It’s not easy being Green

I lost a potential vote yesterday, and I admit I was sad to see it go. With such modest goals as I have, every single vote counts. The potential vote was lost to what the writer referred to as defeatism. You can read the whole comment on yesterday’s blog.

I understand the criticism. My admission that I will not win the riding of Dartmouth South-Portland Valley in the election on June 9 may well be a fundamental error. Politically speaking, it is probably an unwise thing to admit to the people whose votes you seek. Yet, given that I am running in a riding where only 308 votes were garnered for the Green Party in the last provincial election, and where the (now reoffering) incumbent won over 48% of the vote, beating her nearest opponent by over 1400 votes, and where the riding specific operating budget is $0.00 (although I do have some party produced generic signs and pamphlets, meaning we couldn’t afford to put my name on them), I rather thought the assertion that I could come out of political obscurity and actually win the election would appear kind of delusional. And given the choice between appearing delusional and appearing politically unwise, I decided to err on the side of caution.

Here’s the thing I never understood about politics. I never understood why we so often end up electing a guy – or a party – just because he had the good sense and good fortune to hire the slickest marketing firm. Politics is about manipulating people en masse. Policy is about protecting the same people. It is absurd to me that because one is good at the former, we should entrust them with the latter. If anything, the desire to mass-manipulate the voting public should preclude anybody of being worthy of the public trust. Me, I’m bad at politics.

I count lying as manipulation, by the way, and this is what I would be doing if I stood in someone’s door and said to her face I could win. And it would be that most awkward kind of lie, because both of us would know it was a lie and neither of us would want to say it. Me, for the shame of having to admit such a thing, and her, because it would cut precious nanoseconds off in her attempts to close her door in my face. No, I can’t say such things.

But I can talk about the democratic process, about a first past the post system where the only thing that matters is to come in first and where anyone who admits he cannot do that is therefore not even worth having his ideas heard. I mentioned the reoffering incumbent in my riding, Marilyn More of the NDP. She won the last election with 48.05% of the vote. That was a pretty big majority by the standards of some ridings in the province. That’s some kind of math where 48.05% makes a pretty big majority. It means, of course, that 51.95% of all the people who took the time to vote in this riding voted against the person who won. This is standard issue stuff in our representative democracy.

I’d like to see that change. There’s a lot of things I’d like to see change, but I’m clear-eyed and realistic enough to know that change must sometimes be incremental. Electoral change is one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be the MLA for my riding. I would desperately love to sit in Province House and argue for long term sustainability, for democratic reform so that over 50% percent of the actual voters aren’t disenfranchised after the fact, for environmentally friendly means of electricity production, for the fact that teachers and other child development professionals are the greatest human resources we have at our disposal and ought to be rewarded as such. Absolutely, I’d love to be your MLA, but not so much that I’ll look you in the eye and tell you it’s likely when I know it isn’t.

I am a realistic idealist, if there can be such a thing. I believe great things can happen in our society, but they cannot happen all at once. If my modest pursuit of 500 votes, and if the modest pursuits of the full slate of Green Party candidates across this province (for whom my blog should in no way be contstrued to collectively speak), can help put sustainability into the political discourse, then we will have scored a political victory whose meaning will be far better understood in elections to come.