By Barry Wilson, Ottawa bureau
GUELPH, Ont. — Green Party candidate Mike Nagy received more than 12,000 votes in 2008 in this university and high-tech city west of Toronto where Western Producer election campaign coverage touched down this week.
He came third but little more than 6,000 votes behind the Liberal winner. Not too shabby.
The Green results were even more impressive in many rural ridings.
Further north in the Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, in the middle of Ontario cattle country and home riding for House of Commons agriculture committee chair Larry Miller, the Green candidate came second, 10,000 behind Miller but 6,000 ahead of the Liberal candidate.
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In Nova Scotia’s Central Nova where leader Elizabeth May ran, she won slightly less than 13,000 votes and came within 5,600 votes of defence minister Peter MacKay. The NDP candidate was in her dust.
So it was across the country, including Alberta where the Green candidate came a distant second but second nonetheless in Wild Rose and Macleod.
Nationally, the Green party drew close to one million votes, more than 70 percent of the votes collected by the Bloc Québecois in its perpetual campaign to break up Canada.
Yet the television networks have decided May cannot have a seat in the national leaders’ debate, although Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe gets to address a Canada that he doesn’t believe in. The reason is he elected MPs.
On the ground here in rural Ontario, where tens if not hundreds of thousands of people voted Green or were considering it this time and can’t abide the BQ plan to break up the country, there is angst about the fairness and democracy of the decision.
May is going to court to fight a battle she thought she had won in 2008 when she was at first banned and then accepted.
Ontario letters-to-the-editor writers and talk show callers wonder why the other three pan-Canadian leaders don’t take a stand — no Greens, no us, no debate.
Maybe they don’t like the competition. A million votes are a million votes.
Keeping on the theme of green, it has been more than 26 years since former Liberal agriculture minister Eugene Whelan, he of the green Stetson given to him in Swan River, Man., left politics, and yet his memory and legacy still keep surfacing.
On this election campaign, it was courtesy of a Conservative candidate.
As Prince Edward Island Conservative candidate Tim Ogilvie, former dean of the Atlantic Veterinary College, explained how the college ended up in Charlottetown, he gave the credit to Whelan.
The minister had squeezed some money out of Ottawa in the early 1980s to co-fund a new vet college, wanted it to go to Atlantic Canada and then watched in dismay as a battle between Nova Scotia and P.E.I. erupted over whether it would go to Truro, N.S., or Charlottetown.
Whelan favored Charlottetown and Nova Scotia threatened to upend the initiative by refusing to put in money or students.
Running out of patience, Whelan told them to settle their differences and take his money or he would fund a college in British Columbia.
Peace broke out.
In 2000, when Ogilvie was dean, the AVC created the Hon. Eugene F. Whelan Green Hat Award for people who have made a major contribution to the college. The warring premiers who made peace have received it.
It is considered one of the most prestigious of AVC awards.
Whelan of the green hat was the first recipient.
Ogilvie the Conservative candidate says he deserved it.
