One year ago I wrote a blog post in which, among other things, I advocated trying to find a way of using the ancient Chinese philosophy of “capturing whole” to minimize the damage a Stephen Harper majority government might do to the environment.

Here’s what I said:

We’re going to have to, as Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, suggests: “capture our opponent whole.” That means moving carefully to make it so our values, our vision, our passion, slowly becomes their own. We must find what they respond to – be it positive reinforcement or public accolades, as difficult as that may be to stomach – and exploit them as an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.

If we do not, we’ll find ourselves on the outside looking in, and watching all that we cherish about this beautiful nation slipping from our grasp. And we will only have ourselves to blame for its loss. Every moment in life is a choice. This choice is clear: accepting the reality of a polarized politic and gaining what we can, or raging against it, and losing it. It’s that stark a dichotomy.

Reading those words now, today, on the first anniversary of the Conservative’s majority government election victory, makes me feel both naive and foolish.

The first year of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has been the worst 365 days for Canada’s environment in our nation’s history. It’s been that bad. If Stephen Harper and his Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver have their way it’s going to get a lot worse. While I still hold with the philosophy of capture whole – of defeating your opponent without a fight – I must remember one critical disclaimer from the Art of War: avoid a fight if you can. If you can’t, fight hard, and fight to win.

It’s time to fight: to fight smart, to fight clean, to fight fair, but to fight to win. What we’re fighting for is far more than we could have imagined one year ago today. We’re fighting for the soul of Canada: our National Parks, our magnificent wilderness, our wild creatures, our natural heritage: our future. That might sound like hyperbole, and maybe it is. Looking at what we’ve already lost after one year of the most neo-conservative government this country has ever seen, I believe a fair statement. Apparently my friend Tzeporah Berman thinks so as well but then, like me, she’s a radical environmentalist too.

Lets consider for a moment the damage that this government has done in 365 days. As Elizabeth May points out in her widely circulated story “How the conservatives stole the environmental protection in broad daylight,” they have waged an all out war on nature, and on those who protect it. They started by withdrawing from the Kyoto Accord, something that must have burned Prime Minister Harper’s gut during his five years in a minority government. Then they attacked environmental groups, focusing their wrath on those who were opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline, but tarring them all (pun intended) with the same brush: radicals, suckling at the teat of US based lefty-foundations.

Never mind that much of the money used to promote the whole-scale sell off of Canada’s petroleum resources, in the tar sands and everywhere else, comes from the US, Europe, and China. If you take foreign money to continue to narrow Canada’s economic development and destroy the environment, you’re a patriot; if you take money to advocate for the protection of the environment, First Nations cultures while diversifying the economy, you’re a radical, bent on destroying Canada.

Now the Conservatives want to re-write of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, making it easier for industry to win approval of mega-projects like those in the tar sands, and gut the Fisheries Act to remove the scant protections we currently have for nature. Rumour is that the Conservatives have their sights set on the Species at Risk Act, a law that is particularly close to my heart as I dedicated more than five years of my life to its passage.

Budget cuts are a convenient way to disguise the Conservative war on nature. Stephen Harper and his Ministers have cut positions that monitor and clean up oil spills, research the impacts of climate change on the arctic, and most recently, present and safeguard our national parks.

And this is only the first year.

But it’s not. Not really. Stephen Harper is the wiliest and most strategic Prime Minister Canada has seen in a generation. He’s a patient man. He waited. Five years of minority governments and he waited. It must have tried his considerable fortitude not to push ahead with his offensive, but he waited. And when he seized – stole — complete power in May of last year he was able to reshape Canada in the image crafted by the elite, far right wing of Canadian politics who funds his party.

It was almost as if the Prime Minister himself was a student of The Art of War: his war on nature could serve as a text book example of how a superior army confronts an inferior force. His opening attack, delivered by Joe Oliver, and escalated with Senate hearings and the allocation of an additional $8 million to Revenue Canada for “education” and other Orwellian indoctrinations of Canadian environmental charities, is a perfect example of how to use a strategic strike to weaken your opposition in advance of an all out assault.

If I wasn’t so livid I might almost be in awe of the man’s strategic prowess.

What to do? As I said a year ago, and I still believe, there is no time for hand wringing. Capturing whole isn’t going to work either; there is no room to “exploit an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.”

Many are already acting. Dr. David Suzuki left the board of directors of the organization that he founded a quarter century ago so he could speak with impunity. Forest Ethics, one of the most ardent and outspoken organizations in the environmental community has made the calculated move of splitting in two: one organization will continue to undertake charitable work while another will go head-to-head with those who are destroying Canada’s environment. I say power too them.

But there is more work to be done. The Conservative war on nature has just started. And while I no longer believe we can find a way to capture this enemy without a fight, we must be very careful in how we confront them. They hate us and what we stand for, and they will use every resource at their disposal to eliminate us as an opponent so that their greed and nepotism can endure.

If Stephen Harper is a smart strategist, we must be smarter. If it appears as though his Conservative government has torn a page from the Art of War and is using it against Canada’s environment and those millions of Canadians who stand to defend it, we must learn how to beat them at their own game.

Over the coming months I’m going to continue to write on this topic, and I invite you to do the same. Post a comment, write an essay, send a tweet: if we’re smart and if we work together, we can stop this war on nature in its tracks and reclaim the soul of this great country.

According to a poll published in today’s Globe and Mail online edition, the upstart Wildrose Party has a nine point lead over the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. Because Canadian political alliances can be confusing, the Wildrose party is backed by the federal Conservative Party, while the provincial PC party seems to have been cut adrift by the mother-ship.

When I moved back to Alberta, and back into the conservation community, I knew what I was getting into. For nearly twenty years I’ve had to go toe-to-toe with the likes of former Energy Minister Steve West, and former environment Minister Ty Lund when they were in Ralph Klein’s cabinet. Being an environmentalist in Alberta was, as author Sid Marty has written, like being a boy scout in Hell.

Hell is going to look pretty good if Danielle Smith is elected on Monday.

But this is what Alberta does; it lurches from one government to another, about once a generation or so. If as the pollsters predict Alberta changes government on Monday it will only be for the fourth time in our 107-year history that this has happened. The Wildrose will form Alberta’s fifth government, and if they do, Alberta’s willingness to protect land, water, air and its ability to combat climate change will be in considerable doubt.

A part of me thinks: it can’t be any worse than the Progressive Conservatives. Premier Alison Redford has been a tremendous disappointment in this regard. While she has talked tough on education and health care, she has been a dismal failure when it comes to protecting the underpinning of our physical health and our economic system: our ecosystems. She’s cow-towed to the oil and gas sector on the tar sands and despite overwhelming opposition to logging in the Castle Wildland in south western Alberta, bowed to pressure from the local MLA Evan Berger, going so far as to put him in Cabinet to satiate the party’s good-old-boy right wing.

I know it could be much worse. Alberta’s protected area’s network is held together with spit and bailing wire. We have scant protection for our parks from industrial tourism, OHV use, logging and oil and gas development; the land base outside of our parks is fair game to just about anybody with a big idea and a few bucks in their pocket. As the party of extra free enterprise and with a Libertarian leaning, Wildrose cannot be counted on to protect these assets that are the cornerstone of our Province’s natural beauty, ecological health, and economic future.

Add to this Danielle Smith’s defence of candidates who are homophobic, xenophobic and want to take our province back decades in its relationship with the rest of Canada and the world, and it would appear as if politics in Alberta are about to go from bad to catastrophic.

When the federal Conservatives won their much sought after majority, I quickly posted a blog entry suggesting that things weren’t so bad, and that all we needed to do as environmentalists was to burrow into the belly of the beast and work from within to convince Stephen Harper’s government to protect Canada’s environment.

I was wrong. Sometimes this tactic espoused in The Art of War and other Taoist manuals works, but sometimes all that happens is you find yourself surrounded by a rotting pile of entrails while the beast is off devouring what is precious to you.

If Danielle Smith wins election on Monday, I won’t be making any entreaties for Alberta’s environmental community to try and “capture the enemy whole” (as Sun Tzu might advise). On the contrary: my advice will be to use whatever advantage we have to safeguard what we hold dear. Capturing whole only works if both opponents are on roughly equal footing and if both are honourable in their undertakings. As Stephen Harper has demonstrated over the last year, this is far from the case. And what is Danielle Smith’s Wildrose but another guise for a political movement bent on eviscerating Canada and Alberta’s environmental laws, protections and safeguards in the name of smaller government and more free enterprise?

Really, Alberta: just as I was starting to think I understood you. In addition to having good common sense fiscal prudence, I thought that maybe we were on the cusp of having a government that reflected the majesty and beauty of this province. But it looks like I was wrong.

LETTER TO THE PREMIER FROM THE PINCHER CREEK JAIL February 1, 2012

Mike Judd, one of four authors of this Letter from Jail, speaking to a rally of 150 people in the Castle Special Place

Dear Premier Redford;

Around the World people have been fined and imprisoned for rejecting industrial clear-cut logging and the ecological devastation that it eventually brings to a nation. Here are a few examples: 1200 arrested at Reedy Creek, Australia; 800 at Clayaquot in B.C.; over 100 in Chital, Pakistan; 22 women at Grant’s Pass in Oregon; and over 60 First Nations People in the Great Bear Forest in B.C.; and today, four in Pincher Creek, Alberta.

In his book Collapse, Jerad Diamond delineates how deforestation is one of the major factors that lead to the disappearance of many past civilizations, and Global Forest Watch reports that 13,000,000 hectares of forest disappear annually around the World. Do you need to add this thin belt along the Eastern Slopes of Alberta to that statistic?

We’ve already seen over four decades of industrial logging in the Oldman Watershed and particularly in the headwaters of the Castle-Carbondale part of that drainage. We’ve seen the miles of stumps, windrows of waste wood, eroded skid roads, collapsing stream banks, weeds, escalating off-road vehicle abuse, and of course the 22,000 hectare fire that took place in all of that.

Now you’ve sanctioned removing most of the last small piece of intact forest left in this corner of the province. The place where the Grizzly, the Westslope Cutthroat Trout, Limber Pine and so many unique plants are listed by law, federally and provincially, as endangered. This area is also the study area for Grizzly Bear DNA research to establish how many or how few are left. It is classified as “critical winter ungulate range” where industrial activity is not allowed, by regulation. How have you justified removing those rules?

As you know, 75% of Southern Albertans do not want the Castle logged anymore. You have heard from many thousands via email and telephone messages to your office. Your response to date is to maintain the status quo, which is business as usual. Where is the change in that?

So here we sit today, four old men who have joined the thousands of voices in Alberta and around the World, the voices for wilderness, wildlife, water conservation, forest integrity, sustainability, healthy recreation, and everything that is good and beautiful in the Southern Alberta Eastern Slopes.

Why don’t you make the real change you promised, and that you have the authority to make, and stop this betrayal of the public trust?

Beaver Mines Lake Campground in the Castle Special Place: the new view for campers will be of clear cuts. Welcome to Alberta.

Mike Judd

Jim Palmer

Reynold Reimer

Richard Collier

(If you want to get involved, please call Premier Redford at 310-0000 or from outside Alberta 780-427-2251 and ask that logging be halted and that the Castle be made a Wildland Park.)

It’s been a while since anybody called me a name while in a debate over an environmental issue; longer still since that person was a Minister of the Crown. I think the last one was Ralph Klein or Ty Lund.

But truth be told, the Honourable Minister was right. I am a radical.

I want to get to the root of this and other challenges that face Canada, and the world.

And that’s what a radical is: someone or something that “goes to the root or origin.” Mr. Oliver was likely thinking about a couple of the word’s other meanings when he made his pronouncement: “going to the extreme, especially as regards to change from accepted or traditional forms” or “favouring drastic political, economic, or social reforms.”

I’m okay with being labelled with both of those definitions too.

The fact of the matter is simple: radical change is needed in Canada, and around the world, to create a society that doesn’t destroy its life support system while going about its day to day business. That doesn’t mean we have to conjure an unsavoury images of hooded trouble-makers burning cars in the street. The most radical people I know are everyday, average citizens who work hard, pay their taxes, love their children and are trying to make a difference not only with their actions, but also with their hearts.

We don’t just need to stop a pipeline from being built across some of the most amazing landscapes in North America to belch bitumen into tankers that could foul some of the most pristine waters in the world; we need to address the underlying reason why humanity feels the need for the products that this filthy oil produces.

If that makes me a radical, fine. If that makes the vast majority of First Nations in BC, along with the diverse coalition of activists and community members who oppose the Northern Gateway project radicals, so be it. My fellow radicals and I are in good company. Ghandi was a radical for wanting to peacefully harmonize post-English India; Martin Luther King Junior was a radical for working for civil rights. Jesus Christ was a radical for teaching peace, and that the one true way to know God was through direct communication through prayer; Lord Buddha was a radical for teaching us that there is an end to suffering.

I am a radical because:

• I think that Canada’s natural resource wealth, and in particular our tar sands, shouldn’t be liquidated so that wealthy corporations based in the US, Europe and China, can get even richer;
• I believe that if we’re going to use tar sands oil, it should fuel a transition from a petroleum based economy to one that is sustained by sun, wind, tides and most importantly based on conservation, and
• I believe we need to address what underlies our insatiable thirst for the dirtiest energy on earth. I think we need to address the very root of this problem.

I know: radical.

I believe that the root of this challenge is that humanity is destroying the earth’s precious life support system to fuel a pell-mell consumerism in a vain effort to placate basic human suffering. It’s not the sort of suffering that can be cured with a trip to the doctor; it’s a spiritual hole that exists in every human being that we mistakenly try to fill with things.

Until we address this underlying issue we will continue to fight pipelines, tar sands projects, fracking, clear cutting, strip mining, damn building, and the inevitable degradation of natural ecosystems and creation of green house gasses that result.

Maybe the most radical idea is that every single one of us suffers, feels alone, fears death, is afraid of the unknown, mistakes the basic reality of human existence and has desires that can’t possibly be fulfilled with a bigger house or SUV or a new iPhone 4S. Instead of wondering why, we just keep on gobbling up the earth’s natural capital, hoping to ease our pain, necessitating the building of pipelines to pump more and more filthy oil to more and more hungry, unquenchable markets.

If wanting to put a stop to that makes me a radical, then I wear the moniker with pride.

Further reading:

The real foreign interests in the oilsands, Terry Glavin, The Ottawa Citizen.

Cozy Ties: Astroturf ‘Ethical Oil’ and Conservative Alliance to Promote Tar Sands Expansion, Emma Pullman, the DeSmog Blog

An open reply to Joe Oliver’s Propaganda for the Petro State, Andrew Nikiforuk, the Tyee

For updates follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

When Jack Layton died yesterday morning he left a gaping hole in Canadian politics. Soon there will be the predicable questions about whether the NDP and the Official Opposition can survive without him. That’s not what I am asking: What I want to know is who will step up and remind us through his or her every action, every word, that “love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair?”

The space left behind by Jack Layton is simply one of kindness, and of love. One of the quotes in the sound montage used by the CBC yesterday had Jack proclaiming that there were so many familiar faces in the room that he just wanted to wade in and hug everybody.

Really? Is it possible to imagine another Leader of the Official Opposition speaking like that? Maybe in time Jack’s true legacy will be that our leaders will see that if we’re trying to build a country, we can’t tear each other down in the process.

This morning my heart goes out to those who truly knew and loved Jack. His partner Olivia, his children Mike and Sarah and grandchildren who didn’t yet have the opportunity, but will in time know of his legend; and his colleagues in parliament and his myriad friends. Nothing ever really ends; nobody really dies: we just change. And maybe from this change, inspired by his final words to Canadians – “So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world” – we can learn that by wielding lightness, not the dark, will allow us to build a better word.

There has never been a time when thinking creatively, and acting with courage, was more important. And despite moving Canada back into the dark ages of climate-denial and finding ourselves at the back of the bus when it comes to global diplomacy, the Harper Conservatives have provided some important leadership on issues such a National Parks. There’s a small opening there – a chink in the armor maybe – where we can work to advance progressive issues.

The Conservative government of the last five years, as someone recently told me, doesn’t like to be criticized. Who does? We can make the mistake of trying to teach them a lesson about democracy and being “grown up” about it, but look what happens when you spend your time trying to teach Canadians a lesson about democracy: You end up losing your seat and your party.

Instead, people across Canada who want to make this country a better place, and restore its standing as a leader among nations on issues like climate change and poverty reduction, should take a lesson from Loa Tzu: “This is the universal truth; the soft shall overcome the hard.”

There’s no arguing with the fact that the Conservative majority will pose a hard obstacle to progress in Canada. We can spend our next four years battering ourselves against it, or we can find a way to move slowly around it, over it, under it, through it. In Taoism this is called Wu Wei, which means “not forcing.” Nobody is going to force Prime Minister Stephen Harper to do anything. We’re going to have to, as Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, suggests: “capture our opponent whole.” That means moving carefully to make it so our values, our vision, our passion, slowly becomes their own. We must find what they respond to – be it positive reinforcement or public accolades, as difficult as that may be to stomach – and exploit them as an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.

If we do not, we’ll find ourselves on the outside looking in, and watching all that we cherish about this beautiful nation slipping from our grasp. And we will only have ourselves to blame for its loss. Every moment in life is a choice. This choice is clear: accepting the reality of a polarized politic and gaining what we can, or raging against it, and losing it. It’s that stark a dichotomy.

And while we do this, organize for the future. The political environment across Canada has been dramatically recalibrated. Michael Ignatieff has resigned. And the BLOC Quebececios has been reduced to a fringe movement; this is maybe the best of all the outcomes from the May 2^nd vote. And though separatism is by no means dead, at the very least one of the key factors keeping the centre-left from uniting and moving forward together has been eliminated.

While we work to find ways to advance our goals under a Conservative majority, we must do exactly what Stephen Harper did to capture it: unite. It’s time to put ego and hubris and the fallacy of worn-out political history aside and come together under a single banner. It’s time to find common ground, and learn to live with our differences, and embrace the future as a united positive alternative. I simply can’t listen to people complain that with only 40% of the vote the Conservatives formed a majority any longer without demanding that the progressive voices in Canadian democracy join together to form an united, positive alternative.

And within that the Green Party will finally find its place in our House of Commons. Next to the defeat of the BLOC, the election of Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands is the single greatest thing that has happened for Canadian democracy in many, many years. She will make Canadians proud.

I hope that people who want a better Canada won’t spend too much time moaning about what may happen now under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. We may not like it much, but it’s what we’ve got; the sooner we make a choice to move forward, smartly, carefully, like water slowly but patiently wearing away at that which stands between us and our vision of Canada, the better. Our future is at stake; we are the ones who must make the choice about how we advance towards it.

In the 1990s I learned that to influence  policies and decisions about the environment, I had to learn to influence decision makers. In doing so, got to know many of them. At the same time I volunteered for a number of campaigns, including Liberal Stephen Owen, and New Democrats Denise Savoir, David Cubberley and Gregor Robertson, and for the late Andre Gareau, who was a dear friend and who served as a Town Councilor in Canmore for many years until his sudden death this past year.

Despite my propensity for supporting the NDP, I’ve only had the chance to vote for them sporadically. When I lived in David’s riding in Saanich, BC, I voted for him, and in later in Victoria I voted for Denise, but these have been exceptions rather than the rule.

For most of the elections of my adult life I’ve lived in Alberta’s Wildrose riding. It’s a peculiar riding that includes most of Banff National Park, Canmore and the rest of the Bow Valley, a huge swath of the forested foothills that edge the Rocky Mountains, and then cups around Calgary to include the commuter towns of Cochrane and Airdrie.

A lot of people think that because the mountainous Bow Valley attracts a lot of well educated, liberal minded sorts, that somehow this would be a close race between the right-wing parties and the left. But that’s never been the case. (The last time the Bow Valley had a left leading MP was in 1930 when Edward Joseph Garland beat the Conservative candidate on behalf of the United Farmers in the riding of Bow River. This organization, incidentally, still exists as a representative of feed stores and card-lock gas station operator.) When Myron Thompson was the Reform/Alliance and then Conservative MP here, he won with landslides: 63% in 1997; and then 70, 71, and 72% in subsequent elections. Myron – who I knew and respected and liked, through disagreed with on just about everything – had quadruple by-pass surgery and had to sit out the first two weeks of the 2000 election campaign out. He still won by a landslide.

And every single one of the 200+ polls in Wild Rose voted for Myron. Now Blake Richards, Myron’s former communications assistant, follows in his footsteps. Mr. Richards won the last election 73% of the vote. The Greens came in second, with12.6%, their strongest showing across the country. It was a safe place to park your vote.

I’m a strategic voter. I make no qualms about this. I want a government that will reflect my values, but I also want to defeat governments that stand in diametrical opposition to the things I believe in. And while I might have respected the hard working Myron Thompson, I did not want to see his party in government, and once they were elected, wanted them out. So, ironically, I voted for the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark in 2000, and then, because all hope was lost in Wildrose after the amalgamation of the Alliance and the PC’s, I too voted Green.

But something has happened in 2011 that allows me to vote with my heart, not my head. And I think many people across Canada have come to the same conclusion. I think a lot of Canadians, like myself, are coming out of the NDP closet this election; it’s a hypothesis that still has to be proven at the polls.

Staring on April 8^th, and beginning in Quebec, the NDP started an almost unbroken surge in the overnight tracking polls conducted by Nanos Research. They’ve gone from about 14% in the national polls to 31.6% as of yesterday, leapfrogging the floundering Liberal’s on April 26^th and closing the gap with the Harper Conservatives to just 6 points (just outside the margin of error). It makes you wonder what might happen if the election was to go on for another week or ten days.

A lot remains to be seen for this surge in support. Suddenly ridings with almost no NDP infrastructure are in play. In these ridings the all-important work of identifying, through weeks and weeks of phone calls and house-to-house visits, and then mobilizing the vote has not been done. Voters are left to their own devises to find their way to the polling stations.

As one NDP volunteer and former candidate recently told me, “they can get themselves to the voting booth” doesn’t always work out. People are forgetful, and distracted, and sometimes a little lazy or uninspired. If things are going well for their party, they think: “What does it matter if I vote?” If things are going poorly, they think: “My vote won’t make a difference.”

In 2006 I volunteered as a riding captain for David Cubberley in the provincial BC riding of South Sannich. I had a team of half a dozen volunteers and we spent twelve hours making phone calls to “pull the vote.” We had another two volunteers who, all day long, took calls from us directing them to pick up voters and get them to the polling stations. We had a dozen volunteers inside those polling stations “marking the vote.” Every time someone on our identified supporter list cast a ballot, we marketed it down, and once an hour we updated all of our call lists. Some people got three or four calls from us until they voted. In the end we estimated we got 70% of our identified voters to the poll, and we won, but not by a landslide.

Organization makes a difference in an election.

But so does hope. And so does passion. And I think what we’re seeing in Canada right now is a whole segment of our society who have come out of the closet and realized that it’s OK to identify with the left-of-centre NDP. In the past they’ve parked their support elsewhere – Conservative, Green, Liberal or BLOC – but this year, this time, it’s OK to say, “I’m voting NDP.”

This year, I am too.

If I was still living in the federal riding of Saanich Gulf Islands I’d be voting for my old friend and colleague, and current Green Party leader, Elizabeth May. Canada needs her in Parliament. Her election to the House could be the single greatest outcome of this election. If I was living in Victoria still, I’d be out pounding on doors and making phone calls and pulling vote until the very last moment of this election night.

Instead, I’ve used “Vote Pair” to make sure that my ballot counts twice. I’m voting for the NDP, and specifically for Jack Layton’s leadership, in Wildrose; and a new friend in Kitchener Centre, in Ontario, is voting Liberal, where the Conservative incumbent is in a tight race with former Liberal Whip Karen Redman (300 votes separated them in 2008).

Between us, we’re hoping to change Canada for the better.