Green leader May pins hopes on playing role in minority government
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 02:05:17 +0000
If the federal election ends with a minority parliament, Green MPs would insist government adopt more aggressive climate action or risk another election, Green Leader Elizabeth May said Wednesday.
That would happen if Green candidates win enough seats to form a “balance of responsibility,” May said, borrowing the term used by B.C.’s Green MLAs to describe their role in the provincial government.
With three weeks to election day, with a majority government in question and with up to six parties in play to send MPs to Ottawa, May is buoyant about Green prospects to fill that role.
“The reality is, there is a greater likelihood that this will be a minority parliament,” May said. “I believe firmly that the political statements of the 2019 election campaign will be rather more malleable after an election when one (leader) really wants to form government,” May told a Postmedia editorial board meeting in Vancouver.
If the price to become government is to reconsider spending the billions of dollars required to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, which is contested by First Nations and hurts Canada’s chances of meeting its Paris agreement climate targets, “I don’t think they will be as attached to that in a parliament where becoming prime minister depends on changing your mind.”
The provincial Green party’s experience in B.C. has demonstrated the role that a few representatives can play in a minority government and May said that example has taught her lessons about how to hold a government to account.
May said that in a “balance of responsibility” position federally, a Green caucus would be unlikely to strike a formal agreement to proper up a minority government.
She prefers the model of the 1960s government of Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson. That government, May said, delivered medicare, the Canada Pension Plan and unemployment insurance with the co-operation of an NDP caucus, but no formal coalition.
In B.C., May said, B.C. Leader Andrew Weaver’s Green caucus made “a very noble effort to assure British Columbians there wouldn’t be another election any minute,” by striking an agreement with the NDP Premier John Horgan.
However, while the agreement has helped keep government stable, May said she feels Horgan has “violated the spirit of the agreement,” with its decisions to approve B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam project and tax breaks for proposed liquefied natural gas projects.
And May said she would force another federal election before propping up a minority government that isn’t taking stronger action on climate action.
The Green party’s targets are to reduce carbon emissions to 60 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030, then carbon neutrality by 2050, notwithstanding International Energy Agency projections for continued global growth in natural gas use for the next 20 years.
May was in Vancouver Wednesday because she was not invited to the leaders’ televised French-language debate in Montreal.
Instead, she stopped in at Postmedia’s Vancouver newsroom before addressing the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs annual general assembly at the Musqueam Community Centre, then continuing on to events in Victoria and Saanich on Vancouver Island where the party has some of its biggest hopes to win seats.
However, that optimism may be premature, considering the party’s history, said Hamish Telford, a political scientist with the University of the Fraser Valley.
“Notwithstanding the fact the Greens are riding higher in the polls as they have in the past, it’s all about getting support in the right places,” Telford said. “And it’s not clear that the Green support in the polls is sufficiently concentrated in areas to elect that many more people.”
Telford said that in the past, the Green party election results have been disappointing, relative to their polling during elections, because they don’t have as big of a get-out-the-vote operation as the other parties.
By contrast, Telford said the NDP, which is vying with the Greens for third-party status, has a well established network of volunteers to get it supporters out to vote.
“Then a lot of people say they’re going to vote Green, then get to the ballot box and end up voting strategically,” Telford said.
Regardless, May is holding to her view that many Canadians do want stronger leadership on the climate crisis, so she is unwilling to waver on the Green party’s platform calling for deep cuts in carbon emissions and rapidly weaning society off of fossil fuels.
“The political answer is people shouldn’t worry about strategic voting because right now, we’re on track for a minority parliament,” with the vote on the right split by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada, May said.
Then May said her “honest answer” to the question of whether she is worried a strategic vote is that she is less concerned about saying things in public that she thinks will get votes as she is about pushing the other leaders to “read the science and let’s work together.”
“If we’re the voice that says ‘this is what we have to do, we’re clear and have a plan, (and) if there is backfire or blowback, it’s not a calculation,” May said.