All the Greens who have won elections in Canada have used the Get Out the Vote strategy. It means canvassing on foot and by phone. Canvassing starts long before the official Election Period opens. Paul Manly who recently won Nanaimo-Ladysmith started canvasing in early January for an election on May 6. We started on May 4. Election day is October 21.
If you want to make a difference, joining a Canvassing Team has the biggest impact. Teams are based on a time slot, like “The Monday Evenings Team”. Currently, we have 4 time slots: Monday Evenings and Tuesday Evenings, and Wednesday afternoons and Saturday Afternoons. More will be added as people come forward to say when they are available. Join as many timeslots as you like, and come out as often as you can, and don’t worry if you have to miss some.
We always pair new canvassers with experienced ones, and we give them a detailed orientation. Most outings are one to two hours in length.
To get started, just send e-mail to info@ptbogreens.org saying you would like to canvas. Also, on greenparty.ca, you can click “volunteer” and fill out a form we’ll get it.
Here’s a great strategy: talk it over with your friends and set up to canvas together with people you already love to spend time with!
No cuts to social programing or eduction or health care or environmental protection including flood control are needed in order to balance the budget. The Green approach to budgeting raises the revenue needed to efficiently provide for human and environmental needs at reasonable cost.
The Green approach
to budgeting uses the fiscal planning process to help the human community
live healthily and happily within the limits of its ecological carrying
capacity.
This approach asks what nature and human health need us to be doing. It asks who should be paying for this work. It
sets things up so that (1) we don’t do damage that will cost us later and (2) it
is profitable for the private sector to do the work.
The current
provincial government is slashing social programs, privatising health care and
not collecting available revenue. The
previous provincial government also ignored collectable revenue and did not
address root causes, and so costs escalated. Neither of these approaches to fiscal
management makes sense.
The health care
system is a major provincial expense. Yet privatised health care increases
illness by making health care inaccessible. The Green approach focuses on the
root causes of ill-health which are poverty, inadequate housing, and the high
cost of illness-preventing health services such as mental health services,
dental care and medications.
To reduce the
demand on hospitals and policing, we propose using the most efficient income
support and illness prevention strategies, such as Housing First, the Basic
Income Guarantee, covering mental health and dental services through OHIP+, and
using the power of collective purchasing to make necessary drugs available,
that is, Pharmacare.
As was shown in
the budget we published in early May 2018, this would require an initial investment
of 16.73 billion over 4 years to make the adjustment from the current expensive
way of doing things. Eventually health care and policing costs would go down
and we would be able to reallocate the resources, and even reduce taxes. The projected savings from preventing illness
are 4 to 8 billion per year, returning this initial investment within about 8
years (since we don’t know exactly how long it takes for the prevention effect
to kick in). The burden of the initial
investment would be borne by raising revenue from seven sources:
Reinstating half of the previous
governments’ 3% Tax reduction on large corporations: 6.77 billion
Gradual increase on natural resource
royalties: 3.09 billion
Housing speculation tax: 2.18 billion
Collect evaded taxes by following Drummond
Report recommendations: 2.0 billion
Income tax increase on top 1% of earners:
1.55 billion
Tobacco tax: 0.96 billion
Portion of the savings from not
implementing the Unfair Hydro Act: 0.18 billion
In
several cases, these sources also help reduce the problem that we are
addressing. For instance, by taxing
housing speculation, we make it more profitable to get housing back on the
market sooner, reducing the housing crunch. We also make it profitable for
housing speculators to pay for whatever repairs and energy retrofits are needed
to get the houses onto the market, providing local jobs. Taxing tobacco reduces
the amount of ill-health from tobacco smoking. Raising the royalty price of
natural resources encourages producers to reduce waste and stimulates
innovation which often employs more skilled people. Ontario has the lowest royalty levels in
Canada. Instead of giving away the store, we can gradually raise the level to
the same level Saskatchewan has.
Of
course, the Green budget also provides for a major investment in electrified
public transportation which would have knock-on effects of making private
electric cars more affordable as manufacturing capacity improved due to this
market stimulation. In addition to
slowing climate change, this also takes illness-causing pollution out of the
air, further reducing the overall cost of health care in the provincial budget. This major investment is also covered by new
revenue measures which make using fossil fuels and using private transportation
more expensive. This makes the electric and public transportation alternatives
more attractive and profitable. And this approach to transportation employs 5
times more people for the investment than the fossil fuel approach does. Balance the budget, provide improved public
health and transport, increase employment, and save the planet. Jobs, People, Planet.
Now, imagine if we applied this thinking
to building homes and hockey arenas!
We could focuss
provincial economic development support on conserving energy and clean energy
generation. We could require housing and
building programs to meet the net zero standard. That is, buildings generate as much energy as
they use. Hydro bills are very low for such buildings! With this kind of market stimulation, net
zero retrofits will become much more affordable, and more and more people will
be able to get that low hydro bill.
Ontario companies
could be the first to figure out how to build an arena that generates its own
energy to freeze the ice and warm the people.
Then all those cities and towns across the USA whose arenas are getting
worn down or expensive to operate would compete to hire Ontario expertise!
By
sticking with fossil fuel investment, we are missing out on a 7 trillion dollar
a year market for energy conservation and clean energy investment.
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