Jeffrey SimpsonThe Globe and Mail
Elizabeth May is up early. She must be tired, having flown in from Montreal the previous evening, but still squeezed in time for an event in her riding. The next morning she does not look fatigued.
She arrives smiling, talking a mile a minute, usually about herself and her Green Party, waiting for the ferry to take her to the day's first event, a farmer's market on Pender Island, one of five large ones in her riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.
Later, she will do an all-candidates' meeting (one of 15 in her riding), door-knock in Victoria, and attend yet another all-candidates' meeting. "I'm attending them all," she declares proudly.
She doesn't have to attend them, partly because she will win her riding regardless, and partly because she is also obliged to fly around the country as leader of an upstart party that only got 4 per cent of the national vote in the 2011 election. Unlike the other leaders, she has no party plane, no vast array of staff. Travelling as she does is hard.
Ms. May has an effervescence that many find irresistible. She has had two hip replacement operations but never seems to be still. Her physical energy is matched only by her love of talking (and writing). She's fighting an uphill campaign, since a Green vote, no matter how much she disputes the fact, can draw a vote from the New Democrats or Liberals, thereby indirectly helping the Conservatives. She has every reason to sometimes feel neglected, but she's a scrapper.
For the leader of a party with only two MPs – herself and one who left the NDP to become a Green during the last Parliament – she gets an amazing amount of media coverage. It can be said that she has fallen in love with every microphone she has ever seen, but that would be slightly unfair because she has to fight for every minute of air time. It rankles her that The Globe and Mail and other organizers of leaders' debates, including the two this week, cut her out.
Debates or not, she enjoys a high national political profile despite her party's very modest standing. Of course, there are some local Green candidates of note, but she is the party in the general public's mind.
In her riding, everyone seems to call her Elizabeth. Mind you, those who attend an all-candidates' debate on Pender Island are her kind of people: politically left, environmentally preoccupied (dead set against any tanker traffic, oil pipelines or fossil fuels, except presumably for their cars, there being no public transit on the island), back-to-the-landers and retirees, alert and aware of any threats to their little paradise.
The Greens might score something in the range of 5 per cent nationally this time. But that figure is meaningless. Green support is bunched, largely in British Columbia where it might stand at around 10 per cent, rising to perhaps 20 per cent or more on Vancouver Island.
Green voters do come from those who have not cast a ballot before. But they also come from New Democrats and to a lesser extent from Liberals. Green strength barely dents the Conservatives, but it does hurt the other parties. Hurting these parties reduces their threat to the Conservatives.
Ms. May says that with more Greens in Parliament, she would work with the Liberals and/or New Democrats if it means booting the Conservatives from office. On the other hand, if those two parties have between them a parliamentary majority, they would not need any Green support.
The Greens raised more than $3-million last year and are budgeting $5-million for the campaign. They conduct regular opinion polls in the ridings where they believe themselves competitive. They have snappy literature, excellent posters and good media relations: the backbone of a professional party. But they remain very small in contrast with the other three. Determined, energetic, idealistic, but small.
And Greens have the luxury of being so far removed from power that they can construct a platform of dreaminess – free university tuition, investments in all sorts of social programs, the end of fossil fuels, huge amounts of money for green energy and lots of other spending with very limp ideas for how to pay for it all. Theirs is what might charitably be called as aspirational budget rather than a realistic one.
Ms. May speaks of 10 seats or more. That would be an aspirational target. A realistic one would be something much less.