Rethinking Lifestyle

In my last column in preparation for the upcoming by-election, I profiled the Conservative party and argued that conservation and sustainability are core Conservative values, and that a true Tory is a Green Tory. Today we’ll look at Canada’s Official Opposition party, the NDP.

The New Democrats are widely known as Canada’s left-wing or socialist party, and their founder Tommy Douglas was voted “the Greatest Canadian” in 2004. They’re known for championing healthcare and human rights, and for their early ties to unions, farming co-operatives, and the social gospel movement. Increasingly, though, they are making connections between social justice and environmental policy. The second section of their Policy Book (available on their website) is “Building a Clean and Sustainable Canada”, placing environmental policy second only to economic policy. The emphasis in this document seems to be the right of all Canadians to live in a healthy environment: they recognize toxins and pollution as a human health risk, and see Canada’s environment as a “common good” for all Canadians to enjoy.

The environment also features in their other policies, though often in vague ways. Ensuring a “green economy” may or may not be an easy task, but New Democrats have never shied away from regulation of industry to ensure that human rights are respected. With environmental issues being approached as an extension of human rights, a view particularly evident in their policies in regard to indigenous peoples and treaty rights, the values of the NDP definitely support a healthy environment.

Similar to Conservatives, the NDP values the environment because of what we gain from it; but the NDP also treats the environment as a good in itself, with value that cannot necessarily be quantified. This is an important distinction: if the environment is only important in a utilitarian sense (that is, for what it’s worth to us) in a way that can be broken down to a dollar value, then it can be seen as a resource that is to be “spent” for human benefit; but if the environment is recognized as being foundational to human life and freedom, and isn’t reducible to mere commodities, then sacrificing the environment for human gain is more easily recognized as being self-defeating and short-sighted.

There does seem to be some inconsistency, then, between the NDP’s view of the environment as a common good and their plan to implement cap-and-trade strategies to reduce carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade systems work by placing economic value on pollution, and allowing corporations to trade pollution credits like a stock exchange. The danger in this approach is that it’s a short step from putting a dollar value on carbon emissions to putting a dollar value on clean air – something that would undercut the NDP’s general approach to the environment.

All in all, the NDP values the environment as necessary to human life and rights. Engage with them this month, and make sure they stick to their environmental principles, for the people’s sake!