Canada’s Green Party has the potential to become a significant Canadian political force and Western Canada could be the region where it first breaks through, says a national public opinion pollster.
“The West is target No. 1,” Nik Nanos of SES Research told a news conference Aug. 25 after speaking to a Green party national convention that elected environmental activist, lawyer and former Sierra Club executive director Elizabeth May as its new leader. “The West is best, at least for now.”
While Alberta and British Columbia voters are the most sympathetic, he told reporters the party also has significant appeal in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
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Ontario and Quebec are the next most-friendly political provinces, he said. In Quebec, supporters of the separatist Bloc Québecois often share the Green party’s environmental and international focus.
Atlantic Canada, May’s home base, is more inclined to support traditional parties. Atlantic Canadians “will be the last people to get on the bus,” said the public opinion expert.
Nanos said the greatest weakness of the Greens is that they have not been able to convert political sympathy into votes.
SES polling around the January election showed that as many as 35 percent of Canadians supported the Greens, considered it their second choice or agreed enough that they would consider voting Green.
Yet in the last election, just under five percent of voters chose Green and it elected no MPs. However, under new election financing laws, the 666,000 votes received by Green candidates qualified the party for close to $1 million in tax-dollar funding, making the party better financed than ever before.
The party supports proportional representation, which would have allotted 14 seats to the Greens in the existing Parliament.
Nanos told delegates that electing the first Green MP would be a “tipping point” for the party, recalling the increased coverage and credibility received by the Reform party in 1989 after Deborah Grey won the party its first seat in a byelection.
However, to do that, he said the party needs a strategy to turn itself from a movement into an effective political machine.
It needs to organize a campaign of civic engagement aimed at convincing younger Canadians who are less inclined to vote that they should become involved in a political cause that can change the world.
It needs to develop a broad suite of policies so voters do not see it as a one-issue party.
“But in doing that, in branching out, don’t sacrifice your core,” said Nanos.
