By Mary-Catherine McIntosh
Judging by David Chernushenko’s enthusiasm, you’d swear he must be talking about something else. But the Ottawa Centre Green Party candidate seems truly excited about his home’s new, energy-efficient water heater.
“It’s tankless,” he says, smiling widely. “You don’t have to heat water when you’re not using it.”
He says the heater will save him about 50 per cent in water heating costs this year.
In this election, Chernushenko hopes to put his commitment to the environment into political action for the Green Party.
Chernushenko, who is also one of the party’s deputy leaders, ran for the first time in the 2004 federal election. He won 4,700 votes — about 7.5 per cent of those cast.
Under new party financing rules, Chernushenko garnered more than $8,000 in annual funding for his party and he hopes to turn the new-found cash into votes.
“The last election was sort of our ‘get noticed and establish credibility as being more than an environmental party’ election,” Chernushenko says, sitting at the large kitchen table in his Centretown home.
He says the 2004 election showed Canadians the Green Party isn’t a collection of “fringe wing-nuts, but actually sensible people with a logical message.”
But many Canadians have had trouble fitting the Green Party into the political spectrum. The Green Party leader, Jim Harris, is a former Tory, whose fiscal policies — such as lowering corporate income taxes — seem to some to be right-leaning, yet the party also supports same-sex marriage and freedom of choice for abortions.
The son of a diplomat, Chernushenko, 42, says that he “either grew up in Ottawa, Finland, Malaysia, or Lebanon.” He has lived in Ottawa for almost 20 years in total, but spent more time in other places around the world — including completing a master’s degree in international relations in England and working as a journalist and photographer in Japan.
From his solar-panel heated home office, Chernushenko, runs Green & Gold, an environmental consulting company. He has also written three books on the environment.
“I try to ask myself most days, you know, is there another way of doing this.”
Usually he’s found the answer to be yes. His fridge, dishwasher, washer and dryer, furnace and even light bulbs are all as energy-efficient as possible.
Chernushenko says he and his wife, chose their Old Ottawa South home because of its central location. Chernushenko can bike or take the bus almost everywhere he needs to go, while his wife, a linguistics professor at Carleton, can walk to work.
“We do own a car and we do use it, especially with children. But we try to only use it when we have to and we make our trips by combining as many errands as possible.”
While Chernushenko says he likes to keep his family life private, one look around the kitchen makes it clear that his children — Gaia, 10, and Eric, 12 — live here. Beside the kitchen table is a small school desk topped with miniature Plasticine figurines — among them, a dime-sized duck. On one wall is a large collage of family photographs and the fridge is decorated with a brightly- coloured painting with “G-A-I-A” painted across the bottom.
“In 20 years I want to be glad that I pursued a vision and that I found the courage to do what I feel needs to be done,” says Chernushenko. “I see politics as the most viable and urgent way to try to pursue my ultimate goal of helping the human society to live more sustainable.”