Philip Cross: How Elizabeth May taught conservatives never to trust green activists
Two recent books call into question the seriousness that anyone should accord to the Green party and its leader, Elizabeth May, writes Philip Cross
Released last year, the book The Canadian Federal Election of 2015 (edited by Carleton University professors Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan) devotes a chapter to the total flop that was the Green party’s campaign. The Greens set out with the lofty goals of winning 12 seats and achieving official party status, to hold the balance of power in a divided Parliament. Instead, the Greens again returned with only May as a their sole MP. Just one Green candidate finished in second place, and only nine candidates managed to get the minimum 10-per-cent of the vote required to be reimbursed for campaign expenses (six of them were in B.C.). In total, the popular support for the Green party plunged from nearly one million votes in 2011 to 600,000 in 2015 despite a seven-percentage-point increase in voter turnout.
In conservative circles, green is the new red
Nor should anyone be fooled into thinking the Greens are a legitimately national party by its sham of fielding 336 candidates across Canada. As the chapter’s author, Susan Harada, also of Carleton, notes, one in five Green candidates was merely a “paper” candidate, including May’s own daughter and her two campaign co-managers who were listed as candidates in Quebec. The party runs these paper candidates to buttress its self-styled image as a national party deserving of being invited to televised leaders’ debates and worthy of media attention.
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