Some advice for Elizabeth May

Regular readers may have been able to suss-out over time that I’m a Liberal supporter, but I like Green Party leader Elizabeth May – she’s good people – so with the news that she has apparently settled on Saanich-Gulf Islands as her riding of choice in the next election, I’m going to set aside my partisanship for a few minutes and offer her some advice.

First, she should pick a riding and stick with it. This hopping from riding to riding is madness. That was supposed to be the idea with Central Nova, but apparently she has concluded that’s a long(er) shot, so she’s trying another.

Frankly, I don’t think SGI is winnable for her either. If Conservative minister Gary Lunn wasn’t unseated last time, I think he’s pretty darned secure, barring calamity or major scandal. Look at the perfect storm the Liberals had in the riding last time – an unpopular minister, a popular Liberal candidate with strong green credentials in a very green-friendly riding (Briony Penn won't run again but is supporting Liberal nomination candidate Renee Hetherington), and no NDPer on the ballot after their candidate was forced to resign due to scandal. And still, despite lots of alleged shenanigans (phantom demon calling, questionable third-party advertising) Lunn got back in with a four per cent cushion, and 43 per cent of the vote.

None of the other parties are going to give an inch to May (I know the Liberals will be running hard), so she’s going to have a helluva road to climb to build on the 10.45 per cent the Greens got in the riding. More likely, she’ll contribute to vote-splitting, ensuring Lunn’s re-election by a more comfortable margin.

Still, May has to run somewhere. And SGI is probably as good a riding as any for her as any, being traditionally one of the strongest Green ridings in the country. It’s all relative, of course, but you need to start somewhere.

And, frankly, the last thing she should care about is vote-splitting. It really shouldn't give her pause. This brings me to my next, and most important piece of advice: May needs to decide is she wants to lead a serious political party or not.

If her goal is just to advance green issues whatever way she can and to get the Conservatives out of power, she should just join the Liberals. I hear Liberal Party president Alf Apps invited her to do just that, and she declined. That’s fine, she’s made her choice: now she needs to own it.

That means making clear that her mission is to elect Green Party of Canada candidates in all 308 ridings across the country, period. While she turned down Apps, she also reportedly said she’d like to be environment minister in a Liberal government. No, Ms. May. If that’s her goal, she should have run for the Liberals. These kind of mixed signals are demoralizing to her activists across the country, and don’t contribute to the Greens being seen as a serious party.

She needs to completely divorce herself from the idea of strategic voting. If she's running candidates everywhere she needs to support all of them, period. To do otherwise is unfair to them. In the last election, her mixed signals on this weren’t helpful. And the fact is, there is absolutely no scenario in which you can make a coherent strategic voting argument that ends with someone voting Green. The math just doesn’t work. So why go there? It doesn’t make sense.

So, my advice in a nutshell: pick a riding to put down roots in, avoid talk of strategic voting, who she’d like to be PM (unless its her) and what cabinet posts she’d like (except PM), and make clear she stands behind every Green candidate on the ballot and wants them all elected. If she's serious about building the Green Party, it’s the only way to go.

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(Video) Bruce Hallsor, Gary Lunn and Saanich-Gulf Islands

The Globe's Bill Curry writes this morning on a story that online media like The Tyee and Public Eye Online have been on for some time: the strange doings last election in Saanich-Gulf Islands:

Nudity, phantom phone calls, party switching: The 2008 federal election campaign in Saanich-Gulf Islands had it all.

Now Conservative MP and cabinet minister Gary Lunn, who won a hard-fought bid for re-election, is facing allegations his campaign had improper ties to third-party groups that bought pro-Lunn advertising.

New Democratic Party MP Bill Siksay sent a letter yesterday to the Commissioner of Elections Canada asking for an investigation into whether the advocacy groups broke the law.

"These previously unheard of organizations, with links to the minister and his political organization, ran ad campaigns endorsing the minister totalling over $12,000, a figure that if the minister's local campaign would have spent would have put him over the legal limit. Was this an attempt to do an end run around the spending limits?" Mr. Siksay asked in the House of Commons yesterday. He later produced Elections Canada filings for the groups.

Good on Bill Siksay for sending the letter to Elections Canada and raising the issue in the HoC. As Public Eye Online reported last week though, local Liberal riding association president Paul McKivett has already written to Elections Canada on the third-party funding issue, and Elections Canada is examining the allegations (as a precursor to a possible investigation):

In a March 2 letter soon to be made public by the Saanich-Gulf Islands federal Liberal constituency association, Elections Canada legal counsel John Dickson said the agency is reviewing the documentation filed by third party advertisers.

And, according to Mr. Dickson, Elections Canada's commissioner William Corbett could order an investigation if he believes the Saanich-Gulf Island advertiser filings deserve further review.

Back to the Globe though, and some of the specific allegations:

Recently released Elections Canada records show four of the groups - Citizens Against Higher Taxes, Economic Advisory Council of Saanich, Dean Park Advocacy Association and Saanich Peninsula Citizens Council - all used the same financial agent and provided the same postal address.

That address also belongs to Bruce Hallsor, a Victoria lawyer listed as an executive member of Mr. Lunn's Electoral District Association responsible for "election readiness." The Canada Elections Act states that third parties cannot spend more than $3,000, plus an adjustment for inflation, on advertising in support of a specific candidate and cannot splinter into separate groups to avoid breaching that limit.

Mr. Hallsor said yesterday there was nothing improper with the fact that he filed the groups' reports. He said he played a small role in Mr. Lunn's campaign and the groups had no direct involvement with the Lunn campaign, nor any knowledge of Mr. Lunn's campaign finances. He also said the groups conveyed different messages in their ads.

Very amusing to see Hallsor trying to distance himself from Lunn and minimize their relationship as much as possible, despite the fact he's a long-time member of his riding executive and even has responsibility, as Curry notes, for election readiness.

And when Lunn was one of the dissident MPs suspended from the Canadian Alliance caucus in 2001 by Stockwell Day, guess who was sent-up to CBC Newsworld to defend him? Yes, that's right, it was his good buddy Bruce Hallsor:

No one is buying your attempt to distance yourself from Lunn here Bruce, sorry. It just doesn't pass the laugh test.

More from CanPolitico.

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Elections Canada and Saanich-Gulf Islands

Public Eye Online's Sean Holman reports on the latest from Elections Canada on the fallout from the last election in Saanich-Gulf Islands, where NDP supporters got phantom phone calls and a bevy of third-party advertising appeared, much of it with possible connections to a prominent Gary Lunn supporter:

Elections Canada has closed an investigation into mysterious phone calls encouraging Saanich-Gulf Island residents to vote for a candidate who dropped out of the campaign. But there's still a chance the agency could look into the controversy surrounding third party advertisers in that riding, Public Eye has learned.
(read more)

It's really ridiculous they weren't able to trace those phone calls. We'll see what, if anything, happens on the advertising front.
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Strange doings in Saanich-Gulf Islands

Strange doings this weekend in Saaninch-Gulf Islands tonight. The 11 pm Global Vancouver news reports that people in Saanich-Gulf Islands have been getting automated phone calls urging them to vote for NDP candidate Julian West.

The thing is, West isn't running. His name is still on the ballot, but he dropped out of the race after news re-emerged about him exposing himself to a group of teenage girls 12 years ago. The NDP isn't campaigning in the riding. Both West, and the NDP, say they're not responsible for the calls.

According to Global, Caller ID and *69 indicates the calls are coming from a number belonging to the local NDP riding president. But the NDP riding president says he has nothing to do with the calls.

In this riding, the progressive vote has been uniting behind Liberal candidate Briony Penn, who has been picking-up NDP votes (with West out of the race) and is poised to defeat Conservative cabinet minister Gary Lunn. Both Lunn and Penn claim to have to knowledge of the calls.

Local police are said to be investigating the calls. I can only wonder who would benefit from ensuring the NDP vote doesn't go Liberal in this riding?

UPDATE: The Times Colonist now has a piece online:

A number of residents in the Saanich-Gulf Islands riding received recorded telephone messages Monday, urging them to vote for NDP candidate Julian West - who left the race after controversy over a public-nudity incident 12 years ago.

Irene Wright, executive member of the NDP's federal riding association for Saanich-Gulf Islands, said Monday night night people started phoning her around 5 p.m. to say they had received an automated call encouraging them to vote for West in Tuesday's election.

A woman's voice in the recording said the call was endorsed by Bill Graham, president of the NDP Saanich-Gulf Islands riding association, and from the "Progressive Voters Association of Saanich-Gulf Islands."

By using caller identification information, the call's origin appeared to be the fax number at Graham's address.

"It's not coming from our fax machine," said Graham. "Somebody is fraudulently using our name and our fax number to send out a misleading message."

Graham said he has checked with the federal and provincial NDP campaign offices, who told him that they have not contracted any automated calls to be put out in the Saanich-Gulf Islands riding.

A vote for West would be considered a spoiled ballot.

It is possible to "spoof" phone networks into displaying false caller ID numbers using a number of methods, including computers and other external hardware.

Complaints have been filed with Saanich police, the RCMP and Elections Canada.

A Telus spokesperson did not return calls for comment last night.

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On spin doctoring and odd journalism

Last week a story involving Natural Resources minister Gary Lunn went largely unnoticed. The NDP is alleging Lunn, also the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands (where he’s being challenged by former Green Party activist Briony Penn for the Liberals) spent some $25,000 of taxpayer dollars on spin doctoring work that could have been done by his staff.

First, the odd journalism. I thought this passage was weird:

New Democratic strategist Brad Lavigne rejected suggestions that the party was picking on the Natural Resources Minister.

Why would the reporter suggest the NDP was picking on Lunn? I mean, what is this, grade school. They’re raising concerns about government spending. That’s not picking on him, that’s doing their job. Hopefully they didn’t hurt Gary’s feelings.

Anyway, on to more spin doctoring. Here’s some from the NDP’s Dr. Lavigne:

He did note, however, that the NDP came a close second in Mr. Lunn's riding, one of the tightest races in a province with many competitive federal seats.

OK, so the NDP was a close second and it was a tight race. Hmm, what were the results then?

The NDP ran second in Saanich-Gulf Islands in the 2006 federal election, winning 26.5 per cent of the vote, compared with 37.2 per cent for Mr. Lunn.

Put that into raw numbers and Lunn beat the NDP’s Jennifer Burgis by nearly 7000 votes. Calling that a close second and one of the tightest races in the province* is a bit of a stretch for Brad, I’d have to say. He ploughs forward undaunted, however:

"We are the alternative to the Conservatives in that riding as in many other ridings in [British Columbia]," Mr. Lavigne said from Ottawa.

Alrighty then, let’s see how the Liberals did in that riding:

The Liberals came third with 26 per cent in the riding north of Victoria that Mr. Lunn has held since 1997 under Reform, Alliance and Conservative colours.

Actually, the Liberal candidate, Sheila Orr, had 26.09 per cent compared to the NDP’s 26.54 per cent. Again, in votes that’s a 301 vote gap.

The alternative would seem to not be as clear as Brad was spinning. Perhaps the race for second was the tight race he was thinking of? With Penn in the race this riding is very competitive.

*I don't have time a the moment to check the results for each riding in the province, but a quick check shows S/GI wasn't even close to the tightest race on Vancouver Island. Indeed, it was the second highest margin of victory. That honour of closest goes to my old stomping grounds of Vancouver Island North, where the NDP's Catherine Bell won a squeaker over the incumbent, Con John Duncan, whom she'll face again next election.

Here's the margins of victory for the Island ridings:

1. Vancouver Island North: NDP, by 616 votes over CON
2. Esquimalt Juan De Fuca: LIB, by 2,166 votes over NDP
3. Nanaimo-Alberni: CON, by 5,767 over NDP
4. Victoria: NDP, by 6,783 over LIB
5. Saanich-Gulf Islands: CON, by 6,971 over NDP
6. Nanaimo-Cowichan: NDP, by 8,943 over CON

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What's the green game plan?

Steve writes approvingly of an apparent “unite the left” movement underway in the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. Apparently some local Green Party activists would like to see the party not run a candidate there, bur rather unite behind the NDP or Liberal candidate to defeat a particularly useless Conservative, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn.

First of all, let me say I’d be pleased as punch to see Lunn out of a job. And the Liberals do have a great candidate for the left to unite behind in the riding in the form of a prominent former Green Party activist, Briony Penn. And the arguments made around vote splitting are certainly quite compelling.

But putting aside my partisanship for a moment and speaking more broadly, I have to wonder what the Green Party’s long term game plan is here. The initial May/Dion alliance, which I supported, was about two ridings. It was about getting Elizabeth May into the HoC.

It seems to have sparked discussion about vote splitting across the country though, and while as a Liberal I’m pleased when the discussion benefits my party, it has to be troubling for the Greens.

I don’t have the riding by riding vote totals, but Saanich-Gulf Islands has generally been considered one of the strongest Green ridings in the country, and in past elections has often been mentioned as a riding to watch for a possible Green breakthrough.

Given that, you have to wonder if they might not run a candidate in what may be one of their most winnable ridings, just where are they going to run candidates? And why even run anyone anywhere at all?

In a multi-party, first past the post electoral system votes are going to be split, it’s just the nature of the system. It happened for years with two parties on the right, Reform and Conservative. It will potentially be happening now on the Left with the NDP, Greens and Libs. It sucks, but without a merger or folding that's the way it is.

It may be realpolitik to step aside in contestable ridings like Saanich-Gulf Islands, but I’d wager it would also seem to neuter the effectiveness of the party. A catch-22 perhaps, but there you ago.

Whatever happens in this riding or others, it becomes increasingly obvious what the long term answer is: electoral reform.

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