THE GREEN PARTY NEWS CONFERENCE

So the Green Party of Canada held a TV news press conference in response to Prime Minister Harper’s election call. Did you see it? There stood party leader Elizabeth May at the mike, flanked on either side by perhaps thirty other men and women, all lily white Caucasians. Had they been uniformly male, you would have thought that it was a press conference called by the Reform party 25 years ago. This is a party that, more than any other, continually parrots the line of “cultural diversity”, which Elizabeth May has called Canada’s great project and the major rationale, in her mind, for a high immigration target.



But here is the delicious irony and the contradiction in her objective. She knows that immigration is now drawn from “non-traditional” sources. From those countries where people have skin pigmentation of the kind that is apparently missing from her Party or at least from her headquarters for a photo op, which any campaign manager would have killed for. So this New Canada of hers, the Canada of cheap labour which has through mass immigration driven down the incomes of educated workers by 7% by increasing the labour pool by 13% in less than two decades, this “great project”, is actually narrowing her natural constituency. Immigrants of colour don’t like green living. They have been watching syndicated episodes of Dallas on their tiny TV sets in a tenement in Manilla or New Delhi or Hong Kong and now finally they have a chance at the North American dream so, uh, uh, Elizabeth. “ Now it's OUR turn.”



In its great enthusiasm for mass immigration, greater than any other party, The Green Party of Canada is a disease that carries its own cure. For that, at least, I am grateful.