,” wrote Mr. Larsen in July.
It is precisely the stigma of wild-eyed enviro-zealotry that recently prompted the B.C. Green Party (a provincial-level party unaffiliated with the federal Greens) to completely scrub its platform of any whiff of fringe sensibility.
“Within society, there are those who think ‘green’ means dreadlocks, chaining yourself to a tree and getting yourself arrested in protest … so we have to be extra vigilant that our policy flows from evidence,” said Andrew Weaver, the party’s only MLA and the first Green candidate ever elected to a provincial legislature in Canadian history.
“You don’t see chemtrails and stuff like that in Green Party of B.C. policy.”
Nick Procaylo / Postmedia News fileAndrew Weaver, the party’s only MLA and the first Green candidate ever elected to a provincial legislature in Canadian history.. (Nick Procaylo/PNG) [PNG Merlin Archive]
And when B.C. first introduced Smart Meters, Mr. Weaver said he called up B.C. Hydro asking to be one of the first recipients.
Canadian Green Parties are still very young, Mr. Weaver notes, and as such they are uniquely susceptible to a grassroots, non-mainstream “fringe element.” “The party has to evolve to push some of these aside,” said Mr. Weaver.
At the federal level, while Ms. May says there is no shortage of people pushing for her to take fringe positions, she denies that any of them have affected party policy. “We are not plagued by fringe-y elements,” she said.
Instead, many of the federal Green Party’s more head-scratching policies can be attributed to what they call the “precautionary principle,” the idea that if there is scientific doubt about a technology, it should be carefully managed until the “science is settled.”
“You don’t ban something but you say ‘look, let’s exercise some precaution in how it’s used,’” said Ms. May.
Let’s exercise some precaution in how it’s used
The party argues that the principle could have preserved the Atlantic Cod, warded off mass levels of cigarette smoking and thwarted the deadly 1960s decision to spray Canadian military bases with Agent Orange.
But caution is not free, and has helped to shape some pretty extreme Green Party proposals in areas that may have no defined scientific benefit. For instance, the Green Party envisions imposing a “shift to organic agriculture as the dominant model of production,” a total ban on all Agriculture Canada-supported research into genetic engineering and federal support of GE-free zones.
Although the 2011 election saw the first-ever Green Party member elected to the House of Commons, overall, the party’s support crumbled. While almost one million Canadians had cast Green Party ballots in 2008, in 2011 it was down to 576,000 — the party’s lowest share of the popular vote since 2000.
It is impossible to know what the Green Party’s more problematic positions are doing to its support among Canada’s scientifically-minded electorate, but ultimately, it probably would not matter.
The Green Party does not “shop for votes,” or “move around with the flavour of the day,” said Ms. May, and if it ever came down to a choice between losing an election or tweaking their agricultural policy into something more voter-friendly, she said she would choose the former.
“Figuring out what Canadians already want and then trying to sell it to them; that’s the Conservative approach, that’s the Liberal approach, that’s the NDP approach,” she said.
“That’s never going to be our approach.”
National Post
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