I’m not talking about the Green Party [at the federal level]. I think the Green Party is a terrible strategy. You know why? You’re not going to elect a Green Party person to the provincial legislature or Ottawa probably for ten years. Hey, if you wanna work on that, go ahead. But if you want to elect people who are green, there’s only one way to do it effectively, and that’s locally. I was a member of the NDP, those people worked on my campaign, and I got into city hall. And I was there as a green. They were looking at projects, saying “So if we build this overpass, what’s it gonna cost? How many cars around there? Forty million dollars- OK, let’s budget that.”
And I would say “Wait a minute… how much money was that? Is there a bus service there? No? What would it cost to extend the bus line? Bring the transit guy up here.” And start fleshing out and at least getting into the culture that there are choices here. And the media would be there, they have to write a story every day, a boring council meeting, and then there you go, something new.
And then it’s time to vote on the issue, a forty million dollar overpass. And I get my five minutes to speak– just lambaste ‘em. Lambaste ‘em! “What are you guys doing?” I mean, for change to happen, you have to imagine what the change is. People have to be able to dream it, and it has to be part of the culture. If people never hear about it, they’re gonna think that the overpass is the only choice. See, at first, the discussion was “Should we build an overpass, or should we build an underpass?” [laughing] Those are the choices, A or B. Now what about C? Let’s say we spend just twenty million and put it into a bike path or something.
The nice thing about city politics, we know when elections are coming. The really nice thing about Montreal city politics is that you have so many councillors in City Hall that it doesn’t take a lot of votes to get elected. You can have three or four thousand votes and get in there. If you do your homework and legwork, knock on doors, and get through to people to get them voting out on election day, you have a chance of getting elected.
In Edmonton, I was the only member of council who voted against a renovation of the Coliseum, for Peter Pocklington, essentially. Each level of government put in four million dollars for this infrastructure program. And Peter Pocklington put in three million dollars. I mean look, this guy’s a businessman, right? And he was threatening, if we didn’t do it, he was gonna move the team. Two years later, Pocklington’s threatening to move the team. All this time, they’re saying “We have no money: homeless people, soup kitchens, ecological stuff, neighbourhood composting, bicycle paths– we have no money!” Then boom, twelve million dollars show up. The money’s there; it’s a question of priorities.
In Edmonton, I didn’t just bring to the table whatever idea I’d thought of the night before. I would research everything, files, court stuff, say “They’re doing this in San Francisco; they’re trying this in Berlin.” And I’d move a motion, someone on council would second it, they’d bring the head of the department up to talk about it. Now all these substantial issues about how the city runs, better ways of doing things, saving money, protecting the environment, I was putting on the table.
But the one thing the media, especially the tabloids like the Edmonton Sun, used as their constant refrain, was the fact that they didn’t like the way I dressed. I refused to wear a necktie. And I couldn’t have anticipated it. Headlines! Articles! Editorials! Letters to the editor! And when something starts to appear in the tabloids, then they’re talking about it on talk radio. Round and round, there was nothing I could do about it. And I was knocking on doors, and people would say “Oh, you’re the guy who doesn’t wear a necktie.”
I mean, it wasn’t everybody who cared about it, but it was enough people. I only lost ten percent of my support, but that’s what sank me. Because of the necktie! I have two gigantic oversized scrapbooks of the articles about stuff I was bringing up at city council. And you do a Chomsky-style analysis of column inches: the thing that saved the city 300 million dollars, I stopped the expansion of a water treatment plant; it was already in the budget and was about to be voted on, and I stopped it, I proved we didn’t need to spend the 300 million dollars. And it gets this little article in the paper to the effect that the city saved 300 fucking million dollars! But the tie– oh, articles and articles, and photos…
That’s when I really started noticing the media. The people who own the Montreal Gazette or Edmonton Sun or whatever, those editors don’t have to look over their shoulders and tell them how to write a story. It’s very clear that when you work for the Edmonton Sun and there’s an editorial that’s making fun about the way someone’s dressing, for example, and you see something later on that could tie into that, you know your editors are going to like it, so right away you’re ahead five hundred words.
FP: Yeah, it runs by itself.
TG: Yeah. Yeah. But you have to keep going, and there’s a lot of things I’d like to bring to the table for the election in Montreal. In England, apparently, twenty years ago, something like eighty percent of the kids walked to school. And now it’s like something like twenty percent. So what do you do? How do you deal with it? There’s something called the Walking Schoolbus. It started in Denmark or something. What it is, is one parent, with a kid, walking and picking up other kids along the way. And tying all these kids together using a rope or something, and by the end, twenty or thirty kids walk the ten or twelve blocks to school, instead of twenty cars or something like that. Multiply that by all the schools, then all the cities in England… Then imagine if you can carry that idea to other cities, and multiply that. And it all starts at the local level.

Tooker, you sure tried hard, and it probably seemed these past years that the world didn’t appreciate it. I don’t think anyone who knew you could imagine you giving up, though. I guess you chose to stop instead of live without fighting. But we can’t all be faced with such a choice, or else where would humanity end up?
I guess we’ll just have to keep trying.
See www.greenspiration.org for info on the Tooker Gomberg Greenspiration Fund.

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