Recently an article was written by Canadian Press reporter Dennis Bueckert about Elizabeth May's possible entry into the GPC leadership race. Although I don't know her, Ms. May has an impressive array of credentials and I think her entry into the race would further raise awareness about the party and solidify our standing as the fourth national party and a force to be reckoned with.

The point of this blog article isn't to discuss the leadership race but the reporting of Dennis Bueckert. During the January election Mr. Bueckert wrote a number of articles in the same style as the one about Ms. May. I feel his reporting is somewhat biased against the GPC. Consider the first paragraph in his article:

OTTAWA — Elizabeth May, one of the country's best-known environmental activists, is pondering a run for leadership of the floundering Green Party of Canada.

By what measure is the party floundering? We have achieved a wide variety of successes over the past few years and have built ourselves into a solid national party.  As outlined later in his article the GPC also increased its vote total during the election. This seems like a strange word to use and I don't think it would be an instinctive one for most Canadians.

Here are the next two paragraphs in the article:

Current leader Jim Harris hasn't said if he will run again in an automatic leadership vote at the party's August convention in Ottawa. There is speculation he may not stand given the party's disappointing results in the January election.

Despite having access to substantial federal funding for the first time, the party won no seats and achieved only a slight improvement in its share of the popular vote, to 4.5 per cent from 4.3 per cent in 2004.

I don't think that this is a good analysis of our 2006 election results. For example, although we only increased by 0.2% in percentage vote we increased our absolute vote totals by 14% - going from 582,000 votes in 2004 to 665,000 in 2006. I've attached a document that Jim wrote outlining some of our other successes in the 2006 election.

Also, I think the term "substantial federal funding" is misleading. The GPC received only about $1 million in federal funds prior to the election and ran the election on a budget of less than $1 million. This is a small fraction of the funds received by and spent by the other national parties. A better measure of our success would be the "cost per vote won". Here are some numbers compiled by Jim:

Once again the stats available after the election will show that the Green Party is the most efficient political party in Canada. In 2004 we won a vote for every 86 cents that the central party spent. By contrast the NDP had to spend $5.66 to win each vote, the Conservatives $4.30; the Liberals $3.34 and the Bloc $2.86 – we’ll be able to do this same analysis for 2006 six month after the election when the central party spending for each party becomes public.

Here is some further analysis from our 2006 campaign manager George Read:

Looking at the amount of money that it takes to finance an election, we can see that the other major parties spend $12 to 18 million centrally and, roughly their spending limits of, $80,000 plus per riding. This means that we were campaigning against budgets of roughly $40 to 45 million dollars. We had a budget of $700,000 centrally and budgets of $1000 or less for most ridings to do the same amount of work.

All in all I think the term "disappointing" is unfair, does not accurately reflect our 2006 election results and reflects a bias to portray the GPC in a light that is not reflective of our accomplishments.

Most importantly, the term does not reflect the feedback the party received from our own members.  Our 2006 Campaign co-Chair Chris Bradshaw asked our members how they thought we did after the election. Here is how he summarized the response:

Almost to a person, the FCC and staff were commended for the campaign. There was absolutely no one who expressed disappointment, and that was limited to a couple mentions of the late delivery of some materials.

I think the last sentence should read "There were only a couple of people who expressed disappointment ..." but the point is clear. 

Here is the next paragraph from the article:

Harris's leadership has been marked by fierce infighting, questions about his credibility as an environmentalist and threats of legal action against party members who criticized him,

I'm not sure what sources Mr. Bueckert is using and I could debate some of the specifics but the larger point is that this doesn't seem like a fair analysis of Jim's leadership accomplishments.

Jim has played an extremely important role in growing the party from one that won only 0.8% of the vote in 2000 to one that has run a full slate of candidates in the last two elections and won 4.5% of the vote this year. I think that this point is much more significant than the items mentioned by Mr. Bueckert above and if a random sample of GPC members or Canadian voters was polled I'm sure that is what they would say they remember about Jim.

I think more of Mr. Bueckert's bias is shown here in that he notes earlier that a small increase in 2006 is disappointing and important enough to mention early in this article, but the overall 460% increase (from 0.8% to 4.5%) over the course of Jim's leadership is not worth noting in a paragraph discussing his overall leadership accomplishments. This does not seem balanced to me.

The rest of the article is focused again on Ms. May but these preliminary paragraphs seem more intended to call down the party then to announce the entry of Ms. May.

I think the party needs to continually analyze what it is doing right and wrong and to keep an eye open for opportunities to build bridges within the party and with other parties. As the party continues to grow we should try to analyze our own accomplishment and those of other parties in a fair-minded way.  Trying to cast each other in a bad light may be effective in the short term but I think working together cooperatively and with a spirit of goodwill will be a more effective way to build a strong Canada for the future.

UPDATE:  I've made a few corrections to clarify the numbers and math since the original version of this article.