Is time up for the fringe Green Party?

It’s been an extremely bad week for the Green Party.

Indeed, it’s been so bad that it raises serious questions about whether the Green Party is doomed to remain on the fringes of Canadian politics or whether it should simply fade away.

These are legitimate questions despite all the party’s “feel-good” self-congratulations for a respectable second-place finish Monday by Annamie Paul, the party’s dynamic new national leader, in the federal byelection in the traditionally strong Liberal riding of Toronto Centre.

Overall, though, look at what happened elsewhere in this past week:

In Toronto, besides Paul’s defeat in Toronto Centre, the Green candidate in the York Centre byelection on Monday was trounced, receiving only 2.6 per cent of the vote, down from 3.6 per cent in the 2019 general election. In a total embarrassment, the Green candidate actually finished in fifth spot, behind even controversial People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier.

In Saskatchewan, the Greens were swamped in Monday’s provincial election, winning the support of just 2.36 per cent of voters. So bad was the result that the newly formed Buffalo Party received more votes than the Greens, despite running less than one-third of the candidates than the Greens did.

In British Columbia, the Greens were huge losers in Saturday’s provincial election, winning just three of 87 ridings and seeing their share of the popular vote fall to 15.3 per cent, down from 16.8 per cent in the 2017 election.

Let’s be honest, the Greens are nonfactors across most of Canada.

They hold no seats in provincial legislatures in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. They have only one seat in the Ontario legislature and the party drew a smaller share of popular support in the 2018 election than it did in 2014. They hold just three seats in the New Brunswick legislature.

And sure, the Greens are the official opposition party in P.E.I., but — seriously now — the province is so small that the mayor of the city of Oshawa governs over more people (170,000) than does the premier of P.E.I. (160,000).

Federally, the Greens won three seats in last year’s general election, which was its most ever. But in truth the party’s overall support is lower now than it was more than a decade ago. In the 2008 election the party got 6.6 per cent of the popular vote; in 2019 it received 6.55 per cent. That doesn’t seem like upward momentum.

Indeed, despite being a formal political party for nearly a quarter of a century, the Greens remain a fringe party in most parts of Canada.

Which raises the question of why they should even carry on.

Outside of their hard-core supporters, the Greens are seen by most Canadians as a single-issue party. True, they hold detailed positions on a wide range of issues, including a guaranteed livable income, universal pharmacare care and more. But you need to be a policy wonk to decipher the subtle nuances between the Greens and NDP on most issues.

Often the Greens are viewed as NDPers in a hurry. For example, in B.C., the NDP wants to achieve net zero carbon pollution by 2050; the Greens want to achieve it by 2045.

The reality is that the Greens need to ask themselves hard questions about whether it’s time to pack it in, merge or form a coalition with the NDP, or whether it makes sense to keep on going as a separate fringe party.

The biggest argument against continuing as they have is that they are splitting the progressive vote with the Liberals and NDP, thus hurting — not helping — their own environmental agenda. In fact, the Conservatives would love to see the Greens hang around, creating three-way splits on the left that often pave the way to victory for them.

Don’t expect the Greens to change, though. Despite her defeat on Monday, Paul boasted that the Greens will be a “very competitive option” in the next election and that the Liberals shouldn’t take any riding for granted.

I doubt the Liberals are too worried, though — not after the Greens’ bad results this week.