If you are deeply dissatisfied with politics, and a surprising number of people are not, at least judging by their willingness to empty their wallet for political parties and suspend judgement on the misconduct of those on “our side”, whatever it is, it seems to us that there’s an opportunity for a new party to hoist a turquoise banner. By which we mean one that combines the insights of traditional “blue” conservatives (which in the US would be “red”) about the organic nature of society and markets with those of grassroots “greens” about our own organic relationship to nature. The strange thing is that for such a party to exist, you’d have to start a whole new green party almost everywhere because of the weird way in which “green” parties always turn out to be watermelons, green outside but red inside.

It’s a problem for the whole green movement, including Greenpeace Canada, whose policy positions are a cookie-cutter set of left-wing demands that often put anything environmental well down the list. And when it comes to their political arm, consider for instance a press release from Canada’s wretched version headlined “Greens to Hold Press Conference on Progressive Cooperation Between Progressive Parties” that bores us that:

“The Green Party of Canada’s Co-Leaders, Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault, will hold a press conference to call for greater cooperation among progressive parties to prevent Conservative gains resulting from vote splitting.”

We could make fun of a party with a split leadership opposing vote splitting. Or question the true nature of this “co-leadership” arrangement between what’s-his-name and the woman who’s led the party since 2006 despite pretending not to for three years during which her successor suffered endless internal dissent over her failure to support Hamas, of all non-green outfits (except its banners). A propos of which, Australia’s green party also has a glaring anti-Semitism problem that would be very hard to account for in terms of their ostensible principles even if Israelis had not made the desert bloom, and been militantly pro-environment, where the rest of the Middle East basically never heard of the thing. So does the British version. There’s something going on here and it’s not pretty.

It’s also hard to square with their ostensible principles. Which is why we want to draw attention to the mystifying phenomenon of the Canadian version insisting that it exists not because it’s different from other parties but because it’s the same as them. Just as, for instance, Les Écologistes – Europe Écologie Les Verts, which sprouted from the former French Green Party, “leans strongly to the left” on economics. And on the Middle East. (The German Greens, to be fair, aren’t nearly as bad especially on the latter.)

Why the Canadian version won’t merge with the parties it stands in solidarity with we don’t know. But this stand is not a fluke, or an artefact of the tariff wars. Instead, back in January the Greens issued a ringing call for someone else’s program with:

“Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has written to all federal party leaders urging them to work together during Parliament’s prorogation to salvage critical legislation that risks being lost. With the House of Commons suspended, essential bills addressing affordability, housing, clean drinking water, and climate action remain stalled, leaving Canadians waiting for solutions to urgent challenges.”

Note that the first two items have nothing to do with the environment at all, and the third, perhaps not obviously to non-Canadians, is about conditions on aboriginal reserves that the Liberals promised to fix and didn’t; elsewhere the tap water is safe.

The Greens are also keen to work with “the NDP, Liberals, and Bloc Québécois – any leader willing to prioritize electoral reform” even though the Liberals won in 2015 partly by promising to end first-past-the-post then never doing it. As someone said, and it was the Green Party to start that very same press release:

“It has been nearly a decade since the Liberals first promised – more than 1,800 times – that the 2015 election would be the last under Canada’s outdated, winner-take-all voting system. Canadians now know that promise was never meant to be kept. And as a result, election after election, we continue to see the real, harmful consequences of a system that allows progressive vote splitting that favours Conservatives, even when the majority of voters choose progressive parties.”

An unwary observer might think the conservatives had been in power at some point since 2015, not the perfidious Liberals they implicitly trust unlike those rancid Tories. But what the Canadian Greens never seem to consider, let alone advocate, is market solutions to things like, say, affordability or housing, even though the process of private firms adapting to conditions is exactly how ecosystems work and central planning is exactly how they don’t.

Instead, real Canadian Green party leader Elizabeth May recently insisted that social democracy is the bland ticket:

“Like-minded parties should join forces to prevent any election of a majority Conservative government, Green Party leader Elizabeth May (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.) said yesterday. Liberals, New Democrats, Bloc Québécois and Green organizers should be ‘thinking about how we might co-operate together,’ she said. ‘It is common wisdom that if we’re going to have a Parliament that co-operates well together it will be a minority Parliament and it will be a minority Parliament where Liberals, Greens, NDP and Bloc have the majority of the seats but not any one party is able to form a majority government,’ May told reporters. ‘That will instill in our Parliament a spirit of co-operation. That means thinking about voting very differently and thinking about how we might co-operate together.’ ‘What is it exactly that you want?’ asked a reporter. ‘The range of options is almost infinite,’ replied May.”

Yes, since the Bloc Québécois advocates the demolition of the Canada all our politicians suddenly love because of Trump’s tariff bluster and yet she’s keen to work with them. However this “almost infinite” range utterly excludes (ugh) conservatives, as they are badness politified in some way not specified because it doesn’t have to be. Everyone knows. At least all social democrats know, and there sit the Greens, part of the blob.

Actually, she did open the door to helping the Conservatives be less hatefully horrible if only they weren’t so horribly hateful:

“‘Parties that describe themselves and generally are seen in the media as progressive, let’s just also say it would help for co-operation before the next election if the Conservatives wanted to sit down with all the other parties as well and renounce smear-based attack ads, renounce the use of negative algorithms to motivate people into fear-based voting, and rage farming,’ said May. She did not explain the references.”

And left-wing parties would never try to motivate people into fear-based voting against conservatives with, say, smear-based attack ads. No, they just state frankly that conservatives are evil morons and let voters draw their own conclusions, the very personification of generic sweetness and light on the left. (As Blacklock’s noted, Ms. May has called conservatives “cheap and silly” and their leader “Skippy”.)

It seems to us, as non-partisan environmentalists, that a genuinely green party should be genuinely green, and different, because it starts from different premises. At CDN we are deeply convinced that ideas matter, and that partisanship should consist of advocating for your own particular policies and people because the former are based on, and the latter draw on, a particular philosophy that others do not share.

In this regard we would have thought that a genuinely green party would have an organic philosophy across the board. It would approach every issue from budgeting to war and peace to abortion to, indeed, dealing with climate change by first asking: What is natural, spontaneous and self-organizing here? And it would avoid policies and procedures that are mechanical, life-denying and so forth, the kinds of behaviour manifested by the kinds of people J.R.R. Tolkien labeled “orcs” in our own world.

Imagine for a moment that you were founding such a party, and forget what you’ve heard from actual “Green” parties. Where would you stand on issues like the traditional family, abortion, euthanasia or rent control? Would you not view market economics as highly organic, with its niches, ecosystems, adaptive behaviour and so forth, and central planning as mechanistic and harsh?

Now to be fair, if you look at most conservative parties they ringingly endorse free markets in theory then advocate state intervention on any issue currently under debate and many that aren’t. So they’re not exactly showing the way on basing policies on principles. But aren’t the Greens meant to be different, indeed a figurative and literal breath of fresh air?

If these musings take us too far afield, which we do not believe since ideas have external consequences and internal logical implications, let’s just talk environment. Because surely a real green party would care for nature in all kinds of ways. But those ways would not include trying to exterminate plants by labeling CO2 “pollution” and engaging in weird geoengineering schemes to “fix” nature. Or indeed stamping out data it doesn’t like and calling its adversaries ugly names.

In all areas, surely, a real green party should be distinctive in its reasoning, policies and tone. Even if it was in some irresistible way drawn to the left, as moths are to candles, its press releases and manifestoes would be instantly recognizable. As soon as one began reading, without having to check the byline, it would be obvious that this was the green party not some old-tyme socialist or indeed conservative party whose roots lay in steel mills and coal mines and an overwhelmingly urban, concrete-and-grime sensibility.

If it were, and a real conservative party could be found that was distinctive in its reasoning, policies and tone, a case could be made for merging them into something turquoise. If you tried it now, all you’d get is a red puddle with a few scraps of blue and green wrapping.