The Green Party of Canada’s economic platform is heavily tilted toward environmental sustainability, but that’s not the party’s sole focus in the economic realm. It promises to maintain balanced budgets and aim for surpluses to continue paying down the country’s debt.

In addition, the Green party has taken strong a position on many of the economic issues affecting the financial services industry and Canadians in general. For instance, the party favours a single national regulator to oversee all aspects of the financial services.

Calling the current patchwork of 17 regulators in Canada “a bureaucratic nightmare,” Green party Leader Jim Harris says the creation of a single federal body would help restore trust in investment regulation in the country and reduce costs for the businesses involved.

“I’m staggered that it’s been allowed to go on this long,” says Harris in an interview with Investment Executive while he was on the election trail on the east coast. “Business wants it changed and this is what a national government is for.”

The Green party’s platform also includes changes in the goods and services tax that would see the tax gradually lowered on some goods and services in several industries, but slightly raised in others.

“We would keep it at 7% in most cases, but eliminate it on green products and services such as mass transit, including bus passes and sports equipment like bikes,” says Harris, adding that the GST would be eliminated on organic food services as well. In contrast, the party would increase the GST to 8% on fuel-inefficient vehicles like Hummers.

The GST plank is part of the party’s general aim to change the taxation system “to better reflect the social, environmental and economic priorities of Canadians.”

Naturally, key parts of the party’s platform are focused on the oil and gas industry in particular. Although the party’s approaches will rankle the industry at first, Harris says it will make it much more efficient in the future.

The party would eliminate oil and gas subsidies, which totalled about $40 billion in the last 30 years, he says. In addition, it would also shift about $3.5 billion in yearly tax revenue from personal taxes to the oil and gas industry by taxing companies more heavily during their early years of production, which is when a company’s activities are the hardest on the environment.

“We would reduce personal tax burdens by shifting tax away from Canadians toward the oil industry, while also becoming the most efficient oil and gas industry globally,” he says.

Harris points to London-based BP plc, an energy company that has met its Kyoto standards eight years ahead of schedule while reducing costs. The Green Party’s platform would help the Canadian industry achieve those sorts of targets by forcing it to operate much more efficiently, he says.

Harris admits that prices at the pump might rise in Canada because the industry would be forced to absorb higher taxation costs at first, but the cost to average Canadians would be neutral because of the personal tax cuts that the party proposes.

The Green party also proposes allowing corporations to pool pension funds to provide improved risk management with more aggressive investment strategies. This would increase financial returns and tax deductibility levels for employer contributions as well as define the status of pension fund surpluses.

As well, it recommends that the Canadian Pension Plan invest only in environmentally and socially sustainable businesses.