By Ira Basen

How green can they go? At least two federal parties are pledging to wage "carbon neutral" campaigns.

The NDP and the Liberals are vowing to purchase carbon offsets (worth about $60,000 in the case of the NDP) to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions caused by their campaign planes criss-crossing the country over the next five weeks.

Until the 1950s, Canadian campaigns were waged mainly from the backs of train cars. Party leaders would travel across the country, stopping to meet voters and deliver speeches at towns and hamlets along the way.

But these "whistle-stop" tours eventually gave way to the modern air war and, these days, campaigning by train, as Green party Leader Elizabeth May is pledging to do, is seen as a novelty, a quaint throw-back to an earlier era.

Is all this air travel necessary?

Campaigning by airplane has obvious advantages. Our country is large, our elections are short and flying around the country theoretically allows our political leaders to meet more voters in more places than they ever could on the ground.

But then along came global warming and air travel has become much more costly on a variety of fronts.

The David Suzuki Foundation estimates that air travel accounts for four to nine per cent of the total climate change impact caused by human activity.

And in the past few years, as concerns about global warming grew, a carbon offset industry emerged that allowed environmentally conscious travellers (and political parties) to pay money to organizations involved in renewable energy projects in some kind of rough equivalency.

The offset industry

Buying these carbon offsets is undoubtedly better than doing nothing. How much better is a matter of considerable debate within the scientific community.

There are many variables that affect how much CO2 your particular flight is emitting: wind speed, number of passengers and time of day are just a few. As a result, putting an actual number on your flight's emissions is more about guesswork than actual science.

The reality is that nothing says carbon neutral like not flying at all.

So here's an idea. Instead of trying to get all greened up by paying for carbon offsets, why don't party leaders just clip their wings and promise to stop flying around the country so much?

Gotta meet the people

But what about the opportunity to "meet the people," to "find out what's on the voters' minds," and all the other political shibboleths that get trotted out at campaign time?

Well, if that's what really happened when the leaders and their entourage were jetting across the country, it would be hard to argue this is a bad idea.

But the days of the whistle stop are long gone. It has been a long time since politicians travelled to a town because they were genuinely interested in interacting with voters there. These days, travel is basically going from one photo op to another, one highly staged event to another, one interview to another.

Take, for example, the first two days of Stephen Harper's campaign. It began in Ottawa with an early morning drive to Rideau Hall (four cars needed to cross Sussex Drive).

By noon, the Conservative campaign plane was fuelled up and ready to fly 380 kilometres to Quebec City.
There, the motorcade proceeded to a rally in front of about 200 supporters to introduce Conservative candidates from the Quebec City area.

An hour later the rally was over and Harper, his entourage, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press were back at the airport for a five-and-a-half-hour, 3,785 kilometre jaunt to Vancouver.

Next morning, it was off to the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, to the home of Edwin and Fei Huang, for a photo op with the couple's two young children. (The picture of Harper in a sweater vest feeding the couple's youngest child received big play in Canadian newspapers the following day.) Then it was back to the cars and back to the airport for the next stop on the campaign tour, Regina, about 1,300 kilometres away.

Estimated carbon dioxide emitted, according to the organization Tree Canada (not including automobile travel): about 750 kilograms.

Number of voters met who were not already Conservative supporters: not a lot.

They're all doing it

Of course, Harper is not alone is running this kind of drive-by/fly-by campaign. On the campaign's second day, NDP Leader Jack Layton started in Calgary, flew to Fort Smith N.W.T., then Vancouver and finally Regina — and only spoke to reporters and supporters along the way.

En route to Fort Smith, the plane did a slow pass over the Alberta oilsands so Layton could be photographed looking out the window decrying the pollution caused by oilsand exploration. Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion would surely have engaged in similar travel if only the Liberal plane had been ready to fly when the writ was dropped.

These trips satisfy the minimum requirements of the modern campaign. They provide the raw material to satisfy the voracious appetite of the press for pictures and sound bites. They give local supporters the impression that their leader truly cares about them.

Travel does broaden the mind, and if our political leaders were really concerned about learning more about the concerns of people in different parts of the country, no one would argue with that. Were we not facing what most people consider to be a climate change crisis, we could probably continue to carry on campaigning as usual.

But the reality is that the world is changing when it comes to the environment and zinging across the country for a photo op or a media interview that could be just as easily done via satellite is a luxury we can probably no longer afford.

So which of our national parties will be the first to take up the real challenge and forget about paying guilt money to carbon offset companies?

Who will promise to fly less and to bus and train more? Or even who will agree to a serious exchange with real voters every time they fly to a different part of the country?

The world has changed. Our campaigns haven't. Maybe it's time they did.