Beyond the Politics of Left and Right: Beliefs and Values of Environmental Activists in British Columbia

Abstract

WHEN T H E B R I T I S H COLUMBIA New Democratic Party returned to power in the early 1990s, conflict between two of the party's core constituencies came to the fore. Key NDP commitments during the 1991 campaign were to labour, including the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) union, and to citizens and organizations concerned about the environment. In government, the NDP has been less than successful in meeting these, often conflicting, commitments. Indeed the management and use of Crown forests has been one of the most persistent and vexing policy problems the NDP government has faced. Environmentalists have voiced bitter criticism of the government's forest policy, arguing that it has sacrificed the health of forests and communities to appease the IWA and powerful corporate interests. Tha t a left-of-centre government would be plagued by dissension from the environmentalist elements of its constituency would not be surprising to students of environmental politics in Europe. These analysts have argued that environmentalism is part of a new politics, independent of traditional left-right party cleavages (Ofie 1985; Dalton 1994). But the schism dividing the NDP and the environmental movement in British Columbia is intriguing, given the results of recent research that links environmentalist and leftist perspectives in western Nor th America and in Canada generally (Ellis and Thompson 1997; Blake et al. 1996-7; Kanji 1996). D o environmentalists and the NDP occupy different branches of the left? Do environmentalist objections