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"Since the last election, only one party has improved significantly its standing: the Greens," The Globe's Jeffrey Simpson wrote Saturday in his column Great on climate change, but not much else

"Without seats in the last Parliament and their largely unknown policies, they have roughly doubled their poll numbers to 10 per cent from 5 per cent. Can they sustain these gains, or build on them, by voting day?

"New Democrats and Liberals had better hope not, since Greens attract voters from these established parties. But they also bring into politics some citizens for whom electoral politics never offered much of interest.

"Greens, therefore, are the country's political wild card. Having leader Elizabeth May in the televised debates gives them their best chance ever to impress. And as the only woman, and the only "outsider," Ms. May could make quite a splash. She will be always on the attack, since the other leaders won't waste much time on a marginal party.

"So where do the Greens stand? Their 119-page policy document, Vision Green, shows where - way, way out on the political left."

Mr. Simpson adds: "It's a general rule of politics that the further removed from power, the less credible a party's platform, an observation that can be made about Vision Green. It gets one major policy largely right - the importance of tackling climate change with economic tools by taxing carbon emissions - but then overestimates carbon savings from alternative energies such as wind, solar and biomass, efficiency gains from conservation, public transit and vehicle emission standards.

"The Greens, like the NDP, take themselves very seriously indeed, but are fortunate that most Canadians do not. As a result, the Greens can publish their vast wish list without any serious reflection on how to pay for it, even assuming some of the proposals were worth doing or could be done."

Whether you agree or not, it's a provocative thesis, so we at globeandmail.com were pleased to have Mr. Simpson take your questions earlier today.

Your questions and Mr. Simpson's answers appear at the bottom of this page.

Mr. Simpson has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes — the Governor-General's award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award for column writing (twice). He has also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism. In January 2000, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

He joined The Globe and Mail in 1974. His career with the newspaper began at City Hall in Toronto and with coverage of Quebec politics. In 1977, he became a member of the paper's Ottawa bureau, and eighteen months later he was named The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau chief. From 1981-1983, Mr. Simpson served as The Globe's European correspondent based in London, England. He began writing his national affairs column in January, 1984.

Mr. Simpson has published six books — Discipline of Power (1980); Spoils of Power (1988); Faultlines, Struggling for a Canadian Vision (1993); The Anxious Years (1996) and Star-Spangled Canadians (2000). His most recent book, The Friendly Dictatorship: Reflections on Canadian Democracy (2001), was nominated for the Donner Prize as the best book on public policy.

Editor's Note: globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. HTML is not allowed. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.

Editor's Note: The following is a globeandmail.com interactive presentation of the Green Party platform. We will be doing the same for all the other parties when they release their platforms.

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Gary Wilson, Calgary: Mr. Simpson, Mr. Harper has been aggressive with his carbon tax shift fear-and-smear campaign perhaps for many reasons, but certainly included in those reasons is that it's so easy to distort and attack.

My hunch is he knows it's a promising and proven economic policy, but is opting for the easy campaign smear.

In your estimation, what chance (if any) do you see of Harper doing an about-face and implementing an effective price on carbon once the campaign is over (assuming of course he wins the election)?

Obviously it would need to be branded as something different to allow him to save face.

Jeffrey Simpson: Gary, I see no chance of Mr. Harper doing what you propose.

Indeed if the Green Shitt fails then I, as someone who favors a carbon tax with offsets on personal and corporate income taxes, must concede that the policy will not be picked up politically for a long time.

In other words, politicians of every stripe will be unwilling to take the political risks involved. It will therefore be like private delivery of health services paid for publicly, something permitted under the Canada Health Act but deemed political suicide by politicians everywhere.

We will therefore settle for a series of rather ineffectual but feel-good policies such as the Conservatives "eco" ones — energy efficiency etc — and intensity targets from which companies can and will escape by paying into a technology fund which will bring benefits perhaps many years from now.

When and if the Americans establish a cap-and-trade system, as Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have endorsed, we will seek to negotiate joining the U.S. system to make it a North American one.

Similarly, should the Americans adopt tougher vehicle emission standards than those proposed by the Harper government, we will toughen ours.

In other words, the Americans will save us from our own policy incoherence. We are certainly going to miss Mr. Harper's target of a 20-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 based on a 2006 base line.

Every outside group that I am aware of from bank economists to the Sierra Club has said so.

Albin Forone: What do you think of the Green (carbon tax plus cap/trade, no tax breaks) proposal versus the Liberal (carbon tax with personal and corporate income tax offsets) proposals?

I'm a booster of the carbon tax because it recaptures some of the revenues lost in the stupid Tory GST cuts, and it puts income in the pockets of individuals and companies, motivating them to find creative ways to save on carbon use.

I'm distrustful of cap/trade because I think when all those well-meaning environmentalists in their groovy heritage lofts running Mac computers become Ottawa bureaucrats in dry buildings running Windows, they will become nerdy inefficient schmoozers of the type we can do with fewer, not more, of.

Jeffrey Simpson: Albin, I had dinner last night with three of the country's leading public policy economists. I cannot use their names because it was a private, social dinner.

The subject turned to the carbon tax. All favored it, as many economists do, because a tax is comprehensive, simple, and visible. Of course there are challenges in design, but there are also with cap-and-trade system, as the Europeans discovered.

But the politics of the tax are bad because the salesman is unpopular (Dion), because the Conservatives and NDP are hammering it, and because energy prices soared at the very moment it was being presented. I could add a few other problems in design and timing.

In public life, if you are going to present something different, it's important to establish some kind of timeline, as in: "If you elect me, and we do this and this, then within this period of time something will happen."

So, when Paul Martin said to trust him because "come hell or high water" he would eliminate the deficit, and he did, then he got rewarded for the effort.

The Green Shift can't promise specific reductions within a fixed period of time, because that's not how tax policies work.

Similarly, the greenhouse gas challenge is international, so that even if we make major efforts and other polluting countries do not, then many Canadians will say: "What's the point?"

Al Brekke: Dear Mr. Simpson, the Greens have the Green Vision. The Liberals have the Green Shift. Both plans details are pretty much available if one cares to look for it.

Now the question is what's up with the Conservatives Green Plan. Is there a plan? Is there a policy paper on it? Do you know whether the plan is going to be launched sometime soon and hopefully before the election. Is it the infamous "turning the corner" plan.

The MSM has bombarded us with the pros -- but mostly cons -- of the first two plans in details. I would like you to extend the same favor to us for the Conservative green plan.

Jeffrey Simpson: Al, the Conservatives have said nothing in the campaign about greenhouse gas emissions, except that they have a "plan," before launching into an attack on the Liberal Green Shift.

They do have a "plan," of sorts. It is based on getting GHGs down from a 2006 baseline by 20 per cent by 2020. I and almost everyone outside the Conservtive Party do not think the plan will achieve that objective, but we shall see.

In any event, it consists of (a) a series of small programs under the heading "eco" that are designed to get people to use energy more efficiently and to promote non-fossil fuel use, (b) intensity improvements in the emissions produced by larger emitters, (c) payment into a technology fund if emitters do not meet their reductions, (d) tighter vehicle emission standards, and (e) the completely useless ethanol subsidies for farmers to grow more corn. They have also muted the possibility of a national cap-and-trade system.

Kathryn Harrington, Edmonton: Why do people write as if by voting for the Green Party, you will be adopting all their policies and platforms?

Nobody expects them to form the government, just the way nobody expects the Bloc or the NDP to.

Electing even one or two members to Parliament will affect what happens in the governing of this country by giving the Greens exposure and influence. Then they have the time (and money) to mature as a party.

Heck, with the time they've been playing bridesmaid and the influence the NDP has had in the latest government, you'd think their party plank of bringing in proportional representation so that all our votes would actually mean something would have been a slam dunk!

Jeffrey Simpson: Kathryn, you are right. Nobody takes the Green platform seriously, apart from those who wrote and those running on it. It has all the earmarks of a document written by someone, or some group, far removed from the realities of basic economics and government.

I was fortunate in the early 1980s to be based in Europe and spent a great deal of time in Europe's most important country, Germany, where the Green were just starting. I interviewed some of their leaders, including Petra Kelly.

They were where Canada's Greens are now, way out on the left, except that the German Greens also did a lot of street demonstrating. As time has gone on, and the Greens have joined some national and lander coalition governments, they have married their environmental concerns with the realities of governing. They have, therefore, matured.

Perhaps this will happen here, although as you say, the first-past-the-post system obviously makes it hard for a German-style coalition to emerge.

Mervin Hollingsworth, Saskatoon: To have four-left wing parties sitting in the House with the centre right trying to govern would be a recipe for disaster.

Ms. May will be a distraction on debate night and the time of those that have an opportunity to run the country will be seriously limited.

Jeffrey Simpson: Mervin, we've often had this problem in Canadian debates of too many participants. We had it with the Social Credit, the Bloc, the NDP. I agree. But whaddya going to do?

The dynamics of these debates are always the same: the opposition leaders no matter how numerous gang up on the prime minister.

The only good thing is that the moderator, Steve PAkin of TVO Ontario, is superb, the best in the country.

The U.S. vice-presidential debate the same night will be more interesting.

Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Thanks, Jeffrey. I'm sure our readers appreciated your insight and analysis.

To our readers: Mr. Simpson will be taking your questions online every Monday for the rest of the Oct. 14 election campaign.