Elizabeth May on electoral reform

I have an electoral reformer's fondness for the Green Party. Although I disagree with many of their stances, the thought appeals to me that a group of Canadians can perceive a lack among all of the current parties, start an entirely new one, and grow that party into a mainstream force that regularly polls between eight and ten percent across the country. It reminds me that no matter how broken our current system is, it's still better than the system I was born into. Even under first-past-the-post, a Canadian's options really do span the spectrum, and that's incredibly exciting to someone who grew up in the land of the bad choice and the worse choice and that's all she wrote.

The fondness I have for the party, however, does not tend to extend to its current leader. More inter-party cooperation is absolutely necessary in this political climate, but only after the voters in every riding across the country have had a chance to vote for whichever party's policies they feel most aligned with. Any "non-aggression pact" that deprives voters of that full spectrum of choice flies in the face of democracy, and that's something I can't condone.

So keep that in mind when I tell you that Ms. May was just plain terrific on Rex Murphy's "Cross-Country Checkup" yesterday. Again, I couldn't agree with a lot of what she said about other topics, but when she talks about electoral reform, she's definitely worth listening to. I probably won't have much chance to say this again, but today, Elizabeth, I salute you.

In absentia

I'll be incommunicado for the next couple of weeks for work reasons, but here's some stuff you should all read in the meantime:

Paul Wells calls Jim Flaherty a crybaby and Calgary Grit calls him a hypocrite. Given the evidence, I'd say they're both right.

Steve at Far and Wide is hosting an interesting discussion about Dion's latest difficulties in Québec, with a local organization that's actively trying to oust him as leader. Yet again I find myself confused and bewildered by that strange Canadian custom of making the leader the scapegoat for every last one of a party's struggles while ignoring everything else that's wrong.

Worth The Fee to Read It has been offering up an assessment on all of the parties' current predicaments in light of the recent by-elections: the Greens, the NDP, and the Bloc, the Liberals, and the Conservatives. I don't agree with all of it, but it's thoughtful stuff that's, um, worth reading.

The real by-election story: there is no (single) story

Every blogger and every journalist is going to try to make a story out of tonight's by-election results--the partisan pundits will all try to spin them to make their side look good, and the rest will just try to spin a good yarn. But poring over these numbers, it seems that finding any one cohesive narrative in these results is automatically going to mean ignoring some of the data. Why? Because instead of clear trends, we've got four unique storylines--one for each riding.

Let's start with Willowdale. It's a suburban Toronto riding, with an emphasis, it seems, on both "suburban" and "Toronto":

Though this was already a Liberal stronghold, the Liberals actually saw their vote increase somewhat this time with Martha Hall Findlay carrying their flag. This increase came almost entirely at the expense of the NDP, since the Conservative and Green votes in this riding remained more or less the same.

Moving on to the more urban riding of Toronto-Centre, we see some of the same themes, but also some major differences:Here, we see a similar increase in the Liberal vote in an already strong Liberal area with Bob Rae at the helm, and again, we see a decrease in the NDP's vote. But in contrast to Willowdale, we also see a sharp upturn in the vote for the Greens under Chris Tindal, who campaigned very hard in this riding, and a sharp downturn in the Tory vote. It seems safe to assume that the Tory vote either stayed home or bled to the Liberals, while the NDP vote bled to both the Liberals and the Greens.

It's a very different story, though, out west. Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River is a rural Saskatchewan riding, which the Liberals won by a hair last time:Here, we see a substantial upturn in the vote for the Conservatives, to the extent that they could carry it quite easily this time, and a corresponding downturn in the vote for the Liberals. The NDP vote increased by a few points, probably at the expense of the Liberals, but not enough to make a difference--it's clear that most of the voters who fled the Liberals went Tory this time. The Green vote stayed largely the same.

Finally, we have Vancouver-Quadra, the surprise of the night. This is a wealthy urban/suburban riding, which until tonight counted as one of the safest Liberal seats in the country:Early in the evening, when it looked for a while like the Tory might actually win, I was astounded. Had the Vancouverites suddenly grown some conservative roots? Well, maybe a few, but as you can see from the chart, that Liberal-Tory migration isn't enough to explain the result. The main reason this by-election was so close was a wholesale transfer of Liberal votes to the Greens. The NDP vote, on the other hand, only went down very slightly.

What you can learn from this, then, depends very much on where you are. But it also depends on who you are.

Lessons for the Liberals: In Fortress Toronto, you're fine. Golden, even--at least as long as you've got candidates like Bob Rae and Martha Hall Findlay. You're in a lot more trouble out west, though, and for very different reasons depending on where you are. In the rural areas, you're losing out to the Tories, and in the urban core, you're losing out to the Greens. So there are plenty of things to be pleased with tonight, but it should be clear that you've also got a good deal of building to do out west.

Lessons for the Conservatives: At this point even formerly Liberal rural areas are turning to you, which meant a pickup, this time. The thing is, it's still rural voters, which isn't anything terribly new or surprising. In the urban areas, things look quite a bit different: out west and in the Toronto suburbs you're gaining, but not enough to make you a winner, and in the core of Canada's largest city, they actually kind of hate you. So go ahead and be pleased about your single win, but if you try to spin that as part of a larger trend where all roads lead to the Tories, you're fooling no one but yourselves.

Lessons for the NDP: You held on nicely to your vote out west, both in urban Vancouver and in rural Saskatchewan. In Toronto, though, you are pretty much in deep doggy doo-doo, at least when you're running against big-name Liberals. Since the NDP is only an associate member of the Toronto club, this shouldn't be taken as any kind of indication for the overall NDP vote in a general election, but it could make a big difference in particular ridings. Specifically, if I'm Olivia Chow or (especially) Peggy Nash tonight, I'm starting to get seriously worried.

Lessons for the Greens: You massively increased your vote in the two urban areas, so much so that you can call tonight a victory-by-the-numbers and party down. But in suburban Willowdale and in rural Saskatchewan, the increase in your vote was negligible. It's not a decrease, so there's nothing to worry about, but you'd be advised against getting too cocky. You've yet to really sell yourselves beyond the country's urban core, and reaching out to rural and suburban voters should be your next step.

Where are the Greens?

Some people are dubbing the recent climate change confidence motion, put forward by the NDP, as an attempt to trap the Liberals on an issue they want to own. It's hard to argue that this wasn't at least one of the origins of the motion, but it's equally hard to argue that the Liberals shouldn't have been able to vote for the text of the motion without even thinking. And the fact that they refused to do so has been cause for plenty of criticism among Liberal bloggers, to their great credit.

Perhaps understandably, the more high-profile Liberals haven't been quite so candid. But it's more than just Liberal MPs and candidates who have been silent on this issue--the Green Party of Canada has also been completely mum, despite the environment being their raison d'être. There's been no official statement from Green leader Elizabeth May on the subject of this motion, and there's nothing at all about it on the party website. And if you don't think that sounds at least a little bit strange, just imagine for a moment how different things would have been if the roles had been reversed. If the Liberals had put forward a confidence motion about the Conservatives' poor record on climate change, and the NDP had abstained on it, can you imagine for one second that the Greens wouldn't have been all over it? "Parliamentary games" or no?

The point of this post is bigger than a New Democrat whining about how the Greens attack the NDP while sparing the Liberals, though, so I'll cut to the chase. Both Stéphane Dion and Elizabeth May have been utterly insistent that their non-compete pact is limited to each of them not running in the other's riding. If that's the case, then, why on earth is the Green Party so silent on this matter? I can understand that they wouldn't want to help the NDP, but an election fought on climate change would arguably have benefitted them far more than the NDP anyway. I've been racking my brain trying to think of a reason why they wouldn't want to address this, and the only thing I can come up with is that they don't want to damage the Liberals. Which is very odd behaviour for what is ostensibly a completely separate political party trying to compete with the Liberals.

I have no proof that there's anything hinky going on, of course, but it makes me wonder. And I can't help but think about how all the former Liberal voters who are now turning to the Greens are going to feel if it turns out the two-riding non-compete pact really was a prelude to something a whole lot bigger.

To all the gleeful poll-sifters

I strongly disagree with Green blogger Chris Tindal about the current state of the NDP, and for that matter I don't believe the new Strategic Counsel polling numbers for a second (for why, just see any other recent poll, or for that matter, Greg Staples). But I still think Chris still has some smart things to say about the Greens and the NDP toward the end of his post about those numbers.

Between bits of advice for Jack Layton, he sneaks in a statement that essentially boils down to the notion that you don't have to "secretly hope to wipe the NDP off the map completely" to be a good Green. I agree with this, as well as with the reverse: if you're a New Democrat, you can not want to vote Green because you think they're wrong about a lot of things, but still think Canada would be better off with their input in Parliament. And it's part of the tragedy of our political culture that this is a radical idea at all--that being at each other's throats is seen so much as the natural state of things that even two sides that are both proponents of electoral reform are reduced to gleeful poll-sifting and finger-pointing.

In fact, I would take Chris's statement one step further. I would go so far as to say that every time an NDP blogger gets gleeful over the Greens being down in the polls, or a Green blogger gets gleeful over the reverse, what they're really saying is: "You know that dedication to electoral reform that my party has been trumpeting? Well, for me at least, it's nothing but opportunism, and you can be damn sure I'll abandon it as soon as my party has a chance at the big brass ring." When you can't say with clarity and confidence that there's room on the Canadian political scene for a diversity of perspectives, then your commitment to a system that institutionalizes that diversity is revealed as the sham it is.

Strange strategy

From the Globe and Mail, December 23rd, 2006:

The Liberals are planning a "308-seat strategy" for the next federal election in which they will contest all seats in the Commons, including those in regions they have previously written off, such as Alberta.

Now, it wasn't spelled out there exactly how a "308-seat strategy" would differ from campaigns the Liberals have run in the past, but presumably at the bare minimum it would suggest running a candidate in 308 ridings, no?

From the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald, April 12, 2007:

The Liberals can’t decide whether to run a candidate in Central Nova or step out of the way to improve Elizabeth May’s chances of unseating Peter MacKay.

On one side are most Nova Scotia Liberals, who think the party ought to run a candidate in every riding in Canada. On the other side is federal Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, who would prefer not to run a candidate in Central Nova, perhaps because Ms. May often praises his character and environmental credentials, which helps him in the national media.

"There’s a widespread sentiment that Dion is off his rocker to be considering this," one prominent Liberal said this week. "There’s increasing division within the party in Nova Scotia. If Dion proceeds with this, he will have done himself big damage in Nova Scotia within the Liberal party."

I'm not sure what kind of strategy trying to help the leader of another party counts as, but it's certainly not a "308-seat" one. The Liberals took a respectable 25% in Central Nova in the last election, and have an established local riding association that will be completely demolished if they do this. And for what? The vote totals in Central Nova in the last election looked like this:

Conservatives 41%
NDP 33%
Liberals 25%
Greens 2%

Which means that even if every single person who voted Liberal in the last election were to vote Green in the next one (a dubious assumption given how upset some of them seem), that would still only move the Greens into third place.

May had better have offered Dion an awfully sweet deal for him to even be considering this one.

[Update: It's official--it's happening. Perhaps predictably, some Liberals are trying to spin this to say that the only reason New Democrats might speak out against this is that they see this "progressive coalition" (sic) as a threat. Well, I won't speak for any New Democrats but myself, but that's not my objection at all. I'm not threatened--I'm well and truly baffled, on two different fronts.

The first front has to do with ideals. Like I said over at Woman at Mile 0's blog, I’m an immigrant American who chose Canada. One of the things I value about this country is that there’s real political diversity--a full spectrum of parties that, unlike my country of birth, allows voters to have genuine choices. And what it comes down to is the question of whether the Greens and the Liberals really are two distinct choices. If the two parties aren't sufficiently different to maintain two separate political identities, then they should merge. If they are sufficiently different to maintain two separate political identities--i.e., if the two parties can articulate concrete reasons why people would want to choose their party and not the other--then they should start acting like they know they're separate parties. It's really that simple.

Now, some will inevitably be thinking here: "but IP, I know you, and you LIKE the idea of coalitions!" Well, to that I can only say that this is quite a different animal from a coalition. A coalition happens in GOVERNMENT, AFTER the election. If, for example, the Liberals were to win a minority of the seats and the Greens were to get a few more, enough to make a majority government together, then they could form a coalition and govern side-by side. I would find nothing wrong with that; indeed, it would be the kind of thing I argue for in every third or fourth post in this blog. If the Liberals and the Greens want to stand up and announce their preference for forming the government together after the next election, I will applaud that. Actively banding together before the election, though, is not a coalition; it’s just a very puzzling strategy that disenfranchises Green voters in Saint-Laurent–Cartierville and (much more debilitatingly) Liberal voters in Central Nova. And as someone who thinks real voter choice is one of the best things about this country’s politics, that’s something I can’t support.

The second front is more about pragmatism--i.e., the real short- and long-term effects of this decision on these two parties. Presumably the two parties think there are concrete gains to be made from this deal, but I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing it. I talk about some of the reasons why above; and Accidental Deliberations outlines the rest of them. This is simply not a good idea, no matter how you slice it. Now, neither of these parties is my own, so it's not my place to get all outraged on their supporters' behalf or anything, but I'm certainly going to be sitting over here shaking my head in that aforementioned bafflement.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't note that something is getting lost in the shuffle, here--i.e., the fact that there's a much better solution to the problems that May and Dion are trying to solve. It's even something that both May and Dion are on the record as favouring. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd sure like to hear a lot more talk about that option and a lot less about ones that are completely antithetical to real, long-term reform.]

[Upperdate: Green blogger Herbinator sums up my issues with this in much fewer words:

It seems I am the only one who thinks it is wrong to sell votes. Nobody has a problem with thinking the buying of votes is incorrect. People vote, THEN politicians live down to their reputation. Politicians usurping an individuals right to vote for a party of choice is unconscientious.]

[Upper-dupper-date: The National Post wins IP brownie points by not incorrectly referring to this as a "coalition." "Non-aggression pact" is a fun term, too! I like it.]

[Upper-dupper-date-date: More from Herbinator here:

I can understand not being able to field candidates. I cannot understand removing a citizen's right to vote for a party of choice simply for self-serving political expediency. It is wrong to buy a vote; it is wrong to sell a vote.

Voting is an opportunity for the voter to be self-serving and capricious. It is not for the politician to presuppose any voter's intension.

I am stepping down my activities in the Green Party of Canada in protest.

And while Liberal blogger Cerberus says a lot of things in this post that I can't agree with, this is the part where we're on the same page:

Now I like Elizabeth May and think she is an awesomely refreshing addition to federal politics. I think Canadian politics will benefit from having a growing and strong environmental movement getting elected. But if you want to see Elizabeth May in Parliament or more Greens in Parliament or more narrow-focused fringe parties in Parliament, then advocate for proportional representation. Don't mess with the democratic system like it is some plaything.]

[I-promise-this-is-the-last-update: pogge's post is hilarious and worth a read. Though it will undoubtedly tar him as a vicious partisan. *grin*]

May's new strategy

Elizabeth May is saying that the Greens may not run candidates in all ridings in the next election, and I'm going to go against the grain and say that it may not be a bad strategy. If it's really about what some bloggers think it is, of course--that she's deliberately undermining her party so as not to harm the Liberals--then yeah, I agree that it's stupid. But if she's admitting that the party has limited resources and consciously deciding to steer those resources into ridings where they can actually have a chance of winning (or at least seriously growing the vote to prepare for next time), then it's at least worth considering.

I mean, I'm coming at this as an immigrant from the U.S., where it's absolutely par for the course for not only the marginal parties, but also the big parties not to run candidates in districts that they'll never be able to win. I'm pretty sure the Republicans haven't run a candidate against fifty-year Congressman John Dingell in my lifetime, for example. So the whole "this party is legitimate because we're running candidates in every riding" thing that the Greens have sometimes touted has always seemed a bit silly to me. If they've done some investigating and figured out that there are a couple of ridings where they have a real chance, and they're saving up so as to make a real push there, then good on them.

The downside to going that route, of course, is that if they don't win any seats next time, then the only thing that's going to raise their profile is a much larger percentage of the vote than they got last time. They can still manage that by sitting out a small handful of ridings, but it really has to be the exception rather than the rule. But if May runs candidates in, say, 300 ridings rather than 308, then it's not going to make a dent.

A reality check for Elizabeth May

Rather than try to build on her success in London-North Centre, where she took almost 26% of the vote in a recent byelection, Green Party leader Elizabeth May has instead decided to run in the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova. What is Central Nova--other than the current seat of Foreign Affairs minister Peter MacKay, that is? Let me paint you a picture.

It is a riding where an outstanding young NDP candidate named Alexis MacDonald (I have met her, and trust me, this woman is amazing) came within striking distance of MacKay in 2006 with almost 33% of the vote. She has not yet decided whether or not to run again, but is considering it.

It is a riding where the Liberals also turned out a respectable vote in the last election, taking almost 25%.

It is also a riding where the Greens took only a measly 1.6% of the vote in that same election. It is a riding where the Greens have absolutely no on-the-ground organization, no database of supporters, no ready-made group of volunteers--nothing. In fact, as far as I can decipher, they don't even seem to have a registered riding association.

Now, I am no Green Party member, but I do think it's criminal that with more than six hundred thousand Canadians voting for them in the last election, they don't have a single seat in Parliament. But unless both the Liberals and the New Democrats agree not to run candidates against her and also rent out their respective election machines to her, Elizabeth May doesn't have a chance in hell of winning this riding. Given the two parties' successes there, I don't see why they'd do the former (especially since such a move would be almost certain to be seen by voters across the region as trying to fix an election), and they're certainly not about to do the latter.

Why on god's green earth would May make such a ludicrous decision? It's simple, really: ego. Apparently, she's decided that she'd get more media attention running against a high-profile cabinet minister (she had also been considering running against Environment Minister John Baird) than if she ran against the Liberal who beat her in November. And while it's hard to argue with her about that, what a shame it is for her party that she's decided to throw away their best chance of winning a seat on a publicity stunt.

Poll narratives

There have been some puzzling narratives weaving their way through the Canadian punditry and amateur punditry in the last few weeks, stemming from a sort of pre-election fever and fuelled by almost daily polling. I won't link to specifics, but we've all seen them. They go sort of like this: The Liberals/NDP/Bloc are in such big trouble that they're in danger of never winning another election/disappearing from the political scene entirely/rendering the sovereigntist movement irrelevant. And we've only got about two seconds to figure out why, so instead of actually sitting down and analyzing the situation, we'll just blame it all on Stéphane Dion's/Jack Layton's/Gilles Duceppe's obvious complete failure to resonate with Canadian voters.

To make things worse, each version of this narrative always focuses on one of the above possibilities, conveniently ignoring the parts of the picture that don't fit with the way the storyteller wants to view the world. Partisan Liberals will talk about how the NDP is hemorrhaging votes because Layton has dared to negotiate with the Taliban Tories on climate change legislation, partisan Tories or New Democrats will talk about how the Liberals are in freefall because they picked the wrong leader, and all sorts of people will look at the Bloc's numbers and gleefully declare sovereigntists permanently pacified by Harper's big-ticket gifts to Quebec. A reality check suggests that they're all a little bit right about the details...and yet without looking at the big picture, the overall conclusions are completely wrong.



This chart, which shows all of the various polls that have been conducted so far this month (Decima March 1st, Angus Reid March 2nd, Ipsos Reid March 3rd, Decima March 8th, and Strategic Counsel March 15th) shows a pretty even picture with a couple of blips here and there. There's no obvious trend upward or downward for anyone. And if you compare the averages to the 2006 election results, the Liberals are down a bit over a point, the NDP is down a bit over two, and the Bloc is down a bit under two. A bit troubling for partisans of any of those stripes, certainly, but hardly Titanic material, and certainly not evidence that they're all on the wrong track with leaders who need to be thrown overboard at the first available opportunity. And if you consider the fact that the Tories (who according to these same narratives are supposedly eyeing a majority again) are actually doing no better than they did in January of 2006, well, there's just not a lot to get all that worried about. Far from being in freefall, the Liberals seem to be holding their own under their new leader. The Bloc had their dip, but they're holding steady now, too. And as for the NDP, well, with only slightly lower numbers, a tonne of money in the bank, a terrific new ad campaign, and a national strategy conference this weekend, they're certainly not going anywhere.

So if none of the supposedly dying parties are actually dying, then what's really going on? Well, I don't have any hard data on this, but from talking to Green voters, I have some ideas. I don't mean the partisan Greens, who are as smug and arrogant with their 9.8% as the Liberals ever were at 45%; I mean the people who make up the couple of percentage points each that the Greens have taken from the other parties. These people aren't looking in that direction because they hate Dion's accent or Layton's moustache or Duceppe's little bonnet--they're doing it because they actually like the idea of the existence of a Green Party. They don't actually know much about the party, mind, but the idea of the party resonates with them. To these people, the Greens are a brand-new party that wasn't there before and is totally untainted by actual, you know, governing experiences, and that's kinda neat. Now, whether this vague "kinda neat" factor will be enough to bring them the kind of success we're seeing in these polls in an actual election (or for that matter, whether they will get any seats) is still an open question. But even if it isn't enough, there's no denying that there's a new kid on the political block. And this means that the old, lazy narratives of "the Liberals/NDP/Bloc have gone down a couple of points and so Dion/Layton/Duceppe must be doing a crappy job as leader" simply don't work anymore. It's a new game board.

The real story here--and one I haven't seen a single pundit or blogger try to tell yet--is that a new party is being added to the political scene and yet none of the old parties are actually disappearing from it. The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc have all sacrificed a point or two to the Greens' surge, but there's no single party that the Greens can be seen to be replacing. The three older left-wing and centrist parties may trade some of their soft support with each other every now and then, but the vast majority of their support is actually quite firm, and not going anywhere despite the emergence of the Greens as a new force. Before our eyes, we're watching the Canadian political scene transform itself from a four-party system into a five-party one. And that's pretty extraordinary.

Garth going Green makes sense

Now that ousted Tory Garth Turner has been musing publicly about joining the Green Party, many bloggers are confused. "The Green agenda is about as far from Conservatism as anything could possibly get, isn't it?" asks Conservative DazzlinDino. Guess again.

Jim Harris, the former Green Party leader who drastically increased his party's percentage of the vote during his tenure, is a management consultant and corporate motivational speaker who has described himself as a "green conservative" and his party as "eco-capitalist." Before he joined the Greens, he was a member of the Progressive Conservative party, and while he was leader, he hired several prominent Ontario Tories as party advisors. Harris's Greens' party platform was quite fiscally conservative, including corporate tax cuts and taxing resources rather than incomes, and they favoured voluntary compliance solutions to the business vs. environment conflict.

New Green Party leader Elizabeth May, too, has Progressive Conservative roots, which may come as a surprise to the people who are trying to paint her as a hard-left granola-eater. May once worked for Brian Mulroney's environment minister, and while she resigned her post over policy differences, she had nothing but praise for Mulroney when she saw to it that he would be named Canada's Greenest Prime Minister in April. "The truth is that for many years I've been saying that Brian Mulroney had an environmental records that puts subsequent prime ministers to shame," May said only a few months ago. The voters recognize this connection, too--a recent SES poll even found that Elizabeth May's Greens are the second choice party for more than a third of Conservative voters. Hardly surprising when you consider that the current Green platform includes planks on personal income and corporate tax cuts.

The baffled bloggers are right about one thing, though--the Greens are hardly Stephen-Harper-style conservatives. But then again, neither is Garth Turner. The blue streak in the Canadian Green Party is of a decidedly Progressive Conservative shade, and Turner, too, is a Red Tory who once sat in Kim Campbell's Progressive Conservative government and ran for the leadership of that party in 1993. He's a strong fiscal conservative who has spoken out in favour of same-sex marriage and criticized Rona Ambrose's environmental policies. He never really drank the Harper Kool-Aid. And if you look at the Greens' platform--really look at it, rather than just assuming they're nothing but a somewhat less successful clone of the NDP--it's pretty clear that a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, environmentally conscious MP like Garth Turner would be a far better fit for the Green Party than for Harper's Conservatives anyway.

Now, many lefties have criticized the Greens for not being left-wing enough, but to me that's a bit too much like criticizing a petunia for not being a geranium. I don't believe in Progressive Conservative or Green Party policies, but I do believe in a full spectrum of real voter choice, and by now it's pretty clear that the merger of the Progressive Conservatives with Reform left a gaping hole in the Canadian political scene. Sure, Harper has made the occasional minor gesture to appease the Red Tories, but his government has shown itself to be much further to the right on social issues than they'd like it to be, and the recent Clean Air Act fiasco has proven once and for all that Harper and Company think Alberta oil wealth should take precedence over serious environmental policy. The Greens offer Canadians a synthesis of Red Tory fiscal policies, progressive social policies, and a strong environmentalist bent, and there's more than enough room on the Canadian political scene for that.

I say go for it, Garth. It only makes sense.

Canada's left: a credo

Some things I believe:

1. Canada's left consists not of the NDP and no one else, as Jack Layton would have us believe, and not of the NDP, the Liberals, and the Greens, as Jason Townsend would have us believe, but of the NDP, a few Liberals, and some Greens. This complicates matters beyond the quick fix many leftists (of whatever stripe) are looking for.

2. The potential future in government of voices from Canada's left (as defined above) depends not on the NDP snuffing out the Liberals, as Pat Martin would have us believe, and not on the Liberals snuffing out the NDP, as Jason Cherniak would have us believe, and not on the NDP snuffing out the Greens, as Duncan Cameron would have us believe, but on learning how to find common ground within our political diversity. This complicates matters even further.

3. The best model for finding common ground isn't forming a "big tent" party, as John Ryan would have us believe, but allowing for diversity of opinion and separate political identities within temporary government coalitions. These temporary coalitions wouldn't look like the Liberal-NDP cooperation within 2005's Liberal minority government, but like coalition governments as they tend to exist in European parliaments such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This model would require a change in our political culture to make it less antagonistic and more cooperative, and the surest and best way to precipitate this change would be the implementation of some form of proportional representation on the federal level.

4. The very best thing for Canada's left would be the election this fall of a Liberal leader who agrees with me about 1-3. That leader wouldn't even have to be a leftist himself, but someone who sees value in the left and is respectful of different political opinions. Unfortunately, there seems to be no one like that in the race. (For a short time I thought Gerard Kennedy might be that guy, but he isn't.)

5. Having leftist voices in government is a good goal, but having genuine leftist voices (rather than a whole slew of centrists in leftist clothing) on the federal scene at all is still more important in the long run. If--for whatever reason--this can't work out in the way I outline above, we can't let that failure lead us to succumb to the siren song of the big tent. Many laws and policies we take for granted today began as wild ideas from the left, and any big tent (whether it's called the Liberal Party of Canada, the New Democratic Party of Canada, or the Liberal Democrats of Canada) would lead to the marginalization and silencing of leftist voices. Without real leftists on the federal scene, no one would ever come to realize that many of those so-called wild ideas are actually practical and implementable. This, above all other reasons, is why I am a member of the NDP.

6. A lot of people of all political stripes think 1-5 contradict each other. These people are wrong.

Orange and green make grey

Political scientist and commentator Duncan Cameron brings us yet another column about "uniting the left." This time, though, it's the Greens who are sick and the NDP who's standing there with open arms, waiting to welcome their wayward brothers home. The hook sentence presented at the beginning of the article leaves no room for doubt about the column's aims: "What Canada needs now is a Peter McKay of the left, ready to put two warring parties together for the benefit of both." (Because, you know, the one thing Canada's left is really missing is our very own opportunistic, sniveling, ass-kissing sellout.)

I spoke out against a merger when the cries came from Liberal circles, and I see no reason not to make just as much of a stink now that they're coming from my own backyard. If anything, I'm even more appalled that an NDP supporter--and we're talking about a guy who wrote a paper in an edited volume that he called "The NDP and the Making of a Citizens' Party"--would make such a suggestion. Why? Because a major plank of the NDP's platform is electoral reform and proportional representation, and advocacy of a Green-NDP merger is entirely incompatible with that goal.

No one should need me to remind them that the entire point of electoral reform is to allow for real voter choice and stop forcing people to pick between the lesser of the available evils. Just as NDP orange isn't merely a faded version of Liberal red, the Greens aren't just NDPers who have gotten lost in the woods, either. The Green Party of Canada has its own political goals that are quite often at odds with those of social democracy. And you know what? That's got to be okay with us. When we get indignant about the Liberals saying that we're stealing votes that are rightly theirs, and then turn around and play the same sort of game with the Greens, we're being hypocrites of the worst kind.

It's this sort of thing that makes me so acutely aware how much the electoral reform movement needs nonpartisan and multipartisan citizens' groups like Fair Vote Canada--groups that are really willing to work for the good of the country rather than for the good of their own particular political fiefdom. Because no matter how good a political party's intentions are in other areas, when it comes to electoral reform, there's not a single one that's ever going to be willing to do the right thing once they have the power to make it happen.

Green confusion

Ever since last summer's federal election, I've been hearing a charge coming from many other New Democrats that the Green Party of Canada is deliberately obfuscating its message so as to usurp some of the people that would traditionally vote NDP. I simply don't buy it. The Greens' website and their party literature are quite straightforward about what kind of party they are, and the times I've heard individual Greens speak in public, their message has been consistent there as well. After talking with some of the people who are thinking of voting Green this time around, however, it's pretty clear to me that many of them nonetheless think they're supporting a different kind of party than the one that's actually getting their vote. It's not the Greens' fault; they're making it more than apparent that their proposed policies differ strongly from the ones found in other Green movements around the world. Their supporters just aren't listening.

To some degree, this kind of confusion is perfectly understandable. Worldwide, the Greens are quite clearly identified as a left-wing movement that focuses on environmental issues. In Germany, for example, the Greens are associated both in practice and in the public consciousness with a progressive economic and social policy, and the movements in New Zealand and the U.S. have taken similar approaches. In Canada, however, things look quite different. Green Party leader Jim Harris is a former Progressive Conservative, a Red Tory. He's a management consultant and a motivational speaker to large businesses who describes himself as a green conservative and his party as eco-capitalist. Two of the major planks in the Canadian Greens' platform include corporate tax cuts and taxing resources rather than incomes. Their solution to the abuse of the environment by the business sector isn't tough new legislation and enforcement of existing legislation, but voluntary compliance. Despite the fact that same-sex marriage was a major issue in the 2004 federal election, the Greens didn't have an official stance on it until February of 2005. They have no identified stance on abortion rights, and no proposals for how to address the income gap. In August of 2004, they hired a former assistant to an Ontario conservative cabinet minister as a party advisor. Last winter, there was an advertisement on the Greens' website for a conference on "environmental conservation and economic conservatism," at which former Reform leader Preston Manning was a featured speaker. Joan Russow, a leader of the Canadian Greens in the pre-Harris days, has lamented their sharp turn to the right and states that she can no longer support them. The 2004 Greenpeace "report card" gave the NDP a better "grade" on the policies that matter to them than the Greens, and Greenpeace and the Sierra Club both endorsed the NDP over the Greens in the 2004 federal election. One of the Canadian Greens' slogans is "not left, not right, but straight ahead." This is quite clearly not a progressive party. They're not even pretending to be one.

Now, I'm certainly not trying to tell you the Greens don't deserve a voice on the federal scene. On the contrary, the merger of the right-wing Reform-Alliance and the more moderate Progressive Conservatives has left former Red Tories disenfranchised, and it seems reasonable and appropriate that these people would want to make room for themselves on the political spectrum. I'm not even going to try to convince you not to vote Green--if you read their platform and like what you see, then by all means, tick their box on election day, whenever that ends up being. But if you're planning on voting Green because you think you're voting for a fresh new progressive perspective on the Canadian political scene, then you've made the all-too-common mistake of associating them with the other parties around the world that label themselves as Green. The Canadian Greens are nothing more and nothing less than Red Tories, with Red Tory ideals and a Red Tory agenda with an environmentalist bent. They pay lip service to social justice, but their proposed policies suggest that they believe that environmental issues can and should be addressed separately from issues of social justice and consumer culture. And every last one of their potential voters should be making quite sure that's actually what they want before heading to the polls.