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Message: Toby Heaps & Karen Kun Interview Preston Manning With just an idea and some burning passion rooted in feelings of western alienation and opposition to big government, Preston Manning started up a marginal grassroots political movement in Alberta that gathered momentum, grew its base into a national profile, and has now morphed into the Government of Canada. His new passion: the environment. He calls himself “a green conservative rather than a blue environmentalist,” and wants to install a water metre in his house that is connected to his home computer, so he can track his water use in real time. Corporate Knights caught up with the reinvigorated statesman on September 11 at the Manning Centre for Building Democracy’s Calgary office. --- Most people didn’t associate your old party with environmental leadership. How did you get green? The Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance—you had to pick your issues. We were brought into being with the fiscal responsibility issue in the days when they were running $50-billion deficits, and that was our main focus and we had to stick to that—we had pretty limited resources. Then the Quebec secession referendum came up quickly; it made these constitutional issues huge. So that was our focus. [My interest in the environment] came mostly from my association with younger people. I’m a small ”D” democrat probably before I’m a conservative. When I see the younger generation whose participation in the democratic process is not heavy, I keep asking myself: well, these people are interested in something; they’re just not interested in what the parties in power are doing. When I got out of Parliament I spent time at the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto. I found the two issues that would engage young people. One was the international stuff, but the other was the environment. I have an interest in that issue myself. Seeing this gave me a political interest as well. My oldest son is quite interested in and concerned with the environment. He did his Master’s degree at Louisiana State University and he believes that people’s attitudes towards the environment are shaped more by culture and their sense of history and place. His studies have been on how we can use literature to get a stronger environmental ethic. His influence on me has been a big one. And our grandkids—we’ve got nine grandkids under 10. I was helping one of them clean his teeth the other night and when I turned the tap on, he said, “You’re wasting water” [laughs]. This from a seven-year-old! This reflects into the next generation. A lot of messages coming through: you’d better pay more attention to these issues. Why is the Green Party so popular in Alberta? Because the environmental ethic is so high here. And Albertans will do something. Albertans are not afraid of supporting a new party. That’s more the culture here than in the older parts of the country—Alberta is willing to try something new. If you were a consultant to the Green Party, what tips would you give them? First, decide whether you’re going to be a political party or whether you’re going to be an interest group. A political party that aspires to govern—and I think that should be the aspiration of any party—can’t settle for “We’ll have a position on this and we’ll have a crusade on this but we’ll never have to do it.” I think that makes a party irresponsible. Then, start doing the things you have to do to be a governing party. One of those things is to be really strong on the issue that’s brought you into being, which is the environment, but recognize there is a bunch of other issues that you’ve got to be just as strong on. The big task for modern political parties is not championing one interest; it’s the reconciliation of conflicting interests that is ultimately the job of a governing party. And the hard decisions are never between something that’s obviously bad or good. It’s the tradeoffs you make. I think it’s those kinds of issues and questions that the Green Party needs to come to grips with if they aspire to govern. I see a very slow progress. Maybe they can learn more from the Green Parties in Europe. At least they’ve been part of coalitions, which gives them some sort of responsibility. Do you think the hype around the environment is a passing fad? No, I don’t. Some politicians, some of the older ones think that this is a fad, [that] it’s going to go away as soon as people start thinking about what any real action is going to cost. But I don’t think so. I think the problems are big enough and the younger generation is concerned enough that the environment as a political issue is not going away. I do think that one thing that’s missing in this debate is a bigger conceptual framework that forces people to see that when you produce goods and services, there’s another stream of pollutant waste, and that when [you] calculate the Gross National Product [GNP], we don’t calculate the national waste. The government, the market focuses on that stream of goods and services, but we don’t focus on that other stream. And I wish there was a conceptual framework that would make that other stream as visible. We gotta deal with it. You talk about how we need to green Canada-US relations. Where to start? Well, I think Schwarzenegger is on it—for all this cursing of American irresponsibility, it’s been a heck of a lot harder to build a thermal power plant in the Pacific Northwest than in Western Canada. The California emissions standards for automobiles are strong, and I think you can take some of their best practices and apply them here. We do Trading Places sometimes … If you were a contestant for that, would you have any candidates in mind where you’d like to be CEO for the day? David Suzuki Foundation, Sierra Club…? Or the leader of the Green Party. There is a history of how to grow a third party. Western Canada and Quebec actually have a long tradition of that. And when the Green Party makes every mistake that the predecessors, including us, made—it really discourages us. I mean, did nobody learn anything? If you’re going to start, wouldn’t the first place you’d start is look at what the other guys did, what they did wrong? But they don’t seem to be! You said you are not looking to run for a political party per se, but would you run for the environment? The idea behind it is not so much running for office; it’s taking an issue that’s not high enough in the polls and running a campaign like you run an election campaign to get it out. You run a campaign, a communications campaign, and committee, war room, communiqués, have a beginning and an end so you can, say, give your life away for 90 days, and you try to get your solution higher on the polls. So when the other guys’ party pollsters come, they say, “There’s something going on out there, the electors are saying something about that”—I like that. I think political parties ought to do issue campaigns in between election campaigns. The parties resist that nowadays. They think they’re losing their money on them. I say these issue campaigns can be organized by interest group coalitions and they could be run just like election campaigns. That’s partly what the Alberta Environment Stewardship Coalition has in mind: mobilize themselves to get a stewardship agenda so high in the public mind that the provincial guys can’t ignore it. Toby Heaps is the Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Knights. Karen Kun is the Publisher of Corporate Knights. This article appeared on the CK21 issue of corporate knights: 2007 Cleantech Issue www.corporateknightsforum.com