Vote Justin Trottier

Please check out our Green Party Plaform at It’s Time For Green as well as our main Party website at www.GPO.ca

Why Vote Green?

* A consistent voice for the environment. While both the NDP and Greens favour immediate electrification of the Pearson Air Rail Link, the NDP would subsidize the oil industry and make car pollution easier by reducing gasoline tax, even though some of those funds help provide transit services like the TTC. The Green Party has a solid and consistent policy to reduce energy bills by prioritizing conservation, such as investing in retrofits for your home and business, opposing expensive new nuclear projects, and investing in the renewable energy sector where prices are steadily falling. Read more about our Energy Platform

* A voice for individual equality unbiased by vested special interests. Unlike the Liberal party which has continued to ignore discrimination in our publicly funded schools, the Green Party stands behind a plan to work – through a citizen’s assembly – to create a single taxpayer funded school system (for each official language) which is open to all students, parents and teachers regardless of religion, sexual orientation, or any other consideration. Read more about our platform on Education, Jobs & the Economy or watch Justin discuss some of the problems with our current school system in this video

* A pragmatic and moderate approach to governance. Unlike the PCs who favour taking a sledgehammer to vital programs because they aren’t working perfectly, we favour reforming them to make them work. The PCs would undo the Green Energy Act, the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) and a number of other programs. Instead, we favour reforming the Green Energy Act to prioritize local small business access to the grid and reforming the LHINs to allow real community engagement in healthcare decisions. This would have been useful in the case of the Methadone clinic on Strickland Ave. Read more about our Healthcare platform or watch Justin’s video

In addition, we are the only party to put forward some innovative new ideas:

* Only Greens have a Food & Farming Strategy among our 5 point plan, focused on providing food security and healthy food options in schools. Read more here

* Only Greens are focusing on governance reform to ensure openness and transparency, and calling for an end to donations by powerful corporations and unions to provincial parties. Read more here

* Only Greens are discussing a fundamental shift in the way we tax. We would balance a reduction of taxes on the things we want, like income and increasing property value, as a spur to job and housing creation, against an increase in taxes on those things we wish to decrease, to provide an incentive to reduce pollution, carbon emissions and the poor use of land. Only Greens are proposing for Ontario a version of the popular and successful BC carbon tax. Justin gives more details in this video

Listen to our party’s main radio ad as well as our ads in these key areas: Jobs  Health  Energy  Food   Governance

It was a pleasure to share reasons why the Green Party is the best Party for Toronto on a recent episode of The Agenda, hosted by Steve Paikin. Here is a link to the episode page

My fellow debaters were:

Just this Monday, The PEI Greens came in third for the second election in a row, outperforming the NDPs in the province, including a showing of 12.9% for their leader Sharon Labchuk. Congrats!

This week I joined the NDP and PC candidates for a debate on Goldhawk Live, moderated by Dale Goldhawk, and hosted by Rogers TV.

Here’s a link to the episode

The debate covered a lot of ground, especially focusing on crucial local issues. I’d encourage any undecided voters to give it a watch

Mike Schreiner on the Mississauga Gas Plant:

Dear Friends,

I am honoured to have worked along-side the concerned citizens and local farmers in the fight against gas plants sited in improper locations in Ontario.  I’m inspired by citizens who work tirelessly for the benefit of our community and for sensible policies that follow the rules.  I want to thank the thousands of people from across the province who signed petitions and wrote letters to the government on this issue.

The Green Party believes that increased investment in efficiency can decrease the need for such developments. We also contend that before proceeding with additional natural gas generation, greater consideration on the location of gas plants is required. Ontario’s Long-Term Energy Plan must establish safe setback rules for the placement of such plants. It is not appropriate to site large gas plants near residential areas or on protected countryside near prime agricultural land – such as the Holland Marsh.

The Green Party of Ontario will continue to fight for community voices so that inappropriately sited gas plants like the Sherway Gas Plant are not imposed on other communities.

The Green Party supports the cancellation of the Oakville and Sherway Gas Plant. We are also committed to cancelling the development proceeding in the Holland Marsh.  Proper set back requirements and community planning processes are needed immediately to avoid the huge costs associated with having to cancel ill conceived projects.

I would once again like to commend your community on your efforts to fight this development.

Thank you,

Mike Schreiner

September 28: 9pm Rogers TV Dale Goldhawk moderates Parkdale Highpark candidate debate. Cable 10 in TO. Tune in and please call the show with your questions

Justin defends fundamental freedoms like Charter protections for gay students to freedom of expression and association and condemns according special privileges to single faith school systems to government funding. Despite championing gay rights and Gay Straight Alliance student clubs, the NDP continue to support public funding of Catholic schools, despite the continued prohibition at Catholic schools on allowing gay students to voluntarily organize, and the school system’s continued insistence on their right to choose religious doctrine over human rights of students whenever the two are in conflict. The Green Party is the only one courageous enough, and with no vested special interests to teacher unions or other bodies, to state that the system badly needs reform to ensure equality of all teachers, students and parents .

Excerpt of his remarks below. Photos from the rally are below as well.

Any pride I have in representing the only 1 of the 4 big political parties for which One School System is an important issue, is offset by the embarrassment of being the citizen of a province in which only 1 of the 4 big political parties dares to speak up on this.

This shouldn’t be a Green party issue. This should be a multipartisan issue. But when invitations were sent to members of the Liberal, PC and NDP parties the response was a deafening silence.

So you’d think, given their unquestioning support for the public funding of catholic schools, politicians from these 3 parties would have some excellent arguments to make.

When questioned, what do the politicians from these parties say in support of this system? Actually, they don’t even bother trying to support the current system. I’ve heard only 2 actual responses.

The most popular, by far, is “It’s in the constitution”. That’s usually accompanies by the shrugging of shoulders.

Notice how that isn’t actually an argument in favour of the system. Instead, it’s an attempt to avoid HAVING to argue in favour of a system that has nothing in its favour.

Things have changed since the British North America Act of 1867.

The BNA Act called for 4 provinces, now we have 10.

The BNA Act had no provision for our fundamental freedoms. Those were added through the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The BNA Act provided voting rights to only its male citizens. Now women vote and run for office. This last point is worth dwelling on. Although those attempting to stop female suffrage would refer to men’s voting rights as rights, we now know it was in reality a privilege. You see, a privilege is what we call a right when it’s only available to a subset of the population.

Things have changed since 1867.

I said there were two common answers from politicians on the matter of catholic schools. The first is the fall back on the supposed constitutional guarantee. The other is that the system is working just fine.

I always wonder just who the system is working fine for? The system is certainly working well for the bishops and the trustees. But how about the students and teachers?

Is the system working just fine for non-catholic teachers who are effectively barred from over one third of all public teaching positions, or teachers who have lost their job for breaking some aspect of catholic dogma?

Is the system working just fine for the students who were dismissed from class for daring to advocate for pro-choice at a school sanctioned pro-life rally?

Is the system working just fine for parents who wish their kids to have access to the full range of books and literature, but have school boards banning books that are deemed inconsistent with catholic dogma.

Did the system work just fine for Marc Hall, who had to go through the burden of getting a court injunction to allow him to bring his same sex partner to the prom, against the explicit wishes of the school board?

Did the system work just fine for students who wanted and deserve the best sex ed curriculum they can get? No, in a despicable move, the government capitulated to conservative catholic bishops and shelved their new sex ed curriculum after a mere 2 days, depriving both catholic school students and secular school students.

Is the system working just fine for gay students who have their charter right to freedom of assembly explicitly trumped by the catholic board? The TDCSB just a couple of weeks ago approved an amendment to their equity and inclusivity policy. From now on, whenever denominational privileges are in conflict with human rights requirements, the bishops get to overrule the government. Quite apart from the specific case here, how can we have a system paid for by all us taxpayers but accountable not to our elected officials, but to religious leaders?

The system isn’t working just fine, and I’m tired of hearing it is.

Now next time you hear either of these attempts to avoid actually defending cahtolic school funding, please do what I do, and tell these politicians to stop avoiding the core question and to do the right thing. If this issue is still with us in a year, I don’t want to be here reprsenting the only party with the guts to challenge the stauts quo and influential vested interests.

Photos courtesy of Jim McDonald