Silver lining of NDP performance

Editor: Larry Calvin mentioned the letter I submitted some weeks ago when he wrote his own to the editor (Thank you Greens for giving us a Liberal gov’t, May 13).

Larry is correct that weary of charlatans flogging fossil fuels, hopeful for a new green economy, and in defiance of the NDP’s sense of entitlement to my vote, I intended to vote Green. He’s ahead of himself, however, when he thinks I helped deliver a Liberal government.

Until absentee ballots are counted and judicial recounts are completed, what we have is a hung parliament, with no single party or bloc of allied parties having a majority of seats. We won’t know until May 20-22 what the final seat count will be, or who the Green Party will support if neither the Liberals nor the NDP win a majority.

Larry is also ahead of himself in blaming me and the Greens for splitting the left vote. I wrote my letter when all forecasts projected an NDP win. Once the race tightened and an NDP government was far from assured, I checked the projections for my riding, found the NDP and Liberal candidates were running neck-and-neck, and made a tactical decision not to support the Green candidate, who was 20 points behind.

Larry will remember I said that electoral math is not hard and that everyone can do it. The voters I identify with are the ones who do the math before they consider anything else, and are not bound to partisan politics when they cast their votes.

Days before the election, I noticed the projections in Kelowna-Lake Country were 58.8 per cent for the Liberal candidate, 26.7 per cent for the NDP, and 14.5 per cent for the Greens. Voters should have figured there's nothing they could have done to block the Liberals, and this was borne out. The Liberals won the riding with 60.14 per cent, followed by the NDP with 20.7 per cent, and the Greens with 19.2 per cent.

Evidently some NDP voters unexpectedly threw in with the Greens, which was perfectly understandable given the math, as well as the stellar Green candidate who ran there, Alison Shaw.