While talk of tariffs and the economy has been “sucking up all the oxygen in political discourse,” Winnipeg Centre candidate Gary Gervais said climate change is still the priority. “If we don’t deal with the climate as the most critical issue, it’s kind of irrelevant whether or not our economy is healthy,” he said. “We can’t have a healthy economy on a sick planet.” He said other parties’ commitment to climate change varies, but he doesn’t think any of them view issues “through that lens first.”
Appointed by the Winnipeg Centre Green Party Association, Gervais will run in the upcoming federal election.
In our current society, Gervais said, the drive for economic growth outweighs all else. He called this the “growth paradigm,” and used Amazon as an example: it started out as a book retailer, but could only expand financially to a certain point. They then evolved into one of the world’s largest commerce businesses under the need for perpetual growth.
Gervais said while some view a lack of economic growth as a catastrophe, the Green Party isn’t scared of things like negative GDP growth. Though there has been a movement and growing awareness of environmental issues, Gervais said we’re still lost in the mindset that forever growing GDP is the most important thing.
Gervais said that something like the carbon tax is necessary for change, though he would have done it differently. He said consumers need to feel the impact of their carbon emissions in order to change, and “that’s where the Liberal approach failed. No one really noticed that there was a price on carbon. Yeah, maybe you paid a bit more at the gas pump, but [you got that] money back.”
Gervais’s interest in politics “dates back to university days,” and a personal experience of the effects of climate change. In 1991, he went scuba diving on the barrier reef in Australia. “A most spectacular experience. About 12, 15 years later, a friend was going there, and I recommended this town called Airlie Beach.” Lots of dive shops, easy access to the reef, he said. His friend went, and the reef was bleached from overdevelopment in the area. “In such a short time period, this spectacular wonder was destroyed by humans.”
Though the Green Party won only two seats in the most recent federal election, Gervais said that having many voices in an election, and in parliament, is important. “People say, ‘Well, why would you run for a party that has no chance of forming [a] government?’ And that sort of misses the point of what elections are for, and how democracies work. It forces us into an American model of having only two options, and we see how polarized and destructive that’s been.”
“Carbon tax is one example; the legalization of marijuana is another example; where policies that the Greens [put] forward in that election ended up becoming government policy.” Gervais said just because a party doesn’t win, or have a lot of say in parliament, it “doesn’t mean [they] can’t influence the direction of future policy.
