[OntarioJeremy]

Congratulations to JJ for his editorial in the Tuesday (August 19) edition of the National Post. He is totally right about the Green Party!

[Quantum_Wizard]

In case somebody is interested the letter to the editor is apparently this one.

[Psudo]

Congratulations again! Succinct and sharp, as I've come to expect from JJ.

Tristan from Toronto's response seems shallow and angry by comparison.

[emart]

one of these days, though!

[CanadianJeff]

very valid points JJ. Frankly I agree. if all a party can do is stand on a single election issue and cling to it for dear life it's no big surprise they can't get elected but still get media coverage.

Frankly if the green party really wants to help they will disband and join the other major parties with more then a single issue.

[JJ]

Hey thanks for noticing. Here's a longer article I wrote on the whole matter in a Facebook note:

Yesterday the National Post ran a dopey article profiling Mike Nagy, some knob from the Green Party who is running in the federal by-election that will be held in Guelph, Ontario on September 8. The headline read:

"READY TO BLOOM? The Green Party is looking for a by-election breakthrough"

The rest of the piece proceeded to sympathetically profile Mr. Nagy, and discuss his high hopes of "becoming Canada's first Green member of parliament"— an outcome the article presented as being completely plausible.

But of course in reality Mr. Nagy has absolutely no chance to win, and buried within the article it was even quietly mentioned that he "finished a distant fourth" in the 2006 federal election. So why even bother to profile him? I wrote the following letter to the Post, which is published in today's paper:

"I long ago lost count of how many articles I've read in major Canadian newspapers speculating on a possible "breakthrough" for the Green Party in this-or-that coming election. The fact that the Greens remain unable to even get a single member of any provincial legislature elected (to say nothing of the federal parliament) doesn't seem to deter the press, whose spin on the matter is always something to the effect of "plucky party has high hopes" instead of something more accurate, like "delusional party remains unpopular."

The Greens may whine endlessly about how nobody takes them seriously, but at some point they have to honour their end of the bargain too, and actually get elected to something. Then and only then will the sympathetic media gushing be even remotely justified."

The media enjoys getting into comfortable little narrative ruts, in which they can spout various truisms and use those as the basis for stories, instead of actual reporting. "Green Party breakthrough imminent" is one such truism that bears no connection to reality, yet is constantly discussed in the mainstream media. The media props up the Green Party at every conceivable turn, like a pushy parent who insists that their idiot child be given a seat at the adult table.

But as I mentioned, the Green Party never honors its end of the bargain, and remain very electorally unpopular, even with an enormous media bias in their favor. The problem is that they offer absolutely nothing of substance to the Canadian political debate. Elections are already crowded by three political parties who, between them, offer basically every conceivable flavor of bland centrist mush. By offering mush that claims to be even more centrist than the alternatives, the Greens are filling a need that simply does not exist.

I'm also getting rather sick of the Green's annoying tendency to make everything about themselves. I guess because they have nothing substantial to offer policy-wise, about the only thing Greens ever talk about is how "ready" they are to win, how "good they feel" about this coming election, and so on. Their message always carries with it a sense of pompous entitlement and arrogance, as if it is their right to get a seat in something, if only the stupid voters would learn (this is also why they are a big fan of changing the electoral system; it's just not right for an electoral system to exist that doesn't get Greens elected). And the media does its part by repeating these mantras over and over in non-stories about loser candidates and pie-in-the-sky predictions.

One last thing- in the Post article it's mentioned that Mr. Nagy's campaign workers have a slogan, "when the Greens win in Guelph, the BBC will call," with the subtext being that a Green victory would be an international event of tremendous importance. That, in a nutshell, tells you everything you need to know about the Green Party.

[Psudo]

An ode to JJ's intellectual consistancy:

[Ombrageux]

Congrats on getting published. I don't know enough about Canadian politics to comment on the piece.

[Murray_Smith]

I like dissecting the arguments of fools.

Quote:

Letter writer J. J. McCullough must be delusional if he believes the Green Party of Canada -- and green politics in general -- receive an inordinate amount of sympathetic media coverage. Has he ever read the Post's editorial section? Despite running a candidate in every riding and capturing over half a million voters, the Greens have been locked out of major TV debates.

Canada's population, according to the 2006 census, is over 31.5 million. That means that the Green party constitutes less than 1.6% of the total population. Unless much of this 1.6% is concentrated in a small area or the Greens can convince a good share of other voters to break party lines (neither of which sounds very plausible), the Green party has little hope of even getting a plurality in any contested area.

Quote:

Meanwhile, including the Bloc Quebecois, which runs in a single province and gets 1.5 million votes, is considered de rigueur.

Again, we'll look at raw numbers here. The population of Quebec is estimated to be 7.7 million. That means that nearly 20% of the population in Quebec belongs to the Bloc. If we take a gander at Wikipedia (only for the statistics, mind you), the last five election results have shown that the Bloc has never received less that 35% of Quebec's popular vote, and no less than 10% of Canada's popular vote, since the Bloc was founded in 1991. Granted, 10% of the vote nationwide isn't much, but it's still leagues away from 1.6%.

But what do I know. I'm just some stupid American.

[Quantum_Wizard]

Murray_Smith, your numbers are highly misleading since you are comparing Bloc's share of popular vote and the Green Party's voter's share of the total population. These are not the same since not every Canadian votes. Green Party's share of the popular vote was about 4.5% in the last election.

If the system were different this might earn them a seat or two. The Bloc gets seats out of proportion with their share of the vote since their support is concentrated in one province.

Perhaps it would have been accurate for J.J. to say that, "delusional party remains unsuccessful". Of course one can still remark that a party which only runs candidates in one province gets more than twice as many votes as the Greens, so they aren't really all that popular.