While our two main provincial parties continue to snipe at each other on a daily basis, they both may want to glance over their shoulders at something that may prove to be a significant factor in how either of those parties fare on election day.
That would be the B.C. Green party. While I see nothing to suggest it is anywhere near being in a position to actually win the election, there is mounting evidence it may be able to damage both the NDP and the B.C. Liberals in some key ridings in the province and perhaps even pick up a couple of more seats.
First off, the party’s infrastructure and resources bear little resemblance to the party’s operations in the 2013 election. Back then, it ran a threadbare campaign with an unfocused approach, and it still resulted in a breakthrough win in the Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding.
Four years later, the party has a dozen paid staff on the payroll (up from just one) and is heading into the election campaign with enough money to run a more modern campaign.
Party leader Andrew Weaver will even have a leader’s tour bus – just like the B.C. Liberals and the NDP – and he intends to visit wide swaths of the province. He will undoubtedly garner considerably more media coverage than any Green party campaign in the past.
And Weaver will get an enormous boost from being in the pivotal televised leaders’ debate about halfway through the campaign, and I suspect he’ll take to the event far better than his predecessor, Jane Sterk.
Weaver tells me that party fundraising has skyrocketed in recent months, with more than $5,000 coming in on an average day, all individual donations (the average amount is $51). He expects the party to spend between $1 million and $2 million in the campaign, an unheard of amount for the party in past elections.
The Greens have also paid more attention at attracting solid candidates and expect to field a candidate in the vast majority, if not all, of B.C.’s 87 ridings. I saw 26 of them at a large, spirited party rally in a packed Victoria hotel ballroom last weekend.
Weaver has also discovered some issues that contrasts the Greens well compared to the other two parties. The Greens are the only party to refuse campaign donations from unions and corporations (the NDP insists it will ban such donations if it forms power, yet it continues to ask corporations and unions for large donations, an inconsistency that Weaver is eager to exploit).
The Greens are adamantly opposed to an liquefied natural gas industry, which is strongly supported by the B.C. Liberals and conditionally supported by the NDP. And the Greens support the B.C. Liberals’ move to allow ridesharing services such as Uber to operate in B.C., while the NDP opposes the move.
Where lies the best chance for more Green Party wins on May 9? The 2013 results showed the Greens can steal votes from both of the other parties.
Voters tired of the traditional two party choices may say “a pox on both your houses” and opt for the untried, and relatively new option. Both the B.C. Liberals and the NDP are seen as “establishment” parties no doubt by many who may be looking for a change.
So look to Vancouver Island, and ridings like Saanich North and the Islands (which it almost won in 2013) and Cowichan Valley (where it scored 20 per cent of the vote last time), both currently held by the NDP.
The fact that NDP leader John Horgan curiously disappeared from the legislative session last week to tour NDP ridings on their friendliest area of the province – Vancouver Island – may suggest the party is worried about a Green threat there.
Or to B.C. Liberal ridings on the North Shore in Metro Vancouver or Penticton, where the Greens got almost 16 per cent of the vote in 2009 but oddly did not field a candidate there in 2013. Then there are the Burnaby ridings, all usually tight contests and a place where an issue like Kinder Morgan may dominate.
New Democrats and B.C. Liberals are locked in verbal warfare with each other right now. But they ignore the B.C. Greens at their peril, at least in certain ridings.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global BC. [email protected]
What are your thougths? Send us a letter via email by clicking here or post a comment below.
