From time to time I talk to people who are aware of Green Party successes in places like Germany and New Zealand.  But not many know that the Green Party of Canada is more successful in terms of popular support than the Green Parties in those countries. 

That is, our long-standing 10% or more in the polls handily trumps the 8.3% won by the Greens in Germany and the 5.3% won by the Greens in New Zealand.  Not to diminish the significance of those successes, but the nationally elected Greens in those other countries have typically come as a result of some form of proportional representation.  I'm not aware of any national Green Party other than Canada that has 10% support.

Canada's Green Party success is all the more striking given that our supporters keep supporting us, even though they know that it won't lead to immediate wins in their riding!

I just wanted to put this analysis out there, along with a thank you to our supporters who recognize that the most strategic vote is the one for the party with the core values that match their own.  We are in it for the long term, and you have helped the GPC come a long way in recent years.  I'm confident that the Greens can win Parliament by 2020 regardless of whether the electoral system is changed to incorporate some level of proportionality, as has been recommended to Parliament by the Law Commission of Canada (since disbanded).

Stephen Harper has signalled that he won't be calling an election because of the likelihood of another minority government:

"We're entering a period of minority government. We've had a couple in a row now," he said Wednesday.

Harper said with four political parties securing a minimum of 20 seats each, it would be difficult for any side to win a majority government.

"I think the possibility of a minority government in a subsequent election is pretty high," he said. "At the same time, I don't think Canadians want an election and the government is not seeking an election."

Harper is right that we are in a period of minority governments, but he is wrong about the root cause.  The situation of having four parties in a situation to win 20 seats has been the case ever since the Bloc was formed in 1991.  However, the new dynamic in play is that the Greens have built up our core level of support to 10% and this level of support is not going away.  Once voters switch to the Greens they don't go back to the older parties.

This 10% level of support has made it all but impossible for the Conservatives or Liberals to get into what has traditionally been considered comfortable majority territory of 40% or more in the polls.  Consider that in the past those two parties typically shared about 75% of the vote, with a floor of around 30%.  So one party could be at 40% in the polls and the other could be at 35%, or one could be at 43% and the other could be at 32%.  The proper timing of an election call in the latter situation could easily win a majority, and this situation often presented itself.

But now the Greens have pulled about 5% of their support from those two parties, so they only share about 70% or less support between them.  That means that for one party to get to (say) 43% in the polls the other party would have to be at 27%.  And that lower level is unlikely to occur.

The Conservatives and Liberals have both flirted with 40% support in recent years but they can't maintain it since it means the other party is hovering at a historical low of around 30%.  So it is difficult for their leadership to come up with a scenario where they can win a majority using traditional benchmarks. 

As it happens, the new benchmark for a majority is probably around 36% since the 10% of Green Party votes are not really in play. The breadth of our support means that there is no guarantee that the Greens will win even a single seat.  So 308 seats are in play between 90% of the voters voting for the other four major parties (e.g. 90% x 40% = 36%).  But it will be far harder for the Liberals or Conservatives to predict if they can win a majority at 36% or 37% (even if it might occur in practice), which is why Harper is hesitating to pull the trigger on an election.

One of the complaints against using proportional representation in our federal elections is that it will trigger the end of majority governments.  But Green supporters have already triggered this situation, perhaps permanently, even without winning a seat.  This is just one more example of how the current electoral system is broken and has to change.

Finally, some analysis that definitely proves that the GPC is attracting voters from across the political spectrum.  Bruce Anderson from Decima Research wrote an article for CP that summarizes recent voting trends.  The article includes a detailed analysis of where voters who have switched parties have come from, and where they are going to.  This information is often hard to come by, so here are the details:

• The Conservatives have done better at retaining the support of those who voted for them in 2006, losing only 15 per cent of their supporters. The lost points went to the Liberals (six per cent), the NDP (four per cent) the Green Party (three per cent) and the BQ (one per cent).
• The Liberals have lost 22 per cent of their 2006 voters. Ten per cent went to the Conservatives, five to the NDP, five to the Greens and just one per cent to the BQ.
• The BQ has lost 23 per cent of its support, with six per cent siphoned off by the Conservatives, six per cent to the Greens, five per cent to the NDP, and only three to the Liberals.
• The NDP has lost a quarter of its support  an even 25 per cent. Ten per cent went to the Liberals, seven per cent to the Greens, 5 per cent to the Conservatives, and 1% to the BQ.

Other parties (and the NDP in particular) periodically try to resurrect the long-discredited argument that running and voting for Green candidates are actions that help their candidate to lose and some other "bad" candidate (like a Conservative) to win.  I hope Mr. Anderson's article will finally lay that argument to rest.

Recent years have shown that the more support the Green Party has, the more we are able get.  I think the lesson to be learned is that voting for your first choice is the best strategic vote you can make.  In the long-term, such votes have incrementally increased the Green Party's base level of support.  That is important to other voters leaning Green since it adds legitimacy to our stated expectations that we can win.

Good news for Green supporters:  "The poll also suggested the Green Party continues to show momentum across Canada, with 13 per cent support nationally, tied with the NDP for the first time in Decima's polling, the agency said."

I just found a website that maintains a rolling, weighted summary of poll results for Canada's federal political parties.  Kudos to Paul at Paulitics for putting it together.

The following paragraphs appear halfway through a Globe & Mail article titled "Green movement getting a blue-chip hue" (probably soon to disappear behind their subscription firewall):

At the same time, a remarkable 7 per sent of corporate executives said they'd back the Green Party if an election were held right away. Gandalf Group principal David Herle said business leaders appear to have passed a "tipping point" where they have realized that "the economic upside is on getting with this [environmental] program, not on fighting it."

This is good news, but it isn't so remarkable.  Some pundits continue to portray us as left-wing but the Greens have been attracting voters from across the political spectrum for some time now.  The numbers for business leaders exactly parallel our polling numbers in general.

Check out the following article discussing recent EKOS poll results.  Here's what the pollster has to say:

"There is a shock result here for the NDP," Graves said. "Nationally, the Greens are within sight of the NDP."

The NDP is at 10.2% and the Greens are at 7.6% in the poll.  These numbers are middle-of-the-road for the Greens, but the shock result is that the NDP is falling so much from the 17.5% they won in the January election (and the 20% of so they were hovering at in the months after the election).  Two other recent Decima polls (here and here) have the NDP at 12%.  It seems like they have lost about 1/3 of their support.

So, what impact are the Greens having on these NDP results?  I've made the argument in the past that the GPC is drawing it's support from across the political spectrum.  I think that opinion is reinforced by comments like the following in this article by Decima pollster Bruce Anderson:

"The Greens are biting from everybody," said Anderson.

And here are some quotes from an article from back in August that shows that the NDP themselves know that the Greens aren't the root cause of their problems:

Brad Lavigne, communications director for the NDP, says it may be oversimplifying to cast the Greens, New Democrats and Liberals as one, large, left-wing mass. The NDP, more than other parties, has done some intense study of the Greens' vote and has found that people who cast their ballots that way could just as likely vote Conservative. And sometimes, the Green party vote is just citizens' way of saying "none of the above."

"If the Green party disappeared tomorrow, it might realistically mean an extra 1 per cent for the NDP, an extra 1 per cent for the Liberals and, yes, an extra 1 per cent for the Conservatives," Lavigne says.

Granted, this article shows that NDP voters are more likely to consider jumping to the Greens.  But the point is is that people should take any current and future NDP complaints about the Greens and vote-splitting - like the ones in this article - with a grain of salt.  The NDP is losing votes to everyone, not just the Greens.  They may want to consider taking more concrete action on the proportional representation initiatives they've been promising, while they have the influence to do so.

Some additional analysis on the problems the NDP is having is here and here.

Jim Harris has pointed out that the GPC has been ahead of the Bloc in some recent Decima polls.  There is a very interesting history of polls done by Decima over the past year in their news release [link].  Scroll down to the third page of the release and zoom in the PDF to about 300% to make sense of it.

Those who follow the polls may have noticed that sometimes we are around 9-10%, sometimes we are around 6-7%, and other times we are only around 5-6%.  What gives?  There are numbers enough for anyone who wants to trumpet that we are doing well, or that we are doing poorly.

I think the key thing to look for is the company doing the polling:  Decima Research has the highest numbers, Leger Marketing is in the middle and SES Research typically has us on the low end.  Each company will use a polling methodology that is fairly consistent from internal poll to internal poll, but is not necessarily consistent with polls from other companies.

What I suspect is happening is this:  in the 2006 election our high-end polling numbers solidified around 6-7% in the weeks prior to the election.  But on election day we only got 4.5% - about 2/3 of the high-end numbers.  This is the traditional percentage of votes that smaller parties like the Greens are able to convert to votes on election day.  A key reason for this is that we only have about 10,000 members, or an average of 30 or so members per riding.  So it is hard to implement effective get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns in most ridings. 

Some of the polling companies are probably taking this into account, and some are not.  SES pollster Nik Nanos (who gives us the low-end numbers) spoke at the GPC convention in Ottawa in August and emphasised that GOTV is something that could give us big gains.  As our membership numbers and general level of acceptance by the Canadian electorate continue to increase, and we become increasingly able to develop and implement get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns (as seen in the London North Centre by-election) the percentage of vote we are able to convert will increase.  It may well be that the low-end numbers from SES are already too low. 

For planning purposes, I suggest that the party take the number at the middle of the bell curve of numbers from all companies.  Or, since we like to focus on the bigger numbers, we should only use 2/3 of the high-end numbers from companies like Decima.  Then when we get to 15% from Decima or 10% from SES we can be more assured that we will hit double-digits on election day (and won't feel disappointed if we don't achieve the high-end numbers we are hoping for).

An aside:  When polling numbers are close news articles typically say the race are too close too call.  But I enjoyed this article from way back when from Kevin Drum that explains that a better way to think of poll numbers is in percentages, based on the margin of error (MOE) in the poll.  The chart from the article is below.  The percentages in the body of the chart represent the likelihood that candidate/party A is ahead of candidate/party B, given the percentage lead and the MOE:

According to this poll it seems like the GPC is continuing to build support across the country.  We are at 9% which matches the Bloc.  To my knowledge this is the first time we've matched one of the other major parties in a poll so this is a significant event!  The poll also matches our 9% results from an earlier poll.  Different polling companies seem to use different methods for calculating their poll results and one 9% poll result could have represented a statistical anomaly.  But I think two Angus Reid polls in a row at 9% shows that we are trending upward.