Elizabeth May, leader of the Green party, has a damn tough job and she has done it well. She does not always agree with her own troops and her main headaches must come from that quarter.
Talking to a chap at a function where the speaker was Peggy Nash the former Toronto NDP MP, I assumed he was of that party. I was explaining to him why polls showing the Greens winning the election in PEI were inflated.
He agreed that over the years that the NDP vote forecast by pollsters was quite often four to five points higher than the actual vote. It was my opinion that this was because of people who supported other parties, did not want to tell the pollster the truth, and would say they were voting NDP. We referred to this as a ‘parked vote.’ I told him that it was obvious that today voters were also parking with the Greens. It shows Canadians are paying more attention to that party.
While I see it as a compliment to Ms. May, I am still very sceptical of her party getting broad support from Canadians. The simple reason why is that you can get the same line on environmentalism from the NDP. And I am hardly the only liberal who is concerned about our environment and takes a consistent stand on stopping the exploitation of Canada’s tar sands.
But it is not enough to build an effective political party just around the environment. The country needs much more. Ms. May might be a very knowledgeable and well-rounded person but the local Greenie in my area who has run in multiple elections does not seem to want to talk about anything that is not about the environment. I find him boring.
And it is this same tendency of Green party members to bore people with a pre-occupation in environmentalism that tells me that they cannot convince Canadians to give them a real shot at governing.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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