The Greens’ failure to launch

In all the avalanche of sometimes conflicting election polls, one thing has been made eminently clear: the Green Party has yet to seize the imagination of Canadian voters.

Nine weeks into the campaign, the Greens can claim about five per cent of the vote, a slight improvement on the 3.9 per cent it recorded in the 2011 election but down from 6.8 per cent in 2008, Elizabeth May’s first as leader. The latest projections indicate the Greens will emerge from the election once again represented by a caucus of one — May herself.

It’s not for lack of trying. May is acknowledged as hard-working, and generally scores highly in the approval ratings. She performed well in the one English-language debate in which she was allowed to participate, and has an admirable grasp of the issues, if filtered through her own sometimes skewed perspective. There is no question she has the highest profile of any Green leader, to the point that she often seems to overshadow the party itself.

Arguably her personal popularity should have translated into stronger support for the party. That it has not can be traced to the Greens’ failure to establish a clear identity beyond the leadership, and to the odd mish-mash of policies it has put on offer. Always quirky, it has moved away from what once seemed a refreshing mix of economic realism and social activism to an indigestible collection of positions that even the sympathetic find hard to swallow.

As the Liberals and New Democrats battle it out for the left side of the political spectrum, the Greens have staked out ground well to the left of both. Their platform offers immensely expensive promises, worth a combined $42 billion annually, with only the sketchiest plans to pay for them. The Greens would eliminate university tuition, forgive all students loans over $10,000 and hand $1 billion over to municipal governments to hire young workers. They would also establish a national pharmacare program, spend $6.4 billion on infrastructure, reverse cuts to the CBC, re-introduce doorto-door mail delivery, spend more money on Via Rail, boost health- care spending, retrofit all homes to cut energy use — and introduce a guaranteed minimum income for all Canadians.

To pay for all this, the Green budget breakdown pledges to eliminate the Conservatives’ incomesplitting plan and other “boutique” tax credits for families, cancel subsidies for fossil fuels, raise corporate taxes to 19 per cent and introduce a “toxic tax.” It projects an additional $5 billion in new revenue from legalizing and taxing marijuana, while insisting the $22 billion annually in would raise in “carbon fees” would all be returned to taxpayers.

“At heart I am an optimist,” May proclaims in the document. Indeed. All evidence to the contrary, she professes to believe she will win 12 to 15 seats. She has announced plans – were the election to result in a Conservative plurality — to appeal directly to the Governor General, seeking his authority to broker an agreement between the Liberals and NDP to replace them.

To be fair, the Greens are caught in something of a catch-22, excluded from most of the election debates on grounds of having too little support, yet deprived of the opportunity the debates might afford to increase their support. Likewise, the party’s representation under our current electoral system greatly understates the support it enjoys in the population: with five per cent of the seats, the Greens would look less like a one-woman band, more like a real party.

Still, both the Greens and May have been around long enough for people to be familiar with them and their program. If they have failed to catch fire, the explanation may lie more in public doubts about their policies or fitness to govern than any unfairness in the system.

Overall, the Greens project an image similar to its leader: likeable but eccentric, a pleasant diversion from the mainstream parties, but not to be trusted with the levers of power. Perhaps the Greens are happy with that status. Or perhaps they will decide after this election that the time has come to strike off in a new direction: less quirky, more influential.