10 Jun What’s wrong with Ontario’s Greens?
In an editorial reluctantly endorsing the Liberal Party to win this Saturday’s Ontario election, Torontoist, a community news site based in—well, you can probably guess where it’s based, put the case against voting for a fringe party even when you really, really dig its policies:
We actually quite like the Green Party platform, and if there was a single riding in Ontario where the Green Party had any realistic chance of winning a seat, we would encourage you to vote for them there. Unfortunately, as of this writing there does not appear to be a such a riding: not even in Guelph, where party leader Mike Schreiner is running. And that, frankly, is the Greens’ own fault. As a party they have refused to seek out constituencies and make them their own, in what can only be described as their own particular form of egomania. Too many Green supporters complain that the press does not pay their party proper respect, as if the Green Party’s failure to coalesce as an electoral force is part of a media conspiracy rather than the fact that they have not done the hard work of actually going out and finding distinct electoral groups and earning their support. And no, “people who are dissatisfied with the current political landscape” doesn’t count as such a group, because most of those people don’t vote.
It’s a titch glib to blame the Green Party for this failure without acknowledging the onerous barrier to entry imposed by first-past-the-post systems. Voters who believe environmental threats are the most pressing political issues of our time don’t necessarily concentrate geographically, so Canadian and American elections systematically under-represent them. (It could be argued that European elections using proportional representation over-represent them.)
But that’s the system we have, and if the Greens want to wield influence in provincial politics, they should follow the example of Elizabeth May. After running three times in seats she had no chance of winning, May selected one where she might, and did the work necessary to cultivate and win a plurality of Saanich—Gulf Islands voters. That one election victory did more than decades of activism to make May a figure of national influence.
Andrew Coyne probes the unintended ill-effects of first-past-the-post elections in his column today.
H/T: KT