“We think in different terms,” Ms. May (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.) observed of her party after one year in Parliament. “We’re focused on electing more members of Parliament and looking at the issues we want to discuss before the next election.”
The Green Party of Canada will hold its biennial policy convention in Sidney, B.C., on Aug. 17, 18 and 19. When the party last held a convention in 2010, it was still without a seat in the House of Commons.
Today, the Greens hold one seat in the Commons, but it’s made a tremendous difference for the party’s credibility with Ms. May consistently challenging the government on its environmental track record in the House and in the media. Ms. May won the seat in the last federal election with 46.3 per cent of the vote and by a margin of 7,346 votes, ousting then Cabinet minister Gary Lunn, who had held the seat since 1997.
The party may have benefited, too. A poll conducted by EKOS Research in early July put support for the federal Greens at 10 per cent—a big improvement over the party’s showing in last May’s general election, where the Green Party only took 3.9 per cent of the popular vote, but also gained its first ever seat in the House.
The gradual change in fortunes for the Greens, along with the Liberals’ own stalled polling numbers, led EKOS President Frank Graves to recently observe that a merger between the two parties, “would be a much lower cost proposal than merging the NDP and the Liberal Party. It would immediately create a third party with very similar heft to that of the other two parties and provide that new party with strongest access to under 40 Canada.”
Ms. May, who was elected leader of the Green Party of Canada in 2006, was cooperating with other political parties before she was first elected to the House of Commons in 2011. In 2007, she struck a deal with then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion (Saint-Laurent-Cartierville, Que.) to not run candidates against each other in the 2008 federal election. In her first year as an MP, Ms. May worked with both the Liberals and the NDP on tabling amendments to the government’s contentious omnibus budget implementation bill, Bill C-38, which passed the Senate on June 29.
She has also urged the NDP and her own party’s membership to stay out of a prospective byelection in Etobicoke Centre, Ont., where last year’s election results in the tight race between Conservative MP Ted Opitz and former Liberal MP Boris Wrzesnewskyj have been overturned by the Ontario Superior Court due to voting irregularities. Mr. Opitz’s appeal is currently being considered by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Ms. May said that she’s open to further cooperation with other parties, but she isn’t interested in a merger.
“There’s not enough similarity in policy or principle between the parties,” Ms. May said in an interview this week with The Hill Times, describing the Liberal Party as a “chameleon-like entity.”
“I think Stéphane Dion particularly embracing a carbon tax was courageous and deserved support, but Michael Ignatieff immediately repudiated that policy, even though he’d advanced a carbon tax when he ran for the leadership,” she said.
Mr. Dion, who now serves as Liberal critic for Democratic Reform and Intergovernmental Affairs, will be attending the Green Party convention to deliver a presentation on proportional representation. Independent MP Bruce Hyer (Thunder Bay-Superior North, Ont.), who left the NDP caucus in April to protest what he called “lockstep party discipline,” will also deliver a keynote address on environmental politics.
Mr. Dion agreed that the parties’ traditions are too distinct to allow for a merger.
“The traditions of the Greens and Liberals are very different—the same with the NDP,” said Mr. Dion, noting that the parties could continue to cooperate when necessary while ruling out any merger.
“There are some topics that should be above partisan politics, and the basic rules of democracy are something we should be able to discuss,” Mr. Dion said of his own appearance at the upcoming Green Party convention. “But to become one party with so many different traditions—it will take more than a poll to convince any of us to do that.”
If anything, Ms. May said she believes that there should be more political parties for Canadians to choose from. While she was critical of the environmental track record of the Liberals, she likened the NDP to the Conservatives in terms of polarizing the Canadian electorate.
“I fear that NDP and Conservative strategists would like us to be in a binary system with a hard-left, hard-right choice, and nothing in between,” Ms. May said, lamenting the demise of Red Tories under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) reformed Conservative Party of Canada.
“I think it’s important for the health of democracy to have strong centrist parties, but I don’t want to be part of it. I’m not a Liberal,” she said.
While she’s calling on her own party and the New Democrats to stay out of an Etobicoke Centre byelection, Ms. May said her party plans to compete in byelections for Calgary Centre, where former Conservative MP Lee Richardson recently vacated his seat to serve as Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s principal secretary, and Durham, Ont., where former CIDA minister Bev Oda stepped down to avoid being removed from Cabinet over expenses.
“We’re going to have a very exciting candidate in Calgary Centre,” the Green Party leader promised. “The country suffers from a lack of Red Tories. I think the home for Red Tories is in the Green Party—I just haven’t convinced all of them yet.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Chris Plecash
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