A QUESTION OF TRUST
GREENS HARD AT WORK SELLING ‘STRATEGIC VOTE’
It’s a line Jenica Atwin has heard before. The federal Green Party candidate is standing on a doorstep on a Saturday in Fredericton as a local teacher tells her she wants to vote for her, but doesn’t think she can.
She’s worried about the possibility of a Conservative government, she confesses. Strategically, she feels she has to vote for the Liberal incumbent.
Atwin has an answer ready. The Greens could hold the balance of power in a minority government, she says. She has a real shot here in Fredericton.
The teacher listens, unconvinced. She’s worried about who will form government, not just who gets elected in Fredericton, so every seat the Liberals lose is a concern. She and Atwin chat for a while longer, but it looks like a lost cause.
It’s not like this at every door, however. Many voters like what they’ve seen from their MLA in the provincial legislature, the leader of New Brunswick’s Green Party. Still, it’s more often than not a cautious optimism that greets Atwin, even from her supporters. One older man tells her she’s got his vote, then offers a warning. “You’re in tough,” he says. “You understand that.”
Later, Atwin says she has a way of talking to strategic voters. “It’s really just about repositioning to say that we’re the strategic vote,” she said in an interview. “To say that we have a lot to offer and that this is a particularly exciting riding to watch.”
The Green Party could make historic gains on Oct. 21, when it hopes for the first time to expand its caucus beyond the two seats it holds in the House of Commons. The party has been polling at record highs for months, currently sitting around 10 per cent. Leader Elizabeth May has been pitching her party as one that could hold the balance of power.
The Green Party’s base is on Vancouver Island, where May and Paul Manly, who won a byelection in Nanaimo this year, hold their seats. At least two more ridings in and around Victoria seem likely to go Green this time around.
Still, if the party that for years has been synonymous with May herself is to truly take on national relevance after this election, it will need more than Vancouver Island. It will need ridings like Fredericton, where a rookie candidate is hoping to build on the success of the provincial Greens to win a threeway race against the Liberals and Conservatives. But while May has visited Fredericton multiple times in the last several months, a sure sign she has her eye on the riding, the party has provided limited financial support to any campaigns outside British Columbia. To a large degree, Atwin and other Green candidates like her are still very much on their own.
In a riding where a familiar face counts for a lot, Atwin’s rival, Liberal incumbent Matt Decourcey, has the upper hand. Elected by a wide margin when the Liberals swept all 32 Atlantic ridings in 2015, Decourcey and his volunteers have been out door-knocking since November. When he’s in town, he makes a point of eating breakfast every Saturday morning at a farmers market downtown, where he’s interrupted every few minutes by acquaintances checking in.
“I think there are people who cast their vote for a whole number of provincial parties, who don’t necessarily vote the same way when it comes to a federal election,” he told the National Post over one such breakfast. “I think they need a voice within the federal government’s caucus to ensure that federal resources keep coming here.”
Decourcey is a natural campaigner, switching effortlessly between chit-chat and Liberal talking points. Still, holding onto this seat won’t be easy. Across Atlantic Canada, the Conservatives are hoping for a comeback after being shut out of the region in 2015.
Fredericton has voted Conservative before, but this time, it looks to be a three-way race between the Liberals, Conservatives and Greens. The NDP candidate in the riding, Mackenzie Thomason, is the interim leader of the struggling provincial party and was only recently nominated.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau visited the city last month and tried to head off possible Green-liberal vote-splitting by arguing his party is the best choice for those who voted Green provincially. Meanwhile, the Conservative candidate in Fredericton, Andrea Johnson, is counting on New Brunswick’s Progressive Conservative government, elected last year under Premier Blaine Higgs, to play to her favour. “All in all, (Higgs’) popularity I think speaks for itself,” she said. “I feel the momentum is still ramping up.”
Still, if lawn signs are any indication, there’s significant Green support in downtown Fredericton and around the city’s prominent University of New Brunswick campus. Provincially, this is the riding of Green Party leader David Coon, who made history in 2014 when he won the party’s first seat in the New Brunswick legislature. Under his leadership, the Greens won three seats in the 2018 election. “It is creating the conditions where it’s much easier for the (federal) candidate to build support because people are used to having a Green MLA and see how we operate and like it,” Coon said in an interview.
Atwin, 32, ran alongside Coon in last year’s provincial election, coming in fourth place in her riding. This is her first federal campaign, and she isn’t yet very wellknown here, but she tries to build off Coon’s work and May’s leadership as much as she can. “If we can put those two things together, I think they’ll see this as a viable option,” she said.
Support from the federal party is limited, however. The federal strategy team sent someone to Fredericton for a couple of weeks to help get the campaign up and running, and the party has paid for radio ads and an internal poll. But to date, the national office has not given any money directly to Atwin’s campaign, and it’s not clear whether it will. Coon said it would be nice to see more support for a candidate with so much potential. “If it were me, I would be putting money into the campaign. What their thinking is on it, I don’t know,” he said. “It seems to me they should be.”
Jo-ann Roberts, the party’s deputy leader and candidate for Halifax, said the party has to be strategic about where it spends its money. “This is not a lack of confidence in Fredericton,” she said. “This is just limited funds and making sure we win the ones we can win, that we support those who are in a position to do that.”
The Greens have been posting record fundraising numbers in recent months, and even bested the NDP in this year’s second quarter. But they still can’t compete with much larger Liberal and Conservative coffers. Thus far, the party has focused its spending on those Vancouver Island seats it seems most likely to win, though Roberts said it’s keeping a close eye on campaigns in Fredericton and one other New Brunswick riding, as well as a few in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. Atwin’s campaign has raised about $45,000 to date.
She pointed out that the Greens identified Fredericton as a riding they could win in 2015, but ended up with just 12 per cent of the vote. “We discovered then that the makeup of the riding federally is pretty different than it is provincially,” she said. But she didn’t rule out the possibility of financial support later in the campaign. “We don’t want to leave them stranded.”
On Saturday afternoon, after a couple of hours of door-knocking, Atwin and a group of volunteers gather in a parking lot to debrief. Somebody says they’ve been hearing the same concern Atwin heard from the teacher, that people believe they have to vote Liberal strategically. Together, Atwin and her volunteers discuss how to respond.
A tight budget and strategic voting won’t be easy hurdles for this campaign to clear. But the real challenge Atwin faces may be something more basic, something that Green candidates across the country, both federal and provincial, are only just starting to overcome. “To win, a lot of people have to change their votes, obviously, from all parties,” Coon said. “It’s a big decision to move your vote. And I hadn’t realized it until the first time I was elected in 2014, because people came up to me afterwards and told me quite proudly that they had made the decision after all these years … to vote for me. To vote Green.”
Atwin will need to convince people to take that same leap of faith on Oct. 21. “There is a huge element of trust, particularly for a party that people haven’t been in the habit of voting for,” Coon said. “It’s a huge decision to move their vote.”