Greens choose May for leader, electoral breakthrough: whose votes are at risk?

So the Green Party had their leadership convention this weekend in Ottawa and elected Elizabeth May as their new leader. May won with 65 percent of the 3200 ballots cast over deputy party leader David Chernushenko.

According to the Toronto Star, the new leader has had a high profile career as a champion of multiple environmental causes. She also worked for the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, and made a splash in the late 1980s when she paid tribute to Mulroney as the “greenest” prime minister at an award dinner in Ottawa attended by Harper. May met with Rona Ambrose many months ago, before deciding to run for the Green Party and advised Ambrose to follow the example of Mulroney’s green plan.

She was chosen for her clout, influence, and for an electoral breakthrough for the Greens more so than policy. The Star suggests that the two frontrunners had almost no policy differences, except on Nafta: “the race came down to a question about the best winning formula for the Greens”.

At whose expense do the Greens expect to have an electoral breakthrough? May argues that Nafta “rachet(s) down on labour rights and the environment in Canada”. She also is critical of how the policies of the US president imperil” us here” in Canada and how Harper’s Green Plan Two is a “made in Houston” not in Canada plan.

The message here is that the Greens under May will seek to exercise their clout on environmental issues as a voice of opposition, but may not be as ideologically different from the Conservatives as one might at first think, apart from issues of nationalism.

The Greens will try to chip away at support from all other parties by making the environment a “ballot box” question for “swing voters”. That includes going after some “swing support” that ended up with the CPC in the last election - support that had originated with voters who had previously supported the Liberals or the NDP. The Green membership have entrusted May to go after this vote and in so doing seemingly confusing the traditional and linear “Left-Right”.

This theme seems to be recurring, as I wrote on August 19th the following about the CAW/NDP split:

“What does this mean for the use of linear terms in describing ideology such as "left" and right" in Canadian politics? Go back to Poli 101 to fully consider whether in Canada until now these terms have been more about political spin, control and stigma than about an accurate way of analyzing ideological preferences.In light of political theories that suggest that the commonalities between extreme fascism and socialism are closer than the linear definition of the political spectrum can allow, this split between the CAW and the NDP might be proof that this linear model is too simplistic.”

Has the landscape of Canadian politics changed forever … stay tuned.