Even though their leader Elizabeth May managed to win the first ever Green seat in the HOC, don't let that fool you, the Green party on a whole fared pretty badly in the election.
Little noticed in the aftermath of the federal election is how badly the Green Party did.Global warming isn't quite the fad that it was a few years ago and the average person cares more about their job, putting food on the table and paying the bills. Green policies with solar panels and windmills just won't cut it.
In fact, if you weren’t paying attention, you’d get the opposite impression. The Greens managed to elect an MP for the first time, and all the attention was focused on Elizabeth May’s glorious victory, just as Green-related attention has focused on Ms. May ever since she took over the leadership of the party.
But, unless you’re besotted by the glories of Ms. May, you have to wonder about the party’s overall health. In the 2008 election, the Greens attracted 937,000 votes, an increase of 237,000 over the previous election. Last Monday they gave it all back, and more, dropping to 576,000 votes. That’s less than they polled in 2006 or 2004, under then-leader Jim Harris. You have to go back to 2000 to find a worse result.
Ms. May was supposed to bring the party a higher profile and greater credibility. She has succeeded in the first, although party members have to wonder exactly who is benefiting from the extra attention: the Greens or Elizabeth May. To a large degree their party leader has succeeded in establishing the Elizabeth May Party as a regular fixture, and has her seat in Saanich-Gulf Islands to prove it.
Great for Ms. May, but what about the 307 other candidates, all of whom lost? The 361,000 drop in votes would mean a cut of more than $720,000 a year in the party’s federal subsidy under the existing system. It will be a lot worse if, as expected, Prime Minister Stephen Harper eliminates the subsidy system and forces parties to raise their own funds.
In Ontario where they have been trying the "green" thing, the Greens lost a lot of support.
Who was the biggest loser in last week’s election? You get a gold star for guessing right. It wasn’t the Bloc or the Liberals. It was the Greens. Although Elizabeth May finally won a seat, the Green share of the national vote plummeted. It sank from its 2008 high-water mark of 6.8 per cent to under 4 per cent – its worst showing in 11 years. In Ontario, formerly a hotbed of environmentalism, the Green vote fell by half.Even the well known influential environmental journalist,George Monboit, is starting to have questions.
Last week, Mr. Monbiot wrote a pair of searching columns in the Guardian. Environmentalism, he said, is stuck in denial, “and we have no idea what to do next.” Environmentalists simply can’t accept the fact that the vast majority of people on the planet prefer progress and economic growth to no growth. And yes, it is a choice. They don’t understand the science and they don’t understand the economics. They pretend that tackling climate change is relatively easy, when in fact it is demonically hard.The Green party seems to be on it's way out. When the government gets rid of the per vote subsidy, in my opinion, the Greens will be gone.
The Green's are done.
ReplyDeleteThere was no national campaign, the Greens scurried to vote strategically.
Will be interesting to see how much of the GPC purse was spent to benefit one riding, Lizzy's
The Green's are done.
ReplyDeleteThere was no national campaign, the Greens scurried to vote strategically.
Will be interesting to see how much of the GPC purse was spent to benefit one riding, Lizzy's
Exactly and who said politics in Canada was boring. This is the most interesting time in Canada. It sure will be interesting and fun to watch and see what goes on not only with the Greens but the Bloc,Liberals and with Jack and his the new kids in the NDP caucus.
It was virtually impossible to tell how the Green party was different than the NDP or the Liberals in the last election in our riding. They all had the same talking points and they all focussed on dissing the Conservative candidate.
ReplyDeleteThe NDP, in Opposition, has virtually stolen whatever made the Greens credibile by supporting cap and trade, oil tanker banning, etc.
When I spoke to the Green candidate in our riding, she received very little physical or monetary support from Elizabeth May. Virtually ALL resources went into defeating Gary Lunn in Saanich Gulf Islands.
It’s worse than that. I know a lot of children in their early teens and pre-teen age that completely reject ACC. They accept climate change but not the anthropogenic version. You might think that they have been indoctrinated perhaps at school, but you’d be wrong. All of them go to liberal public schools which have been showing “An Inconvenient truth’ over and over with no opposing films or opinions, the teachers openly blame humans for climate change, they ridicule any opposing views from their students, as a result most of these kids have had enough and reject it all. I have been an environmentalist since 1970, and I have never seen anything like this. I have been saying for years that AGW will kill the environmental movement in the end. And now I’m seeing how. There is a whole new generation of kids who will not fill the ranks of the green movement in the future. They reject environmentalism. This is a disaster in the making. So perhaps the Greens won a seat in 2011 but over the next 10 or 20 years environmentalism is going to have a serious problem on its hands.
ReplyDeletethe Green party is nothing more than a offshot of the church of Al Gore and despite the denials of May, is really a one issue party, and people are seeing through the green bs
ReplyDeleteI would guestimate that Lizzy May ran in that riding because research showed there are more eco-freaks living there than in any other riding in Canada. The Greens now that the fraudulent tripe they have been espousing has been exposed for the lie it is are finished except for a few fanatics that refuse to believe the truth of the matter. When I was a young man raising my family I lived through the eco-freaks first try at bamboozling everyone with the news that a new Ice Age was upon us in the early 70s. I didn't believe their crap then and I don't believe it now when they have tried the opposite approach.
ReplyDelete