The angst in NDP circles about what the Green party is doing to their prospects isn’t growing, federal Green party Leader Elizabeth May says.
It’s been a constant since the day she was elected in 2011. For all the strength the NDP shows provincially on Vancouver Island (11 out of 14 ridings), it’s a different story federally. It holds three of the six ridings contested in the last election. The number will grow to seven in this year’s federal election.
Historically, the Conservatives and their predecessor parties had a stronger hold on the Island than the New Democrats. Federal Liberals haven’t registered on the island since 2008.
So May’s breakthrough during the last election — in which she defeated Conservative heavyweight Gary Lunn — has been a cause of concern to some New Democrats ever since.
It’s not that they lost the riding — it hasn’t been winnable for the NDP for 20 years. It’s that the win established a storyline that has held for four years — the Green party is no longer a place to park a no-hope protest vote. In some situations, a Green supporter could vote for a potential winner, which is trouble for the NDP.
That theme was supported by the party’s strong showing in the 2012 Victoria byelection, where Greens came within 1,000 votes of upsetting NDP winner Murray Rankin. Then Andrew Weaver broke through provincially by winning Oak Bay-Gordon Head in 2013. The party only narrowly lost Saanich North and the Islands.
There was a similar provincial breakthrough in New Brunswick. A federal NDP MP defected to the Greens last year, for what that’s worth.
And there was a strong Green element in some local municipal elections last November. Lisa Helps parked her party allegiance but is presumed at least lower-g green, and she defeated NDP-backed Dean Fortin for the Victoria mayoralty.
Most noticeably, the ranking members of the NDP hierarchy in Victoria — MP Rankin and MLAs Carole James and Rob Fleming — urged their constituents to vote for incumbent mayor Dean Fortin and it didn’t get the job done.
May said she stayed out of civic politics and said the NDP move “backfired” on them.
Another ground level indicator — the party said fundraising was up 36 per cent in 2014, from 2013, and number of donors were up 52 per cent.
Not so far behind the scenes, there’s a bit of tension developing.
May said she has lots of friends in the NDP, including Rankin.
“But in terms of published messages from the NDP, I have to say I’ve been taken aback by some of the nastiness in messages from [federal NDP leader] Tom Mulcair to NDP supporters about Greens,” she said Thursday, a complaint she’s voiced previously.
Just to keep that pot boiling, this week the Greens poached Paul Manly as a candidate in Nanaimo-Ladysmith. He’s not only the son of former NDP MP Jim Manly, he was blocked by the NDP when he tried to stand for their nomination last summer, for reasons still obscure.
So the Greens now have a secondhand candidate who prompted a first-class fight within the NDP, and could trigger another one when the campaign begins.
It’s always hard to figure out which party loses seats if Greens win them. But by the numbers, Conservatives have more of them, so less to worry about than the NDP.
May said she doesn’t waste time thinking about all the calculations that go into fear-based strategic voting.
She told constituents at a meeting last week: “The progressive left, for want of a better word, is somewhat obsessively worried, based on the emails I get, about so-called vote-splitting. Our real problem is vote abandonment.”
She said there’s much more ground to be gained by targeting the largest voting bloc in Canada — people who don’t vote.
That’s a universally recognized problem for which no one has yet found the solution. But it’s worth noting that Saanich-Gulf Islands had the third-highest turnout of all federal ridings (74 per cent) in the 2011 election.
Canvassers are already door-knocking there, because May will spend less time in the riding than last time. Nonetheless, the closer to her riding, the more potential there seems to be for Green growth.
This is a corrected version of an earlier article.
