Green Party myths
After a few days of public wrangling that included threats of a lawsuit, the Green Party yesterday won its fight with the consortium of Canadian broadcast networks that produce the federal party leaders’ debates. Green leader Elizabeth May will be participating.
To me, that’s unfortunate. Make a few threats to the right people, with a few able lawyers to back you up, and you’ll generally get what you want. But enough about the Green Party’s tactics. Significantly more relevant are the arguments the Greens have used to justify a place at the debates.
Myth #1: The Reform Precedent
One argument is simple: the Reform Party was allowed into the 1993 debates, despite having Deborah Grey as their lone MP. If Preston Manning could represent Reform at the debates on the basis of Grey’s seat, why can’t Elizabeth May represent the Greens on the basis of newly-acquired MP Blair Wilson?
Well, for one thing, by election time, Grey had been representing Reform in Ottawa for four and a half years; Wilson has been the Greens’ flag-bearer for a week and a half. But what makes this argument laughably weak is that Grey was elected under the Reform banner in a 1989 by-election. Wilson crossed the floor, so there’s just no comparison.
Myth #2: The Bloc Precedent
Another common argument used by the Green Party in elections past pertained to Lucien Bouchard also being allowed into the 1993 debates as leader of the Bloc Québécois, despite not having elected any MPs under that party’s banner; the initial makeup of the Bloc consisted of a handful of former Progressive Conservative and Liberal MPs, along with current leader Gilles Duceppe, who was elected in a 1990 by-election as an independent.
But this line of reasoning is a rhetorical sleight of hand that obscures one very important fact about Duceppe’s entry into Parliament. His candidacy as an independent came about not due to choice, but because the Bloc had not yet registered as a federal political party. In essence, Duceppe was elected as a representative of the Bloc all but in name; the same cannot be said of anybody with the Green Party.
Myth #3: Seat coverage
One of the most overused rationales for Green participation at the debates used to be that the Greens run candidates in all 308 ridings across Canada. Some fanatical devotees to this line of thought even consider the inclusion of the Bloc, which only runs candidates in Quebec, in the debates to be a corruption of democracy.
Unfortunately, the premise isn’t even true anymore; this time around, the Greens aren’t running in Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s riding of Saint-Laurent—Cartierville. Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives, for that matter, are running in all of the country’s ridings, which means that if doing so were the sole criteria for inclusion in the leaders’ debates, we’d be watching NDP leader Jack Layton debate himself.
The bottom line
Much ado has been made of Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s opposition (and to a lesser extent, that of Layton as well) to May’s inclusion in the debates. Accusations have ranged from being afraid to debate with May to wilfully corrupting democracy.
| “ | … the Greens wanted a court to order a media outlet to broadcast something they may not have wanted to… that’s something that never goes anywhere good | ” |
But it’s clear that anybody assigning political motives to Harper’s position has failed to think through his incentives very well. Consider what happens if the Greens become a force in an election that may very well feature environmental policy as a key issue. Who will the Greens be most likely to split votes with? The Liberals and the New Democrats. The last party on that list? Why, Harper’s Conservatives.
Given no political incentive for Harper to push for May’s exclusion and every reason for him to support her instead, one has to at the very least accept Harper’s opposition at face value. But even this misses the point completely.
The unescapable fact is that the broadcast networks—save for the CBC—are private institutions, every bit as private as this blog. To frame the Greens’ fight as an issue of democracy, fairness, and justice is to hide the fact that at the end of the day, the Greens were also threatening to appeal to a court to order a media outlet to broadcast something they may not have wanted to.
And take it from any former communist country, or even Mark Steyn or Ezra Levant—that’s something that never goes anywhere good.