Why a Green Party government would be good for business.

I’ve struggled from time to time to come up with a short, clear, succinct way to express the idea that a Green Party government in Canada would be good for business.

As true as it might be, it is not intuitively obvious, and thus results in the common misconception that the Green Party is left wing, or that we would “ruin the economy.”

It’s true that the Green Party’s policies generally favour local business selling to local markets over larger corporations. Not that large corporations are bad necessarily, but there are tremendous community advantages to having local businesses thrive.

We like organic agriculture, family farms, no GMO’s, local business, vibrant small towns, farmers markets, and local contractors and manufacturers.

The benefits of these things are many, but include that they generally do not need extensive travel to conduct business, they spend their hard earned money within the communities in which they operate, they have less tendency to widen the rich-poor gap, they generally decrease green house gases, they result in healthier food, and promote the sense of community.

In the same way, it’s also true that our policies would favour Canadian business over foreign business, especially when it comes to shipping goods a long way to market or, worse yet, shipping raw materials to be processed elsewhere and shipped back here as final product. Globalization functions, after all, on the premise of cheap transportation energy which relies on subsidies and the illusion of never-ending supply.

But all this is fairly hard to articulate in a 30 second sound byte or debate response.

Fortunately, the recent report from the government-commissioned National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy seems to have worded the argument for me.

Their report found that regardless of which mechanism we choose, the longer we wait to put a price on carbon, the more costly it will be. The report said that, because businesses and investors make long-term decisions about capital costs, like buildings, technologies and equipment, they need a clear idea where the government is heading: “In essence, inadequate and delayed communication by the government of a [greenhouse gas] ‘price’ could lead to substantial long-term economic costs.”

Hmmm…

Businesses and Investors make long-term decisions.

They need a clear idea of where government is heading.

There is no party which thinks in the long-term more than the Green Party.

So it would seem to me that the key to expressing how the Green Party is good for business, is in articulating the Green Party’s long-term approach to policy and how that stability is what business really needs to thrive.