As Harris geared up to take control of the party in 2003, he was preoccupied with new election finance legislation, which he believed would boost the party’s chances for a breakthrough. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s government had introduced Bill C-24, legislation changing how parties could raise money for elections. Out were major donations from corporations and trade unions. In was government funding based on the number of votes parties received in the previous election — $1.75 per vote. To earn this, a party had to get at least 2 percent of the popular vote. To ensure the party received the money, Harris was determined to have the names of Green Party candidates on the ballot in all 308 federal ridings, whether, it seemed, they knew anything about the party’s policies or not.
In his first leader’s memo to the party’s newly elected council in 2003, Harris outlined Ottawa’s new election financing legislation and how important it was. Much of the 5,000-word priorities document dealt with C-24 and the all-consuming importance of running 308 candidates. In contrast, there was almost no mention of policy development. “I was concerned with the obsession with getting 2 percent of the vote,” recalls Matthew Pollesel, a former Green Party staffer. “That’s all they talked about.”
Early in his leadership, Harris clearly demonstrated that almost anyone persistently opposing him would be driven off the party’s governing council. The first to experience this was Julian West, a prominent environmentalist and Green Party stalwart from British Columbia. West found himself on the wrong side of Harris when he became involved in a discussion of a plan to ensure the vote wasn’t split between the Green Party and the ndp, which also had a strong environmental platform. Under that proposal, which was never put into action, the Greens would have adopted a non-compete policy in the many urban ridings in which the ndp could do well.
To remove West, Harris called members of the party’s governing council and lobbied them to get rid of his critics. Recalled Gretchen Schwarz, a long-time Green Party activist from Ottawa, and chair of the council at the time: “Before he was even elected, Harris phoned me up and said, ‘We have to get West off council.’ I was just stunned and said, ‘What?’ Harris said, ‘Well [BC leader] Adriane Carr wants him off council, and I promised her that I would deliver that for her if she would support me in my leadership campaign.’” Harris denies the allegation. But whatever actually happened behind the scenes, West eventually quit in frustration. Harris usually had his way. “Jim has a very fine gift for making people sick of fighting,” recalls Schwarz, who also left the party. “He’s a salesman. He’ll make you throw up your hands and say, ‘Take my house, take my kids, I don’t care, leave me the heck alone.’”
In February 2005, Kate Holloway, the party’s fundraising chair, was suspended from the council, and Platform Chair Michael Pilling was fired. They were preceded over the two years of Harris’s leadership by a number of others who either quit the council or left the party altogether. Some of those have now formed the rival Peace and Ecology Party. “I had a gut feeling about this man,” says Schwarz. “He wasn’t Green. He wasn’t passionate about saving the planet. He was saying lines and speaking a part like an actor.” But the party was desperate for someone with organizational skills, and she admits, “I thought we could use him. I might not want to sit down and have a beer with Harris, but he had something that we didn’t have.”
Once in charge, Harris knew he would quickly have to raise money to invest in the looming federal election campaign. One plan, called “affinity funding,” involved such organizations as the Humewood Ratepayers Association, a Toronto citizens’ group. Essentially, the party would lend its legal authority to issue tax receipts for political donations. Groups such as Humewood would then kick back a percentage of the money raised to the party. To test the legality of the affinity plan, members of the council — against Harris’s wishes — had it vetted by Elections Canada, which found it illegal. Another scheme called “democracy bonds,” which was never adopted, would have paid investors 25-percent interest, but the loans would only have been paid back if the party received more than 2 percent of the vote.
Despite internal bickering over fundraising, Harris finally received the money he needed to pursue his 2-percent solution from two unlikely sources. The first was wealthy Toronto feminist and former Tory candidate Nancy Jackman (now Nancy Ruth), who donated $50,000 to the party. According to Ruth, who was appointed to the Senate in March, she met Harris when she ran against him in a 1993 provincial by-election in Toronto. They became friends and she agreed to help. “I wanted them,” recalls Ruth, “to have a chance to get the $1.75 per vote.” Critical support also came from wealthy BC businessman and Green benefactor Wayne Crookes, who loaned the party more than $300,000. In the end, even his fiercest critics were stunned by Harris’s ability to field a full slate of candidates. “It totally staggered me,” recalls West, “that they could get 150 signatures [per candidate], in most cases in ridings where they had no active members.” And as unlikely as the whole project was, Harris’s strategy worked. And not at just the 2-percent threshold: 4.3 percent, or 582,247 Canadians, voted for the party. Under Bill C-24, this translated into $1,018,932 of government funding and the promise of building a party that could do even better in the future.
As Harris established himself as leader, he began a pattern of handpicking people to work with, even if that meant going outside of the organization. One was Pilling, whom he put in charge of policy while he was allegedly still working for Strategic Advantage. Another was David Scrymgeour, former national director of the Progressive Conservative Party. He had been at the heart of a conflict leading up to the Conservative leadership convention in 2003, when Conservative MP Peter MacKay was chosen to head the party. The controversy centred on claims by David Orchard, who was also running for the leadership, that Scrymgeour had used a variety of dirty tricks to ensure that Orchard’s supporters were denied delegate status. Harris, aware of the controversy, phoned Orchard, whom he had earlier courted — unsuccessfully — for electoral support. “We talked for quite a while,” recalled Orchard, “but he didn’t follow up on any of [my advice]. He didn’t get rid of him.”
The arrival of strategists such as Scrymgeour — and another controversial former Conservative/Alliance operative, lawyer Tom Jarmyn — stood in sharp contrast to previous Green Party leaders, especially those such as British Columbia’s Joan Russow, who were preoccupied with policy matters. An environmentalist and social democrat with a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies, Russow compiled a 400-page policy backgrounder for the party as leader. But in looking at the party’s platform today, she wonders how the planks she built around social democratic policy and strong regulatory enforcement were replaced by a structure that she says could lead to the adoption of right-wing programs. Said Russow: “It has abandoned itself as a principle-based party.”
According to Harris, Russow’s recommendations were replaced with a platform developed directly by the membership and one more appealing to voters. Many of the party’s economic policies appear to be mainstream — even, at times, identical to those of the Conservatives or Liberals, including promises to “lower taxes on income, profit and investment.” The idea of a guaranteed annual income has been removed from the platform. Poverty rates a mention, but there is nothing specifically proposed to address the root causes of the problem. Instead, the Greens promise to “enhance the existing network of food share, school nutrition, and food bank programs to eliminate hunger and malnutrition.”
Like Conservative leader Stephen Harper, Harris wants to hollow out Ottawa with a massive devolution of power. According to its own literature, the Green Party would “respect the right of provinces to ‘opt out’ of federal initiatives without financial penalty.” This would undermine the Canada Health Act and make creation of new national social programs all but impossible. Some policy language even echoes the old hard-right Reform Party. For example, in a mid-election news release, Harris stated: “Tossing money alone at health care is not going to miraculously fix the problems faced by older Canadians.” Instead, he proposed supporting health care through more community volunteerism.
Harris even watered down the party’s policy on genetically modified foods, from one calling for a ban to one simply calling for labelling. Harris personally opposes the manufacture of gmo foods, but when asked why he stopped short of calling for a ban, he replies: “I want them labelled but we don’t even have labelling. What’s the point of calling for banning when we’re eating the stuff and we don’t even know it?” Instead, Harris would rely on the eco-capitalism market solutions that inform so much of the party’s platform, arguing that consumer disapproval of products, not a government ban, will ultimately change corporate behaviour.
Harris’s desire to create a consensus on the environment by building bridges to the corporate sector emerges when asked whether the party would increase the level of fines against polluting corporations. “It’s not about being punitive,” he insists. “People want to do a good job. And I work with people who are in corporations, and they’re good people. They have children, and they care about their future too.”
Even so, there are occasional and dramatic contradictions to the conservative thrust of the platform that seem designed to appeal to radicals in the party. For instance, the party promises to “rescind all uranium-mining permits and prohibit the export of fissionable nuclear material.”
During the 2004 election, the party was found wanting in the two areas in which Greens feel they can make a difference — promoting democracy and protecting the environment. Democracy Watch, an Ottawa-based group, gave the Greens a D- for not adequately addressing issues surrounding corporate responsibility and ethical government. And on the their environmental policies, the ndp received a slightly higher grade than the Green Party from both the Sierra Club and Greenpeace.
