By Jon Roe
Tuesday’s federal election was supposed to be a breakthrough one for the federal Green Party. Instead, they now sit in the same situation they have been the last few years: no elected MPs and a decent amount of popular support spread throughout the country.
Though the inclusion of Green leader Elizabeth May in the national debates is a victory for the party, there is lack of progress elsewhere due to May’s decision to run against Conservative defence minister Peter MacKay in the riding of Central-Nova. May lost to MacKay by fewer than 6,000 votes or 14 per cent of the popular vote.
May made the decision to create a high profile race with a federal minister. In the end, it may have done more harm than good to the Green Party. Winning a seat was the last step towards legitimacy for the Greens.
May would have had a much better chance had she cherry-picked a riding with a weak leading candidate, a strong Green base or without an incumbent. Though sometimes it is looked upon unfavorably when parties “parachute” candidates in to ridings they think they can win, in an electoral system where voters largely vote along party lines and not for individuals, this doesn’t matter as much as people think. Additionally, having a party leader represent a riding brings a spotlight that no Liberal, Conservative or NDP backbencher could.
Locality is often an overvalued commodity for MPs, a competent non-local representing your interests in Ottawa is worth incredibly more than an incompetent local.
For Canada, having May sit somewhere would have been a much more preferable result than having her lose in a high profile race. Nearly one million Canadians voted Green– they collected about 400,000 less votes than the Bloc Quebecois. And though they only drew around seven per cent of the popular vote instead of the 10-12 per cent they were polling at, there is obviously a lot of interest in what the Greens believe and what they say.
In this way, the results of May’s race with MacKay makes her choice a critical disservice to Canadians and Green voters. The party enters the next election in virtually the same position it entered this one (barring any defections in the coming months). It still needs to take at least one seat to prove it can actually win an election and to prove to voters that their votes are more than second-thought pity votes.