IT WAS one of the odd, recurring themes of the last election campaign.
Over and over, voters appalled by Stephen Harper’s Conservative ideology and disgruntled with Paul Martin’s Liberal over-promising and underperforming said they were pondering a difficult dilemma – the NDP or the Green party.
To a family member who suggested she was facing the same difficult choice, I had some simple advice – look at the platform of the Greens. It is not a left wing party in any way unless environmentalism is considered left wing.
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For millions of Canadians and for tens of millions of world citizens who vote Green in other countries, it is not.
Environmentalism transcends ideology. There are right wing Greens, left wing Greens and Greens with no wings at all.
That became evident last weekend at the Green Party of Canada national convention when pollster Nik Nanos from SES Research told delegates that Alberta and the Prairies, not usually identified these days as radical left hotbeds, are the best hope for a Green electoral breakthrough.
Reform party founder Preston Manning has suggested the Greens could be Alberta’s next political wave.
The ideological neutrality became evident when Nanos said voters who chose the Conservatives in January 2006 are the most likely voters to cite the Green party as their second choice. New Democrat voters were the least likely.
It was reinforced when a Green candidate from the Bruce County area of Ontario, among the most rural and conservative regions of the province, noted that he won the highest percent of Green votes in any riding last election.
And the conservative side of the Green message was bolstered on Aug. 26 when delegates to the leadership convention overwhelmingly voted for Elizabeth May as their new leader.
The new Green party chief, a 52-year-old lawyer and former head of the Sierra Club of Canada, has strong credentials as an environmental activist but not as a leftie. She worked in the 1980s for then Progressive Conservative environment minister Tom McMillan and has regularly held up the regime of PC prime minister Brian Mulroney as the greenest government in Canadian history.
This is no ideological radical, and that is one of the strengths of a party that appears poised for a political breakthrough.
May can appeal to the conservation side of the Conservative ethos as much as she can appeal to the anti-corporate polluter ethos of potential New Democrat voters.
She can stoutly defend the unrealistic greenhouse gas reduction targets embedded in the Kyoto Protocol while mocking the Liberals for signing the accord and then allowing the real world to go in the opposite direction.
And she can appeal to Quebec voters who have supported the separatist Bloc Québecois but are more interested in good government and a clean environment.
The Greens won’t win many rural or farm votes with the agricultural policy they approved at last weekend’s convention but that policy may not be key.
Farm voters may give the Greens consideration because they like their general approach rather than because of their specific agricultural policies.
After all, voters are usually not single-issue creatures.
