I'm pleased to announce my candidacy for the GPC Party Chair council position.

We have taken great strides in recent years and I believe I am well-qualified to help council and the party maintain this momentum.  I want to help improve our strategic planning process and strengthen our internal infrastructure in the short term.  This will allow us to develop a more robust national organization - including more comprehensive policy and large increases in membership - in the long term.  If you've read my Simple-5 essay of GPC roadmaps these themes should all sound familiar!

I am currently writing a set of more specific objectives that I will work to accomplish during the term, should I be elected.  I will publish them here when they are complete - please watch this blog for more details.

I am looking forward to the internal election and want to wish the best of luck to our Leadership candidates and all other contestants for council positions.  Together we can help the party win Parliament.

UPDATE:  My objectives as Chair and other information will be posted to the blog by Monday, June 26.  UPDATE #2:  Everything is published and is accessible on the sidebar.  Please email me if you have any comments.

Recently Duncan Cameron proposed that a unite-the-left effort between the Green Party and the NDP would help promote a Green agenda in Parliament.  I believe that is an excessive way to go about things when the option of electoral reform is ready and waiting.  Then Green Party MPs can start working in Parliament with all other parties to promote and implement our policies.

I'm not sure how many people are aware that the Law Commission of Canada proposed such reforms to our federal electoral system:

Recommendation 1:

The Law Commission of Canada recommends adding an element of proportionality to Canada's electoral system.

This change and the other electoral reforms proposed by the LCC would help ensure that parties that have fundamentally different policies, objectives and values will not find it necessary to merge to achieve a few of their shared objectives.  The parties that do have representation in Parliament can and should make an effort to start implementing these recommendations now.

Here is another article from rabble with some suggestions that would be great for the NDP and terrible for the GPC.  Duncan Cameron states the following in the article:

Working outside Parliament the Green Party is not going to set the agenda for public policy. In elections to come it will continue to be a spoiler, serving to enhance the chances of electing MP's hostile to its cause.

If the NDP lived up to its commitment to push for electoral reform then it would not be necessary for the Greens to work outside of Parliament.  In many countries Greens have started achieving many of their goals with the level of support equivalent to the GPC in Canada.  It is the first-past-the-post system that is the problem, not the strategy of the GPC to run candidates.  With proportional representation the GPC would already have 13 or 14 MPs (4.5% x 308 ridings). 

As I outline in this essay I think we will be able to win Parliament in the long term and I suspect supporters of other parties are starting to wake up to that fact.  It isn't a surprise to me that we are hearing suggestions from NDP supporters that we should merge, not run candidates, etc.

However, there is a role for the Green Party. Should Elizabeth May take on a unite-the-left strategy, by creating a Green Democratic coalition with Jack Layton, then we could see a Green agenda in Parliament that would lead rather than lag behind public opinion on issues such as climate change.

As I outline here the GPC does not draw it's votes exclusively or even primarily from left-leaning voters, which means it is not a party of the left.  A unite-the-left strategy should take that into account!  Green Party supporters are not wayward NDP voters and we have an important and unique voice to offer Canadian politics.  It would be beneficial for Canadians if the NDP and other parties started working for the electoral reform that was proposed to Parliament by the Law Commission of Canada years ago and is now long overdue (more in my next post).

In my last posting I analyzed parts of Murray Dobbin's recent article about the GPC. In the article Dobbin stated that running a Green in every riding helps elect Conservatives and defeat NDPers.

On the surface this contention does not seem accurate to me, especially given the bashing the Greens take from some NDP supporters for being too right-wing. Reviewing the many differences between NDP and Green platforms is probably enough for many to understand that Green voters are not primarily wayward NDP voters. But let's consider the facts for those who want more support for the contention that Green Parties draw voters from across the political spectrum.

To start, consider this poll done prior to the May 2001 provincial election in BC.  The Green Party of BC jumped to 12% in that election and the poll shows that they weren't pulling their support exclusively from the NDP. Here is the relevant quote on page 8:

Green Party voters – the "softest" support of the three main parties – are split between the BC Liberals and the NDP as their second choice. Twenty-seven percent would vote BC Liberal as their second choice and 24% would vote NDP. A further 12% of Green Party voters say their second choice would be Unity BC. Thirty percent of Green Party voters are uncommitted to a second choice party.

The BC Liberals are right-wing and the Unity BC party is very right-wing. So the second-choice split is 39% right, 24% left, and 30% uncommitted.

I have also seen a 2002 Ipsos poll on BC provincial politics that showed that 44% of Greens would vote NDP as their second choice, 15% would vote Liberal and 15% Unity (30% on the right) and 22% are undecided. But this poll was done at a time when many people were angry at the Liberals over the right-wing policies they were implementing in BC and I think that partly explains why second-choice NDP support jumped from only 24% in May 2001.

I haven't seen any polls that provide this detailed breakdown federally. However pages 11 and 12 of this poll released shortly before the June 2004 election shows that second-choice support is not high for any given party - the NDP is the highest at 18% but the Greens aren't that far behind at 11%. The previous week the numbers were 24% for the NDP and 18% for the Greens:

All in all it is just not clear that our votes would go to the NDP if the Greens weren't running and it is time to put that tired meme to rest. My rough estimate based on the BC polls and from talking to our supporters is that we get 1/3 of our votes from the right, 1/3 from the left and 1/3 from voters who would not otherwise vote.  We need to do some get-out-the-vote work for the non-voting group to help bring our election day results closer to our pre- and post-election polling results.

Neither left nor right, but forward.

Murray Dobbin has written another piece about the Green Party and I wanted to respond to a few of his comments. The focus of the article is on Elizabeth May and I think the Green Party is lucky to have high quality individuals such as her and David Chernushenko running for our leadership. But I'm going to focus my comments below on some of the subtext in the article.

Jim Harris, the corporate inspirational speaker who has led the party through a controversial three years of ups and downs has announced he will step down after a poor showing the last election.

As I outline in this article I don't think the Greens did poorly in the last election. And the party has polled has high as 9% in recent weeks - we clearly still have momentum.  Moreover, Harris did not state that he decided to step down because the party did poorly - here is his speech with his thoughts on the matter. But Dobbin has presented the information in a way that might make a reader believe that Harris said the party did poorly, and this is incorrect.

Despite the funding, the party received just 4.5 per cent of the vote in the recent election.

We increased our vote total by 80,000 in the 2006 election, an increase of 14.4% from 2004. I think a more relevant number than the 4.5% is how much it cost to win a vote. Even with the funding the Greens spent several times less than the other major parties to win each vote. In 2004 the number was $0.86 per vote for the GPC and $5.66 per vote for the NDP. The GPC is much more effective than other parties at converting the funding we have available into votes at the polls.

It is here that the biggest unknown hangs over a redirected Green Party. While May would probably not replicate Harris's approach of running in every seat — in the process helping elect Conservatives and defeat NDPers — she will minimally want a seat in the House of Commons for herself. Would the NDP, in return for the Greens avoiding ridings where the NDP has a chance, facilitate her election by not running against her?

If not, the NDP could face a more serious dilemma. If Jack Layton's strategy is to replace the Liberals as the official opposition, the temptation for the Greens to replace the NDP as the progressive alternative might prove to be irresistible.

The strategy and accommodations suggested by Dobbin would do everything to help the NDP and nothing to help the Greens. They were tried in a Vancouver election a few years back and did not work. In the long run not running candidates for "strategic" reasons will also reinforce a perception in the public that we are opportunistic and are not serious about getting elected.

Running 308 candidates and giving every Canadian a chance to vote Green and understand our policies is essential to our success. We have run 308 twice - I coordinated the team that did so the first time - and I know we have the institutional capacity to do so again. Our new leader can set new priorities for the party in addition to running 308 candidates.

It is also incorrect to imply that Green voters are helping elect Conservatives and defeat NDPers. I'll write a separate blog article on that topic.