In a catalogue of alleged failings of the Green Party of Canada, (editorial July 30, 2014) the most absurd claim is that of moral relativism. We are the only party left in Canada to have principles and stick to them.

The Conservatives were once thought of as a party of fiscal responsibility, yet Stephen Harper has added to the national debt and expanded the size of government. His promises of accountability are buried under scandals of the culture of entitlement he once decried.

The New Democrats once championed the poor and down-trodden, but now clamor to appeal to the middle class calling not for guaranteed annual income, but for lower banking fees.

The Liberals stand less condemned, if only because their approach to principle was always pretty flexible – big tent and all. Still, the support for the Keystone and Kinder Morgan pipelines while opposing Enbridge suggests polling as a basis for position.

The Green Party of Canada, along with Green parties around the world, stand on six global green values: participatory democracy, social justice, ecological wisdom, non-violence, sustainability, and respect for diversity.

In the context of conflicts around the world, we are anything but moral relativists. The reason I was the only Member of Parliament in June 2011 to vote against the continued aerial bombardment of Libya was that Green principles of non-violence and promotion of a culture of peace made voting for bombing impossible. There were peace talks rejected as we joined the side of those calling for Gadafi’s head. It was clear when Parliament voted to keep up the bombing that the side we supported included al-Qaida-linked extremists. It was clear that warehouses full of munitions would flood into other countries and lead to greater instability, loss of life and chaos. It was clear that shifting our mission statement from Responsibility to Protect (R2P) innocent civilians to regime change would cost us down the road and remove the possibility of relying on the R2P doctrine to intervene in Syria.

In the case of the current Israel-Gaza conflict, it is critical that positions be based on international law. Pursuing peace cannot be discarded as unrealistic. It should be possible for all Canadian political parties to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization and to demand it cease its shelling of Israel. It should be possible for all other political leaders to continue to press for a two-state solution, one that defends the right of the State of Israel to exist, but equally calls for a secure Palestinian state. It is simply not credible to take the stance of all three other leaders (Messrs Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau) that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s siege of Gaza is legal and meets humanitarian standards. It does not. The death toll among Gaza’s civilians provokes the conscience of the world. Hamas is to blame for provocation, but to imagine that Israel is blameless is untenable.

We are the only party that bases our decisions on evidence. That is why we may take positions ahead of the “group-think” curve, calling for caution on newer technologies while others throw caution to the wind. We have been consistent about climate policies, while other parties treat the greatest threat to our children’s future as “flavour of the month.”

Our budgetary plans are based on a thorough examination of the sources of revenue, macro and micro-economic impact of policy. We are the only party to prepare election platforms that have been thoroughly costed over a three year horizon. We were the only party to submit our budget to the Parliamentary Budget Office to ask for verification that our numbers added up. (They did.)

We have been the most accountable in office of any MPs. I was the first MP to post all my expenses (original receipts) on line. Now Bruce Hyer, Green MP from Thunder Bay-Superior North does as well. We have pushed other parties to greater levels of accountability.

The biggest reason that Canada needs to Green Party is that we are the only party fighting to restore real democracy by reducing the power of political parties themselves. We need to tear down the bloated Prime Minister’s Office. We must reduce the unhealthy top-down control that turns good people, elected as MPs, into little more than ciphers. We are the only party that wants to eliminate the excessive hyper-partisanship of modern political debate and replace it with respectful dialogue to find common ground. We will make it a priority to replace the perverse first past the post voting system with fair proportional representation.

We will elect more Green MPs in the next federal election, forging consensus across party lines and working for the people who elected us. I appreciate that your editorialists would like it if all Canadian political parties kow-towed to “group think. We never will. And for that reason alone, more Canadians are turning to the Greens to give them reason to believe in the possibility of responsible government.

Elizabeth May, O.C., is the leader of the Green Party of Canada and Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands. Her eighth book, “Who we are: Reflections on my life and Canada” (Greystone Books) will be released in October 2014.

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My father was an accountant and I vividly recall, because I was about eight years old, that he was the senior cashier for a large insurance company. During year-end, they could not find $1 million. He came home from work and said they could not find that $1 million. It was a matter of accounting to figure out where it went. I was a very little girl and I remember saying, “Keep looking in all the wastepaper baskets; it has got to be there somewhere”.

I find the misapprehension from Conservative members of the House today of what it means to have $3.1 billion missing to be quite like my reaction as a little girl, saying that the money is not really missing. They just cannot figure out where it is; it is not really missing money.

I think we understand that in an audit we have to track where the money is and where it was spent. That is why we have an Auditor General, to figure out that the government is taking good care and can account for every penny spent.

If $3.1 billion cannot be accounted for, will my friend from Nickel Belt agree with me that it means it is missing?

Claude Gravelle: Mr. Speaker, I completely agree with the member: the money is missing. All the Conservatives have to do is give the Auditor General the proper documentation so he can find where the money is. If he cannot find where the money is, then it is up to the Conservatives to tell us where they spent that money; $3.1 billion is a lot of coins to be missing.

The post Opposition Motion – 2013 Spring Report of the Auditor General of Canada appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Would the hon. member for Markham—Unionville contrast and compare the reaction of the Conservatives when fingers were pointed at much smaller amounts of money in the Attawapiskat community with the way they are sloughing this off as though nothing has happened when $3.1 billion cannot be tracked?

This is lousy attention to detailed paperwork and keeping track of money. The Conservatives were contemptuous when it was a small first nation community, but now they just say, “Look the other way; there is nothing here.”

John McCallum: Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Green Party for that excellent comparison. I think it is telling when the Conservatives bring in a third party administrator to deal with an impoverished, small aboriginal community, maybe dealing with, I do not know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then they slough it off when $3.1 billion goes missing under their watch.

I think this shows a certain tendency to take on small, poor communities with a vengeance and to simply ignore the problem of $3.1 billion going missing under their watch.

The post Opposition Motion – 2013 Spring Report of the Auditor General of Canada appeared first on Elizabeth May.

That summary of what the Auditor General found is quite astonishing. It is a much larger amount of money that is missing, although the Conservatives, we know, will say, as they have in question period, that the Auditor General did not say there had been any wrongdoing. Obviously, the Auditor General cannot figure out where the money has gone. It is going to be a difficult forensic exercise.

I wonder if the hon. member would comment on whether he believes that the motion from the official opposition will allow us to get to the bottom of the matter.

Mathieu Ravignat: Mr. Speaker, indeed, it is a forensic exercise, and that is why our motion proposes access to information that would allow us, as parliamentarians, to find out what happened to this $3.1 billion in missing money. It is a scandal. It is incredible that the President of the Treasury Board is absolutely incapable of saying what happened or of even indicating what might have happened. That is worrisome. The responsibility of a government is first, to take care of taxpayers’ money, and this is a clear violation of that pact with the Canadian people.

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The thing that shocks me most about the budget is that I cannot find any tables that tell us, department by department, where the money will be spent. I have never in my life seen a budget that did not include the budget.

I wonder if my colleague has any comments.

Francis Scarpaleggia: Mr. Speaker, when I worked on my speech this the weekend, I looked furiously for some numbers and some comparative tables that would allow us to get some kind of an historical perspective on what was being done and noticed the exact same thing.

There seems to be an effort of subterfuge, to basically hide the realities of this budget in an historical context. I find that quite ironic. While the government is hiding what it is doing, it is spending large sums of money promoting itself and its supposed good works on television. Even a small portion of that advertising money could have been used to keep the ELA going, which is known as the best freshwater laboratory in the world. It is a travesty that it is being shut down.

The post The Budget appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May: Yes, Mr. Speaker, I am aware of that, of course, but just as I am aware of it, so too were other witnesses before the committee. I draw attention to the following statement from Kent Roach, law professor at the University of Toronto:

I think it’s always a problem in a democracy when police independence to commence an investigation or conduct an investigation is interfered with.

Michel Drapeau, who is a lawyer with over 34 years of experience with the Canadian military, said:

Would the mayor be able to issue a direction to the chief of the Ottawa police, even if it’s in writing, about a particular investigation? The answer is “no.” Would the Prime Minister be able to do that with the RCMP? The answer is “absolutely not.” So why would it be here?

Those witnesses and experts in military justice knew, just as the Military Police Complaints Commission knew, that the instructions would later be made public. The question is how much damage would be done by demands or instructions from the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff in the course of an investigation, even when the Provost Marshal might make them public later on. There is a very large window for abuse, and we should close it now.

The post Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act (Bill C-15) appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Proposed section 31 of the act has been pointed to by RCMP members and by members of the Lawyers’ Rights Watch group as potentially forcing RCMP officers to be involved in torture without the ability to grieve that involvement or to question the sources of information that lead to such activities. I think that is enough of a reason to vote against Bill C-42.

The post Enhancing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Accountability Act (Bill C-42) appeared first on Elizabeth May.

I agree with all the points he raised. We really do need more transparency in the RCMP, especially in light of what Mr. Kennedy, the former RCMP public complaints commissioner, had to say.

Can my colleague tell us why the Conservatives oppose these very important and wise amendments, which were even supported by experts?

Jamie Nicholls: Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands raises an excellent point.

We proposed reasonable amendments. We were elected to the House in 2011 to work together. That is what we promised Canadians.

When the committee heard the evidence of experts on a number of incidents involving the RCMP, such as the Robert Dziekanski case and sexual harassment incidents, it was clear that the RCMP should have dealt with the problem internally because there was the opportunity to do so.

In response to my colleague’s question, I would say that the Conservatives did not listen to our reasonable suggestions, which were supported by the experts. They did not want to improve their own bill simply because they are afraid of being weak and being seen as weak if they accept our suggestions.

Canadians want all MPs to work together to come up with bills that make sense, solve problems and move our country forward, rather than playing politics at committees and not accepting suggested amendments.

I do not know why the Conservatives are so opposed to the opposition’s reasonable suggestions.

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I wonder if my hon. friend has any comments on his testimony.

Jasbir Sandhu: Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right.

The RCMP and the people of British Columbia, because we have the largest RCMP force, have been asking for an independent body to investigate the RCMP when they are involved in incidents. We have had a number of high-profile incidents where the call is loud and clear from the public that we need an independent body to investigate the RCMP.

The government had an opportunity to address these issues, which are of concern in our communities. Again, the Conservatives failed to do that.

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Seconded by Elizabeth May on February 1, 2012

Click here for the complete document.

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