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Can Elizabeth May win a seat in BC?

By Andrew MacLeod

Elizabeth May said she likes her chances to win a seat in the next Canadian election. “I think I'm going to be either first or second, in terms of polling,” she said of the race in the British Columbia riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. “I like first.”

She has some reason to be optimistic, though perhaps not confident. Internal Green Party polls, which helped her decide where to run, have put her even with the incumbent, Conservative minister of state Gary Lunn, she said.

“I allowed a long search process to take place,” she said when asked recently how she chose to run in a riding on Vancouver Island, on the opposite side of the country from Central Nova where she ran last time.

“Part of it was polling and part of it was listening to people, and there was no question far and away it was voters of Saanich-Gulf Islands that said their values were most in tune with Green values, they were most interested in making a change,” she said.

The poll upon which the Green's have staked May's future was taken in the spring of 2009 by the firm Harris/Decima, said John Fryer, who recently resigned as May's campaign manager. “The result of that poll was both she and Gary Lunn polled exactly the same at 33 percent.”

Encouraged, May moved to the riding, won the nomination contest and has made herself a local presence. Her letters and editorials have run in Victoria's daily newspaper and she has appeared at a wide range of community events. She's opened two campaign offices.

She also has some prominent support. Nobel Prize winner and University of Victoria climate professor Andrew Weaver appeared with her at a Green Party press event in May. “In Saanich-Gulf Islands I clearly support Elizabeth May,” he said. “I always look for the candidate and I agree we need to have a change in Ottawa, we need a different voice.”

Weaver, by the way, said he supports the Liberal and NDP incumbents in neighbouring ridings.

Ken Wu, frequently quoted in the press as a former campaigner for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and in his new role leading the recently formed Ancient Forest Alliance, is working with volunteers to go door to door for May. The riding is full of environmentalists and even many of the conservatives have a conservation bent, he said. “It is possible to get a portion of the Gary Lunn vote to go to Elizabeth.”

Voters, however, will have three choices who are all clear alternatives to Lunn. The Liberals have nominated a middle-aged woman with a climate science background to run in the riding and the NDP has found a female first nations educator to carry their banner.

And the Greens have not done any polling in the riding for over a year, Fryer said, so it is difficult to know whether their campaign efforts are working.

Will Horter, who as a co-ordinator of the Conservation Voters of B.C. has been an active observer of the riding, said May's success will depend on running a professional, disciplined campaign with a focus on identifying likely Green voters and getting them to the polling stations on election day.

“When I looked at the polling numbers I was impressed. It said she's in the game,” he said.

But he pointed out that Briony Penn, who ran for the Liberals last election and came second to Lunn, might well have won a poll on election day too. Lunn ran a below-the-radar campaign that relied on developing a list of likely Conservative voters, then making sure they got out to vote.

To win, May's campaign will have to use a similar tactic, said Horter. “It's all down to the numbers,” he said. “If her list isn't to 15 or 17,000 people by now, they have no hope.”

He also recommends that May focus entirely on the riding, allowing someone else to speak for the party nationally. May should talk about “toxics” and “pollution” rather than Kyoto or Copenhagen if she wants to pick up past Conservative voters, he said. “If you talk about 'global warming', you lose them.” Running focus groups would also help, especially to figure out how to talk to conservative women who may be looking for an alternative to Lunn.

Most importantly, the Green Party has to be prepared to spend what it takes to win, he said. There are no spending limits until the campaign period, and the party should focus a significant amount of its $4 million budget in the riding, he said.

Former May campaign manager Fryer said the plan he developed included canvassing each of the 56,000 homes in the riding at least twice. The first call was to be a gentle, get acquainted type visit, while the second was to be an attempt to identify how residents are likely to vote. “That could be the campaign secret weapon if they can do that,” he said.

He said he doesn't know how many voters had been identified, but it had an “upward trajectory.” Many people, with the election yet to be called, are of course undecided. “It never goes as well as you like,” he said.

But is the campaign doing everything it can? “That's a hard question. Especially a hard question on the record. I would say you can always do more.”

The party doesn't have as much money as some would think, he said. It borrowed $3.5 million for the last election and is still paying it back. But Fryer said when he went to the party's executive council seeking money for May's campaign, they gave him more than he requested.

“I think the party's serious about this goal,” he said. “There's not very much moaning about the allocation of the necessary funds to try to achieve that.”

May is staying in the riding for three weeks out of four, on average, he said. And once the election is called she will be in the riding for all but 10 days of the five week campaign period. She'll leave for an eight-day leader's tour and for two days for the televised debates.

“I guess they're doing what they can,” he said. “Everything's a bit of a compromise.”

Meanwhile, he said, it's clear Lunn's campaign is keeping in touch with voters, using Windsor, Ontario firm to canvass the entire riding by telephone three or four times.

“I think it would be foolhardy to suggest this is any kind of easy task,” Fryer said. “It's going to be a tough four way fight.”

Andrew MacLeod reports on politics for TheTyee.ca website from Victoria, BC.