Q. When is "green" not green? A. When you're driving a car instead of taking a bus, no matter how fuel efficient that car is. Which brings us to Rodney MacDonald's announcement yesterday that the province will implement a "green fleet" policy.
The announcement was made as part of the opening remarks at the provincially hosted Power of Green Conference. (I'm attending the conference Monday and Tuesday. I'll post a few reactions the next couple of days, then write about it for my column next week.)
Rodney was late for the conference because heavy traffic on the MacKay Bridge delayed him. I don't necessarily expect the premier to take the bus, and I'm not suggesting exactly that the 250 conference attendees by themselves caused the traffic jam (although they surely added to it) but certainly at least some of the assembled conventioneers could have taken mass transit to what is, after all, an environmental conference. But apparently not, as several of the early morning speakers mentioned the heavy traffic, and my casual survey found that only one attendee-- ahem-- took the bus. Just to show you the mindset here.
It's not a small point.
Rodney's "green fleet" policy is simple: every provincial vehicle purchase will be reviewed such that each vehicle is one of the 20 percent most fuel efficient in its class. Good enough. That makes sense, and should have been policy long ago, for simply financial reasons, if not environmental concerns (less fuel consumption means lower operating costs).
But in the scheme of things, this is a small, small improvement: the province owns about 2,300 vehicles, a tiny amount of the provincial total. So while the green fleet is a sensible step, much more can be done by adopting a sensible overall transportation policy, including government support for mass transit.
This was brought into sharp focus with an exchange just an hour after Rodney's announcement. Terry Smith, an architect with the Department of Transportation, asked Nancy Vanstone, the acting deputy minister of the department of environment, how the province could at all meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, seeing how new suburban sprawl like Dartmouth Crossing is building apace. What is the province doing to increase mass transit opportunities, asked Smith.
"There are no specific targets," admitted Vanstone. "We do need to look at that."
Once again, we see the province setting forth wonderful targets (the GHG emission targets implemented as law), but doing nothing to actually meet those targets. A green fleet policy, by itself, just doesn't cut it.
