If the Green Party ever wants to be taken seriously, then it needs to stand good quality, local candidates.
There was no Green candidate on the May 5 provincial ballot and this time around the federal candidate is from Calgary.
The whole thing begs some basic questions. An obvious one is logistics. How is Green Party candidate, Sabrina Levac, going to campaign?
Will she be relocating to the riding for the next month and a bit, or making the seven-hour round trip commute?
We don’t know what their pre-selection process is like but if the best the Green Party can do is parachute in someone from the third city south on Highway 2, voters are right to ask what the point is.
How are we expected to trust a candidate that isn’t from here, doesn’t know us, and therefor must lack the kind of insight needed to represent us.
And the last point should be the purpose.
Why stand for election if you don’t think you can win?
If you’re not in it to win it, what are you in it for? Is it to give people an option, like the ballot is some kind of electoral salad bar?
That’s OK, maybe, if you give us that option consistently. There’s no point asking people to buy into your ideology if you’re not selling it at every opportunity.
World wide, in places where the Green Party has done well and been able to move beyond the single issue of environmentalism, it’s stood high quality, hyper-local candidates who were able to make sense on key issues.
But back to the main question, if it’s not to win, then why run and what purpose is it serving?
Some of the more skeptical of us think it’s for the money.
Every vote the Greens get goes toward making the threshold for electoral funding.
It seems like a complete backflip on 2011’s focus of winning seats over seeking a volume of votes.
If the party thinks it can do both by riding on the back of federal leader-by-default Elizabeth May, then they have signed their own electoral death warrant.
