Sheryl Neeb-Newnham comes to the front door with potting soil on her hands. She’s smiling, which seems awfully generous for someone whose gardening has just been interrupted by a stranger with a clipboard.
This is not how some of us react to door-knocking campaigns. Come to my house, you better be a Girl Guide selling cookies — the good ones, not that mint nonsense — if you don’t want to get chased with a pitchfork.
But no, Chris Naismith says residents are invariably decent when he presents them with the Dogwood Initiative’s petition against oil tankers on the B.C. coast. Half the people sign it. Only one in 10 don’t want to engage at all.
“The nice thing about being in Victoria is people are pretty polite, even if they disagree with you,” he says.
This is the fourth time Naismith has waded into Oak Bay-Gordon Head, one of the most hotly contested races in B.C., to push for the anti-tanker vote. The Dogwood Initiative calls itself non-partisan, but only in the sense that it will equally support all parties that oppose Enbridge and Kinder Morgan plans to ship diluted Alberta bitumen to Asia from pipelines terminating in Kitimat and the Lower Mainland.
The New Democrats and Greens are flat-out against the tanker plans, the Conservatives favour them and the Liberals have a foot on both sides, offering backing under five specific conditions. Therefore Dogwood, hoping to shift votes to the NDP or Greens, is concentrating on vulnerable Liberal ridings, specifically targeting those polling divisions in which the latter party was strongest in the last election. The enviro group’s foot soldiers are augmented by volunteers calling from phone banks. They have identified 4,311 people in Oak Bay-Gordon Head who have signed the No Tankers petition and whom they intend to get out on voting day.
The organization’s message is also tightly targeted. Dogwood doesn’t rail against fossil fuels, global warming, the Alberta oil sands or even pipelines — just the oil tankers and the consequences of a catastrophic spill. It’s an argument palatable to those who don’t oppose the oil industry, but who fear that in shipping off a precious, finite resource by the riskiest method possible, Canada would be playing Russian roulette with both its environment and energy security.
“They’re focused on the weak link in the whole issue — the tankers,” says Naismith. This week found him among a half dozen Dogwood volunteers canvassing a leafy Liberal enclave on either side of Foul Bay Road, near Camosun College.
That’s where he interrupted Neeb-Newnham gardening and asked her to sign the petition.
“Can I sign half?” she asked.
Neeb-Newnham is torn. She understands Naismith’s argument, but also understands the need for economic development. She has three teenagers who will need jobs.
And yes, the pipeline-tanker issue has already been a subject of vigorous discussion within her household.
“We debate this around the dinner table. We’ve got to stop talking about it because it’s dividing the family, so to speak.” One teenager vehemently opposes the pipeline plans, another tilts toward them and a third is undecided. So is Neeb-Newnham. “It’s hard. I don’t know whether I should sign the petition or not.”
Aside from the realization that some families still eat (and talk) around the dinner table, what was encouraging about this little tableau — he with his clipboard, she with earth on her hands — was that they were both so invested in the matter.
Naismith, a 29-year-old Saanich-raised engineer with his own young family, says he got involved because he is dismayed by the notion that the economy and environment are always presented as an either/or proposition, one being sacrificed for the other. “We need to stop this dichotomy,” he says.
Neeb-Newnham, wrestling with the relative merits of the oil-tanker question, didn’t object to this stranger’s intrusion in her yard, his disruption of her daily life. “I’m glad you’re doing this,” she told him. “Good for you.” Some of us would have gone for the pitchfork instead, but this was democracy in action, civilized and respectful.
It was a nice contrast to the bullhorn rhetoric that so often passes for debate, or to federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Olive’s demonization of “environmental and other radical groups.”
Think of that when those backing politicians of whatever stripe knock on your door this week. These are people who believe in something, and they’re walking the walk.
