The Green party is more left than the Liberals. They've had Pharmacare, Preventative Dentalcare and a Negative Income Tax on their party platform for years now. On the Student Loan front, they want to work towards Abolishing Tuition and eliminating existing Student Debt through increased interest free periods.
Where is the Liberal positions on half of these items? Sure. The're not the NDP. But they're a hell of a lot more progressive than the LPC tries to claim itself to be.
The Greens are more left on social and environmental issues, but that tells only part of the story.
The Greens get accused for being centrist and/or right-wing based mostly on their history and policy positions other than environmental and social, mostly foreign and economic, though they have at least one controversial environmental position, too. The leader prior to May was quite a libertarian, as well, which was admittedly a horrid look for them and I'm glad that May took the party back in a better direction.
But now, anything that brings a whiff of being deviant from the traditional leftist position occupied by the NDP would give the appearance of being regressive, centrist or even right-wing. Some examples:
- as has been mentioned here before, the NDP holds a much stronger position on worker rights and protections (which is entirely unsurprising), especially under Singh
- they sternly believe that handgun bans are ineffective and all effort should be placed on stopping the import of illegal unregistered handguns from the US, which is an issue that divides many on the left and I myself am of 2 minds about
- their foreign policy or, more accurately, the glaring lack of it, which is difficult to characterize as either right or left wing
- their position of anti-GMO crop growth and anti-GMO research funding in Canada, which is again difficult to characterize as left or right on the spectrum but easily comes off as something from the conspiratorial right wing
- their anti-nuclear power stance, which angers a subset of environmentalists but is a correct position to take IMO, at least until we have a permanent solution to storage of high-level nuclear waste one way or the other (we only just started narrowing down candidate locations for a deep geological repository site for the high-level waste and are storing waste on-site, meaning our aging power plants cannot be decommissioned until that has been concluded)
- abolition of monarchal rule (not a position held by May personally, but one that many in her party agree with), a position most often held by the right wing
- accusations that they are more concerned with the environment than they are with the poor (and I can't deny there are a lot of bougie white environmentalists in the party, but there's not enough info to validate this claim)
There's a bit more, but I'm losing TV time compiling this, so...
It's a lot of policy positions that are sometimes difficult to place on the spectrum, but reflect poorly on the Greens' leftist cred all the same, depending on who's looking.
Personally, I'm of the mindset that the left has a lot more flexibility than it allows itself to exercise in that they can be in favour of the same end result policy in both intent and efficacy but still have different methods to get there, whereas the right has basically boxed themselves into one method with the only difference between one over the other being to what severity they employ it.
Conservatives have convinced nearly everyone that the only position the left can take is being tax-and-spend politicians and that conservatives are the ONLY type of politician that can offer other fiscal options like cutting programs, slashing spending or reducing budget bloat, making these 2 positions part of the left-right dichotomy. This is also where some of the Greens-as-centrists dialogue comes from, being less aggressive on certain types of taxation than the NDP.
I'm of the mind that what better differentiates right and left here isn't cuts versus taxation, but
which programs are cut,
where spending is slashed and
what is considered to be bloating the budget, along with
how much the spending is decreased in these areas. One could hardly consider cutting military spending, government advertising (sometimes read: propaganda) or corporate subsidies (O&G and logging, precisely) to be right-wing actions, after all, just like I logically don't equate new taxation exclusively with the left (although conservative politicians, through their own bluster, have made the introduction of new taxes under their watch akin to tanking their chances at re-election). But cutting spending in those 3 areas are part of how Greens expect to pay for some of their proposals and, from an outside perspective, far more aggressively than any other party was willing to in 2015. They do also propose increased taxation, in addition to that, but more as a measure to take other taxation away (like removing income tax on $20K or less earners) or to promote better ecology beyond GHG reductions (a modest "toxin tax" on industrial pollutants that is not revenue-neutral).
I can see where the argument comes from, but Greens as centrists doesn't hold a lot of water, at the end of the day. Unless I missed something, of course.
