IS ELIZABETH MAY A CBC MOUTHPIECE OR IS IT THE OTHER WAY AROUND?

IS CANADA'S GREEN GAULEITER A CBC MOUTHPIECE OR IS THE CBC THE MEDIA ARM OF ELIZABETH MAY?

Check this out: http://kerstenskolumn.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/elizabeth-may-to-run-in-saanich-and-would-happily-become-environment-minister-in-a-liberal-government

Elizabeth May, the parachute Green Party candidate for North Saanich and the Islands, declared that she would be happy to serve as an Environment Minister in a Liberal government. (Was there ever a better reason for voting Conservative?)

This makes sense for several reasons. First, she is above all else a careerist and an opportunist. Getting elected and achieving office are her paramount concerns. No surprise there. She is after all a politician and politicians tend to want to get elected. But the Green Party was to be something else, something different than the other parties, not just a mainstream party with a green hue, and certainly not a wing of the Liberal Party. It was to be a grassroots party with a minimum of hierarchy, where decisions were made consensually rather than from a brute contest of power. "Winner take all" was not to be their approach to democracy, either within the party or without. That is what made May's unilateral willingness to join a Liberal cabinet shocking. Or was it? The fact is, power in the Green Party is centralized around her leadership--she lent impetus to a trend that was evident even before her election, for despite their pereniel call for democratic electoral reform, the Green power brokers around May do not believe in proportional representation in their own party.They really do not want to allow grassroots Green Party sentiments to prevail on a policy level. Case in point. In the fall of 2004, the federal Green Party tinkered with a democratic experiment. They permitted on-line voting by members on policy proposals. Some 56% of voting members favoured a policy which would restrict immigration in the interests of achieving population stability in Canada. Repeat-- a clear majority of participating Green Party members voted to restrict immigration. One insider who played a role in the process remarked that the winning percentage would have been a full two-thirds of the vote if the resolution had excluded specific mention of immigration and talked instead of simply stabilizing the country's population level, which is a function of net migration and fertility rates. That in itself would have been a rebuke of every thing May and her clique now stands for. And that is why the democratic experiment in on-line democracy was scrapped. Green members spoke and the clique didn't like what they heard. So now the Green Party is guided by a sustainability strategy of absurd contraditions.

On the one hand she May often repeated Paul Ehrlich's famous remark that "growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". Yet on the other she has consistently and stridently argued for a stratospheric immigration intake that would exceed the present levels, which even now is the second highest in the world on a per capita basis, and gave us the highest--- that is the worst--- populaton growth rate of the G8 group. It is evident that Ms. May regards economic growth as cancerous, but population growth as quite OK. In fact, she has called muliticulural immigration "Canada's great project", as if the objective of fragmenting the culture is a holy crusade that justifies the subdivision of farmland, urban overcrowding pollution and the loss of biodiversity. More fascinating is the implied concept that Canada could ingest her immigration quota of 330,000 consumers every year--or 1% of the population---and not grow the economy. Or that this population and economic growth can be decoupled from urban sprawl and Green house gas emissions.

Other than intellectual dishonesty, political ambition and an anti-democratic impulse, Elizabeth May's true colours are revealed by the wardrobe she wore as a hamburger flipper at the Green Party fundraiser last summer. Take a look. Le Vrai Chef is wearing a cowbay and an apron in Canadian red, with, wouldn't you know, the CBC emblem featured prominently on the front. That says it all, doesn't it? Elizabeth May a walking billboard for CBC Pravda. A tag team of misrepresentation and denial. One wonders though. Who is shilling for who? Is Elizabeth May playing Charlie McCarthy or Edgar Bergen? Is the CBC the mouthpiece of her mushy soft green, cultural relativist open borders mentality, or is Elizabeth May the mouthpiece of CBC corporate ideology? Will CBC Omsbudsman Vince Carlin be joining her in Ignatieff's cabinet too?

Maybe then Canada will no longer be referred to as the True North, Strong and Free, but the True North, Strong and Muzzled. A nation that proudly respects your right to an opinion, but will make damn sure that no one else hears it. A land of cultural diversity and intellectual conformity. A nation that is "Home to the World" but not to those who were born in it.

Tim Murray
November 27/09