April 6, 2007

Greens must keep focused on cause

Henry Srebrnik, The Calgary Herald

The Green party clearly is riding the crest of the environmentalist wave in Canada. The debate about global warming, the arguments over the controversial Kyoto accord and the various proposals to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – these have been front row center in Canadian politics for the past year.

Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, derided by many as “climate change deniers,” have been playing catch-up on these issues.

But for obvious reasons, no party is better positioned to take advantage of the anxiety Canadians feel about our climate than Elizabeth May’s Green party – the Liberals and the New Democratic Party notwithstanding.

Some recent opinion polls show the Greens at close to 10 per cent of the national vote.

Still, the party must be careful to differentiate its policies from the Liberals and NDP, lest voters choose one of the latter two when going to the polls. After all, why bother with a “minor, one-issue” group, when Stephane Dion or Jack Layton can also deliver on climate change – along with many other matters of concern to the electorate?

So the Greens may be making a tactical error by focusing their fire mainly on Harper, even though he is ideologically the one furthest from their views.

For example, Vancouver environmentalist Briony Penn has taken Elizabeth May’s message that the Conservatives must be beaten to its logical conclusion. She recently left the Green party to become a Liberal.

May ran second to the Liberal candidate in a by-election in the Ontario riding of London North Centre last November, beating both the Conservatives and NDP and garnering more than a quarter of the vote.

But now she has decided to challenge Peter MacKay, the MP for the Central Nova riding and the last leader of the old Progressive Conservative party, in the next federal election. This smacks of political symbolism: Does she feel MacKay’s decision to merge the PCs with Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance in 2003 was a form of ideological treason?

It is interesting to note that in the London by-election, May was endorsed by Mort Glanville, a former president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and by Halton MP Garth Turner, a former Progressive Conservative who had been expelled from Harper’s Conservative caucus a month earlier, and now sits as a Liberal.

All of this indicates to me that the Green party, perhaps not consciously, is filling the niche in Canadian politics left by the demise of the PCs, a party that was by the 1990s, following the exit of those who moved over to the Reform party in the West and the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, a vague “feel good” place for people who found the Liberals too power-hungry and ambitious, and the NDP too left-of-centre and union-dominated. Have many of the old “Red Tories,” the followers of Joe Clark, now turned Green?

We once again have three parties that share, in a large sense, a similar vision of Canada, as a “kinder, gentler” country that cares for the environment and practices “soft power” abroad. Indeed, May hopes that the Liberals and NDP might stay out of the Central Nova race.

This informal Liberal/NDP/Green “coalition” will face the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois, two parties with very different visions of the country, in the next election.

Will this result in vote splitting among environmentalists, allowing the Conservatives to win many ridings with small pluralities? If so, will the Greens and NDP eventually merge, as the parties on the right finally did? Or might many Greens even join the Liberals? We definitely live in interesting times.