On April 20, Georgia Straight reporter Matthew Burrows, along with Stephen Hui, interviewed B.C. Green party leader Jane Sterk at the Straight offices.

Here’s a transcript of the interview.

Matthew Burrows: When you won the B.C. Green party leadership race in October 2007, you beat out two younger candidates, Damian Kettlewell and Ben West. Damian is 37 and Ben West is just about in his 30s. As you are a baby boomer and B.C. Greens leader, I wondered how you respond to people who say your generation is part of the problem, and not part of the solution?

Jane Sterk: I think my generation might have contributed to the problems that have been created. We lived at a time where the expectation was that we could have a good life and that that would have no negative consequences. I also think that those of my generation like myself, who recognize that, have decided to make a difference. All generations have to be part of the solution. Those of us who have the luxury of some experience and age maybe have more time to devote to it than some of the younger people, who might be creating families and careers and things like that. I don’t think that generational issues are really a factor.

MB: Do you think your party can win a seat in this election?

JS: I actually do.

MB: Where do you think they can win?

JS: I think that there are several seats that have some possibilities, because of the dynamics of the riding: ones where there is either a new riding where there is no incumbent, ones where we have particularly high-profile candidates who are known in the community, and ones where there seems to be a pretty even split between the Liberal vote and the NDP so there could be an opportunity for some Greens to slip up the middle.

MB: You’re not naming any ridings where you think you will fare strongly?

JS: I think we’re going to fare strongly in my own riding [Esquimalt-Royal Roads]. I’m very optimistic that we will win that riding. I have a good reputation in both Esquimalt and Vic West for my work on council and in View Royal. So I think that it’s a possibility. I think that in Penticton we have a very strong candidate [Julius Bloomfield] with lots of roots into all of the communities that are part of the Penticton riding. In Vernon-Monashee we have Huguette Allen, who got 18 percent in the federal election in a four-person race. She seems to have picked up some of the support of disaffected Liberals. So, on the ground it feels as though she has got some pretty strong support, and may be able to be elected. We have a woman up in Peace River North by the name of Liz Logan, who is a First Nations woman who was chief of her band for five consecutive terms, and has a great team on the ground. She was publicly endorsed by all of the Treaty 8 Chiefs and by Shawn Atleo. That’s a riding where there was only 10,000 votes in the last election, and there are 4,000 First Nations. If she can mobilize that constituency, I think she has a very good chance. She’s very well respected in the white community as well as among First Nations. We have a couple of interesting candidates on the Island. Dirk Becker in Nanaimo was recognized as being one of the 20 most influential people in Nanaimo by their local paper. He’s taking on a pretty strong incumbent, if not in winning ways, he’s making them pay attention.

MB: Sorry to interrupt, but you’re missing one person aren’t you?

JS: I haven’t finished my list yet....We have Simon Lindley in the Cowichan Valley, who is the director of business development for the Better Business Bureau of Vancouver Island, and he is getting amazing local press and recognition. And Damian Kettlewell in Vancouver-False Creek, a new riding. We’ve now noticed that the NDP is temporarily without a candidate, and my view is that a late candidate will work in Damian’s favour. He is a tenacious campaigner and likes to fight the good fight, so I think he has a chance.

MB: Do you think there is a genuine opening for the Green party?

JS: We have several reasons why there are openings for the Green Party. One is we’ve got the best policy of the three parties. We’re not afraid to say that we need change in society and that that change has to be fundamental, if we want to recover from this economic downturn and to address issues of the failure of the social structures and the environmental issues related to climate change. So I think that we are the only ones who have a comprehensive policy and people are looking for a different solution. We don’t do politics as usual; we are bold and innovative. There are lots of people concerned about the behaviour of the other parties and their behaviour in the legislature and their behaviour in the political arena and the lack of discourse and terrible name-calling and sarcasm and rhetorical questions that stand in for civility and respect.

MB: You want to introduce respect into the legislature?

JS: I definitely want to change the culture of the legislature.

MB: In November 2007, a few weeks after you became party leader, you were keynote speaker at a forum at the Aboriginal Friendship Centre and you discussed female representation in politics. It was here that you revealed your admiration for these three politicians: former Conservative prime minister Kim Campbell, former Reform party deputy leader Deborah Grey and former foreign minister Flora MacDonald. What led you to pick those three?

JS: Those are women who I think were pioneers. Flora MacDonald ran for the leadership of the party, the Progressive Conservative Party—not the current Conservative party. I think she would have made an exceptional prime minister. She was an exceptional minister, she was an exceptional MP and I think she stood up for women’s issues at a time when it was difficult for women to do so. She was a real feminist at the early part of the feminist movement and I admired her courage. When she left politics she committed herself to working on behalf of women in the Third World, and I think she has been an extraordinary Canadian throughout her life. So that’s Flora MacDonald. There’s nothing incongruent between my understanding of true conservatism and the values of the Green party, which are not inconsistent with that. We both believe we need to live within our means, both economically and ecologically and within the social environment. Deborah Grey was a pioneer in her party, the Reform party, and she was the first person elected as a Reformer. She is an extraordinary woman, again, and she carried the banner of her party very well. In many ways she was like Joy MacPhail—she like a one-person party that was more effective than the other opposition parties. I admire that. Every day when Deborah Grey went into the House of Commons, she acknowledged the first woman who [was] ever elected as MP, as recognition that she was carrying the torch for women generally in the House of Commons. And she rides a motorcycle and she’s a gutsy woman.

MB: In my one and only interview with Elizabeth May she did mention the shades of green. I’ve often wanted to ask, based on your choice of role models, do you consider yourself a blue green?

JS: I consider myself a green. I don’t subscribe to the view that there are shades of green. We are a group of people that are united because we have a series of principles that we believe in. They come from the Global Green Charter. They are ones that are part of every Green party in the world—all of the provincial Green parties, the federal Green party and Green parties throughout the planet. There are people that might have formerly come from the Conservative end, and some from the Liberal end. We have former New Democrats. We have people that are anarchists, which is quite inconsistent with being a member of a party. But we are united because we believe in these principles. We believe that there is a responsibility that this generation has on future generations, and it is an all-encompassing party in terms of that. All of our policy is informed by these principles.

MB: Although the premier mentions his grandchildren quite a lot these days, how do you equate Gordon Campbell’s desire to see a future for his grandchildren with the policies of the Green party?

JS: I think that there is a grandparent factor that comes in. I think he doesn’t understand the consequences of the decisions that he’s proposing, because if he did, he would not be very optimistic about his grandchildrens’ future.

MB: On page 22 of your 41-page Green Book, you finally address protecting B.C.’s resources. Should your party not put that up front?

JS: We think the four things that we are campaigning on are of equal importance and that you have to order them. And we chose to order them based on—

MB: You’ve got Four Pillars to the Liberal Six Pillars, so you kept it pretty simple.

JS: Well their Six Pillars, I think, are pretty simplistic. Ours are complex and meaty. So we wanted to start with the economy, because that’s the current focus of attention. We think that we have some very strategic and important things to say about how we can recover from this economic crisis. You know, the order speaks for itself. Everybody knows that we understand the environment better than any other party. Even when people say they don’t know me, they say that I would be best to handle the environment, because we have the best policy.

MB: [Deputy leader] Damian Kettlewell is business savvy and owns a business in the local area. He has talked a lot these past two years about creating green jobs, which appears at the very front of the Green Book. How would you define green jobs?

JS: Green jobs are jobs that will last for the long term. They are jobs that require skill and technical knowledge. They’re jobs that provide good quality of life, in terms of income, and they are jobs that are in the new economy that we need to be transitioning to.

MB: This would mean something that hadn’t heretofore existed?

JS: Not necessarily. They could be jobs that are an expansion of our current employment, but there is an environmental or ecological understanding that becomes foundational to that job.

MB: Would that include the alternative-energy sector?

JS: That would include the alternative-energy sector and that would include the building-construction sector. We’re talking a lot about the retrofitted buildings and homes, and making things more energy-efficient and ultimately zero-greenhouse-gas-emission buildings and energy plants—so that we could contribute to the grid through those buildings—changing of the building code so that we net-zero energy buildings. So we are no longer building anything that isn’t making a positive contribution to the landscape. They [green jobs] are in transportation, urban planning, ecological restoration, service industries. We think there needs to be a reinvestment in service from child-care education—so that we have good childcare that’s founded in early childhood principles—to health care services that are multidisciplinary in approach. Nutritionists, dieticians, nurses, nurse practitioners, doctors, naturopaths.

MB: These might be jobs that already exist.

JS: They are part of a different lens and a different foundation and part of a recognition that there are limits to the ecological damage that can be done in the economic activity. We are saying that there doesn’t need to be ecological damage; that we can do things in a very different way.

MB: Have you heard of Bill Rees?

JS: Of course.

MB: He talks about internalizing those costs that have been externalized by economists, and David Suzuki has also talked about this. Is this what you mean?

JS: Exactly. An example that’s always astonishing to me is that it costs $50,000 to keep someone impoverished in this economy. So why is it that we couldn’t free up that money so that a person could live a life of dignity with housing, with appropriate nutrition and with an ability to achieve the maximum potential that they are capable of achieving? Why is it that we are prepared to spend that money wastefully on policing and shelters and health-care services, but we’re not prepared to bring that money together to find a different solution? Ours is the different solution to the same problems that we have, and the other political parties have never been successful at solving these problems. There have always been these grand goals set by political parties, with no intention ever of meeting those goals in my mind.

MB: How do you define steady-state economics?

JS: Steady-state economics is one in which the inputs and outputs are roughly equivalent. So, instead of always believing that you always have to have growth—which is based in consumption—we believe that you can improve the economy locally, without focussing just on having it grow, and so it’s not a consumption-based economic model. So it’s better, not bigger.

MB: This weekend we had the Bike the Blossoms slow-food ride here, which focussed on the local economy and local food. Would this be something akin to what you mean?

JS: Yes. So, rather than being based in an import of goods from elsewhere, most of which we don’t need, the creation of strong, local and diverse economies, where we are creating what we need, we’re supporting the businesses that are created locally and that are the job-creators in this province. Ninety-eight percent of businesses in B.C. are small- to mid-sized businesses, and yet we take them for granted and we don’t support them and we make them compete unfairly with larger companies or companies from other jurisdictions and it’s not a level playing field. We believe that we need to be focussed on a good quality of life that’s not based in waste and excess.

MB: Will this not give the B.C. Chamber of Commerce and other such organizations indigestion with that kind of policy?

JS: I think that, if they understand the policy—that we’re trying to support a diverse and strong local economy—most businesses would be very supportive of that. I think that the chambers—we’ve all subscribed to and bought into this belief that the only way that we can recover and have a strong economy is in a consumptive-based economy, where we’re buying goods from somewhere else and that this is the engine that keeps the economy going. That’s not the way it has to be and it’s certainly not sustainable in the long term.

MB: Give us your position on the Gateway project?

JS: We are opposed to the Gateway project. We don’t need port expansion. The purpose of the port expansion is to get cheap goods from China to Chicago one day earlier. So we’re prepared to trash our communities and trash our environment to be a conduit for goods that nobody is buying any more anyway. The creation of those goods in China is collapsing as we speak. There are container loads of goods that are being backed up. So we don’t support this port expansion, and we don’t support the roadway—the east-west road system. It’s destroying farmland, which we think in the future needs to be one of the primary focuses that we have—food security and the creation of farming on our farmland. It’s going to fundamentally destroy Burns Bog, which is a UN heritage site and needs to be preserved. It’s part of this belief that we can build our way out of congestion, which has never worked in any jurisdiction anywhere in North America, and hasn’t been tried in Europe.

MB: The premier claimed when he sat in that very chair there that we will still see an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions [despite Gateway] if you factor in the many other initiatives one could undertake to bring about the 33-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that he legislated. Some people have said this a lie—that you cannot build this type of infrastructure and reduce greenhouse gases. Could you respond to this?

JS: When you create road infrastructure it creates more urban sprawl, which means that you are going to have more traffic travelling longer distances and contributing higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions. And some UBC professors have shown that, just for the cost of the Port Mann Bridge—$3.1 billion—they could put in 200 kilometres of light rapid transit throughout the Lower Mainland, including to Surrey. I personally believe that the Port Mann Bridge is being built because the two parties are competing over the Surrey ridings. There’s some belief that the Surrey residents will subscribe to the belief that this will reduce congestion and will make it easier for them to get to downtown Vancouver in less than an hour-and-a-half every morning.

MB: Your platform promises to end drug prohibition. How do you envision drugs being produced and distributed in a post-prohibition era?

JS: Well, cannabis could certainly be produced by co-operatives. The compassion clubs already do that. They have very specific analysis of the product or the crop that they grow, and they know the medicinal properties of each of the strains that they’re producing. So there are already co-operatives doing that for the compassion clubs, and those are people who have the ability to use cannabis for medical purposes. So an expansion of that would be certainly something that we could do in British Columbia. We’re already giving over our land to all kinds of criminal elements, who are growing cannabis on land and in buildings that make it less than desirable, including the watershed in Greater Victoria. They found grow-ops there, so we need to get a handle of that and make it a legitimate agricultural activity. So, that’s one way to do it, and then it would be controlled and regulated just like we do tobacco and alcohol, so that we keep it out of the hands of youngsters and out of the hands of the criminal elements that are destroying our communities.

MB: So we would have drugs like heroin and ecstasy sold in stores like the B.C. Liquor Stores that we see today?

JS: We are focussed primarily on cannabis at this stage, and I do think that ultimately we need to look at all of that class of substances. The war on drugs is a futile endeavour. It’s a failure, and it doesn’t make sense to continue to do something that’s failing, and we should approach this problem differently. In the jurisdictions where drugs are treated differently, such as in the Netherlands, their overall use of these substances is much lower than we have and their problem use is almost nonexistent....

MB: There’s also quite a lot of money sloshing around in the club drugs, the recreational club drugs, and I wonder how you’d address that—ecstasy, for example—this class of drugs?

JS: The party has focussed on cannabis for the most part. There is... The vast majority of people who use these substances use them in such a way that it causes no harm to themselves or anyone else. Fundamentally, we believe that, if it’s not causing harm, why would we need to criminalize behaviour which is done by responsible adults.

Stephen Hui: Would you see marijuana being sold in something like a liquor store?

JS: Yes. Or Compassion clubs or cooperatives.

MB: Could you name top three things you believe set your party apart from the B.C. Liberals and the NDP?

JS: First of all, our party has a set of principles that we believe in and which are part and parcel of every policy that we create. The other parties have no defined set of principles from which they work. Number two, we are not a party that would whip its members, because we believe that our candidate should represent their local area, that they should be passionately involved in their community, and that they should be able to speak on behalf of their constituents. If you always require your members to vote in the same way, or if you tell them how to vote, you kill that kind of initiative that the people have. Connected to that, we believe in greater participatory democracy. So we would expect our MLAs to find out what it is that the people in their constituencies feel passionately about and to bring that information into the legislature in such a way that it can be examined and debated and discussed, either through private members bills or through their contributions through the committees or through the legislative procedure. Number three, we believe that our democracy is at risk, and we support reform of government—starting with electoral reform but moving beyond that to campaign finance reform and the reform of all of the agencies that are funded and connected to the government. Say the appointments to all the boards—the police boards—and the Agricultural Land Commission. All of those things should be done by an independent non-partisan agency that is looking for qualified people who are not being rewarded for some sort of relationship with the party that’s in power. We are a party that is not obligated to special interests groups, as the other parties are. They are funded by the special interest groups and because of that their policies are compromised by those relationships.

MB: So you advocate campaign finance reform?

JS: Absolutely.

MB: What differentiates your climate policy from the Liberals?

JS: Ours is coherent for one thing. We believe in putting a price on the garbage that we’re putting into the air. So we do believe in a carbon tax. It needs to be at a higher level than it is currently. There needs to be aggressive investment in those things that will also take greenhouse gases out of the environment, like transit and retrofitted buildings and change of land-use planning and building codes. We are saying we need to get off oil and gas as soon as possible, so we would make that transition as rapidly as possible by moving subsidies out of the oil and gas industry and into other forms of energy—from energy conservation to geothermal, solar, wind and some ocean-based energy development. So, the premier is really suggesting that the carbon tax will solve the problem, when in fact a carbon tax is just one part of the solution.

MB: Do you think the NDP dropped the ball by opposing this tax?

JS: I think that the NDP position on the carbon tax is quite irresponsible. I think it feeds into a sense of entitlement that the 50 percent of the emissions that are directly related to ordinary, everyday working people in British Columbia, that we shouldn’t have to do anything about that—that we shouldn’t have to drive less and reduce the temperature in our homes to try and save a little money and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists and the economists are all saying that the first and necessary step is a carbon tax—a tax on the pollution that we are putting into the air. We also support cap and trade. We think there has to be both. It’s not an either-or for us. You either believe in the science of climate change or you don’t, and I would have to say that, based on the reading of the other two platforms, they don’t.