Angry in the Great White North

Elizabeth May is blaming the NDP for allowing the Conservatives to win an increased minority in this last election:

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says she would never join the Liberals and that NDP Leader Jack Layton's party is to blame for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's victory on Oct. 14.

"I certainly don't blame myself at all," said Ms. May, who spoke to The Hill Times from a payphone in Truro, N.S., after just stepping off a train.

Prime Minister Harper's (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) newly-minted 38-member Cabinet is preparing for a hasty return to Parliament on Nov. 18, however, some opposition parties are still pointing fingers at whose fault it is that the Tories won the election. During the election, and in the immediate aftermath of the Conservative victory, the possibility of forming a left-wing or centre-left coalition government was a hot topic in the media, and last Thursday former Liberal Cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy joined the 'Unite the Left' chorus. Some are also urging the centre-left parties to eventually join political parties, as the former Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance did. After the election, however, some Liberals, including B.C. MPs Hedy Fry (Vancouver Centre, B.C.) and Ujjal Dosanjh (Vancouver South, B.C.), lashed out at the NDP and the Greens for splitting the vote to the benefit of Mr. Harper.

Ms. May said that she and Liberal Party Leader Stephane Dion (Saint-Laurent-Cartierville, Que.) cooperated to try and defeat Mr. Harper because they understood that the Conservative government would not take any action to fight climate change. She said NDP Leader Jack Layton (Toronto-Danforth, Ont.) put partisanship ahead of concern for climate change and that he is partly to blame for the Conservative win.

Stéphane Dion and I went as far as any two leaders of any federal political parties have ever gone to express some spirit of cooperation in the larger goals of protecting the climate, and Mr. Layton would hear none of it. He was harshly critical of efforts to say those who care about the climate should find ways to get past partisanship. Mr. Layton has made partisanship his god and he's certainly not willing to do anything to put climate ahead of partisan self-interest, and that's what he lives with. I have a clear conscience."

But the Green Party, the Liberals, and the NDP ran candidates in almost every riding.  How is it that the NDP was splitting the vote, but the Green Party and the Liberals were not?  Indeed, the NDP platform rejected a carbon tax in favour of a cap-and-trade system, while the Liberals and the Green Party were both running on carbon tax platforms.

On the face of it, it would seem like the Liberals and the Green Party were the two parties most responsible for splitting the vote.

Consider Elizabeth May's comment that she and Stephane Dion cooperated to try and defeat Stephen Harper.  What cooperation?  Elizabeth did call for strategic voting on two or three occasions, and then immediately recanted when her own party started issuing press releases repudiating the idea.

The only observable example of sustained cooperation between the Liberal Party and the Green Party was in the decision by the Liberal Party not to run a candidate in Central Nova.  There, Elizabeth May herself would be carrying the Green Party banner in a fight against Conservative incumbent Peter MacKay, the defence minister.

Stephane Dion and I went as far as any two leaders of any federal political parties have ever gone to express some spirit of cooperation...Mr Layton would hear none of it.

What exactly did Jack Layton refuse to do?  The only thing that Stephane Dion did in the spirit of cooperation was pull out of Central Nova, gaming the vote in order to help Elizabeth May.  Is that what Jack Layton was asked to do?  To remove the NDP candidate from Central Nova so that voters in Central Nova would only have Elizabeth May to vote for if they didn't want to vote Conservative?

It is absurd nonsense to say that the NDP split the vote in the rest of the country, but that the Green Party did not.

But to make that statement concerning the vote in Central Nova makes some sense.

The Green Party and the Liberal Party did make a move in Central Nova to consolidate the anti-Conservative vote.  The NDP did not, and Elizabeth May suggests that Jack Layton was given that opportunity.

And so Elizabeth May is mad the she was cheated out of a seat.  If only the NDP had taken the choice away from voters, then she would be in parliament.  Not only that, she would have been the Green Party MP who took down a cabinet minister.  How far could she have gone with that feather in her cap?

But the NDP didn't see how important it was for Elizabeth May to win a seat in a dramatic way.  The insisted on giving voters in Central Nova the choice to support a different party, and that wrecked Elizabeth May's little plan.

Running as a candidate in an election is a precious right all Canadians enjoy.  But the reality is that you are almost certainly going to lose unless you have a party backing you.  When a party makes a decision not to run in a riding, that is a move with serious consequences to voters who would like to have had the choice.  When Stephane Dion decided that the Liberal Party would not run a candidate in Central Nova, he knew that the likelihood of an independent running on a facsimile of the Liberal Party platform was vanishingly small.  He knew he was forcing Liberal voters, therefore, to vote for the next closest thing, and that was for Elizabeth May.

That was at the heart of the agreement between Elizabeth May and Stephane Dion.  Remove the choice from a certain group of voters in order to give Elizabeth May an easy ride into a parliament seat.

This wasn't about the Green Party not winning enough votes nationally.  It was about Elizabeth May not winning enough votes in her riding.

Did I saying winning?  I should have said that this was about Elizabeth May not being gifted enough votes.

All those other Green Party candidates who had to fight against the Liberals could just go pound sand.

But this is all about Elizabeth May, not those other candidate.  Jack Layton and the NDP apparently refused to coerce voters in Central Nova into voting for Elizabeth May (the "spirit of cooperation"), and for that refusal, Elizabeth May is furious.  Apparently, Jack Layton is of the mind that votes are not favours to be traded back and forth by party leaders.

Foiled by the New Democratic Party.  That's sort of fitting. 

Too bad for Elizabeth May.  But don't count her out.  I bet she's trying hard to figure out a way to trick her way into parliament without have to actually win the most votes somewhere.  But I bet she is not going to get the next Liberal leader to just hand her his party's votes in the riding of her choice.  Or any riding, for that matter.

That is going to make things a lot harder.  No wonder she's mad.