How 2015 Could Be Historic for Greens

[Oscar]

How 2015 Could Be Historic for Greens

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/12/31/20 ... ign=050115 ]

What Elizabeth May has to offer Justin Trudeau, and her prize just two elections away.

By Kai Nagata, 31 Dec 2014, TheTyee.ca

What would the House of Commons look like with the addition of a few dozen Green MPs? Under any kind of minority government, a Green caucus led by Elizabeth May would wield outsized political clout. For example, they could demand important environmental policy commitments every time they helped pass a government bill.

This could be reality in four years or less, if Green Party members in a few key ridings play their cards right.

Here's the situation. The Greens hold just two seats out of 308 in Ottawa -- one secured by Elizabeth May in 2011 and the other courtesy of Bruce Hyer, the former NDP MP for Thunder Bay who sat as an independent before joining May as a Green.

That's just 0.6 per cent of seats, despite the Greens polling as high as 10 per cent nationally. One survey commissioned by the party found as many as three in 10 Canadians would consider voting Green. What holds them back is Canada's first-past-the-post voting system, under which Green candidates almost never have enough concentrated support in a single riding to win.

That's why Greens are strongly in favour of proportional representation. Under pro-rep if 30 per cent of voters really did go Green, they would win roughly 30 per cent of the seats. In the expanded 338-seat House of Commons, that would translate to a massive 100-person caucus.

It will never happen, however, unless Canada's voting system changes. That's why Greens interested in becoming a serious force in Ottawa should do everything they can to win commitments on democratic reform from other parties. And with a federal election coming up, the Greens might have more leverage than many realize.

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[Oscar]

Elizabeth May, power-broker

[ http://www.ipolitics.ca/2015/02/10/eliz ... er-broker/ ]

By L. Ian MacDonald | Feb 10, 2015 8:59 pm | 51 comments |

It’s time for people in this town to sit up and take notice of Elizabeth May and the Green Party. She has brought the Greens to the doorstep of respectability, and could well cross the threshold to become a serious player should the October election return a minority House — or even a hung Parliament.

Consider, for openers, her poll numbers. In a January EKOS poll for iPolitics, the Greens were running at 9 per cent nationally, and nearly 17 per cent in British Columbia, where they’ve been as high as 21 per cent in November.

Those are real numbers — especially on Vancouver Island, where May now holds the lone Green seat in B.C. But if those numbers hold she’ll likely have company from the Island, which is getting two of B.C.’s six new seats, to give it nine out of 42 from the province in the new 338-seat House. And the Greens have been trending on the Lower Mainland and the B.C. interior as well.

Then there’s her job approval rating, which at 51 per cent nationally in the January EKOS poll puts her in a statistical dead heat with the NDP’s Tom Mulcair at 52 per cent, followed by Justin Trudeau at 45 per cent, and Stephen Harper at 39 per cent.

Her approval numbers don’t translate into voting intentions — far from it — but they do indicate two things: She has name recognition and people like her. It’s no coincidence that her new autobiography, Who We Are, is in a second printing.

“She’s being very well received out there right now,” says EKOS president Frank Graves. “She’s basically tied at the top in approval numbers, and that’s a big plus.”

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May’s goal is to punch above her weight in a divided House, to force the national conversation onto Green territory. “We seek to elect enough Green MPs to be the balance of power in a minority Parliament,” she wrote in the current issue of Policy magazine.

If that happens, she says, “we could get a real climate plan and get rid of (first-past-the-post).” A game plan on climate change for the Paris Conference of the Parties in December, and a promise to replace the FPTP system with some form of proportional representation, would be the price of doing business with her in a weak minority House. And both commitments would have to be in a November throne speech following the election.

What kind of minority House? Well, what if the Liberal and New Democrat caucuses combined were just three seats short of a majority, and May had four?

If that happens, we’re looking at what Graves calls a “traffic light coalition — red, orange and green.” And Liz May would be calling her share of the shots.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of five books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.