Collaboration can pay off for NDP, Greens

Electoral competition can still allow co-operation on shared policy objectives

The relationship between the NDP and the Green Party has long been fraught with conflict in any jurisdiction where both have enough strength to seriously contest elections.

At the federal level, the NDP’s push to build a governing party led Elizabeth May’s Greens to perceive an opportunity to win over antiestablishment and environmental votes. In the process, May frequently sought to align herself with the Liberals — who largely obliged due to their interest in seeing the NDP squeezed from all sides.

In Atlantic Canada, the Greens have managed to get the best of a competition for third-party status. The Greens currently hold seats in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, while the NDP’s larger provincial vote share in both provinces has been insufficiently concentrated to result in any representation.

And it’s in British Columbia that the two parties have seen the most hotly contested fights.

The NDP has fallen just shy of forming government for several election cycles, while the Greens have been within reach of official party status — giving both parties obvious and immediate incentives to try to poach any available votes away from the other. And the cash-heavy Liberals have promoted the Greens in their own party-funded advertising to split votes away from the NDP.

But recent events are showing how the similarities between the NDP and the Greens can outweigh the differences when it counts most.

In particular, British Columbia’s recent election led to a minority legislature — with the Greens holding the power to choose between John Horgan’s NDP and Christy Clark’s Liberals as the government.

Some commentators theorized that past campaigns had created a divide between Horgan and Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver which couldn’t be bridged. But Green supporters showed no interest in letting Clark stay in power if another option were available. And once Horgan and Weaver started discussing their shared public policy goals, they found more than enough in common to put any personal differences behind them.

As a result, Clark’s government stands to lose the confidence of the legislative assembly despite her last-gasp effort to promise everything she ran against in the previous month’s election. And so the common priorities of the NDP and Greens soon stand to be implemented by the parties that have worked to promote them.

Meanwhile, on the federal level, the NDP’s lack of trust in Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has unfortunately proven to be well-founded.

With Trudeau breaking his promise of electoral reform, prioritizing military and corporate interests in the short term, waving through controversial projects without environmental review and deferring any social progress until several election cycles down the road, any personal animosity between May and the NDP has largely taken a back seat to their common critiques of the government. And the list of the parties’ concurrent priorities is growing, notably including the Greens’ endorsement of a mixed-member proportional electoral system.

To be clear, there are still important areas of conflict between the parties. On an organizational front, they continue to run candidates against each other while pursuing relatively similar sets of voters. And substantial policy differences remain: Most notably, Weaver has already signalled his disapproval of some of the B.C. NDP’s election promises, including its plans to improve access to collective bargaining.

But the recent experience of the two parties offers a valuable reminder that electoral competition is entirely compatible with co-operation on shared policy goals. And if the NDP and Greens can achieve their plan for proportional representation in B.C., we may soon see the benefits of a political system built to foster that type of cross-party work.