Green-Grit dealing and wheeling - Part II

The Green-Grit saga continues, much to my surprise and imitigated sense of disgust. Now, it seems as though the May-Dion non-aggression pact is about to get some significant play among other Green members and potential candidates...the following is a short excerpt from the Ottawa Citizen..

Saying he was taking a page out of Elizabeth May’s strategy book, Green party member Jim Fannon has proposed throwing his party’s support to the Liberal nominee in the St. Catharines riding rather than run a Green candidate in the next election.

....He was quoted in the St. Catharines Standard saying his resolution is another example of doing politics in a different way: “Canadians have recently elected two minority governments. They want parties working together, and that is what this is all about.”
Former Liberal MP Walt Lastewka said he would welcome the help in the next election since he only lost by 250 votes to Dykstra and he believes many of the Green votes would come his way. But he denied being involved in any discussions with Fannon or any other local Greens.

So, there you have it - one party (The Greens) are promising another party (The Libs) a free ride in order to help defeat the big, bad government of the day. I see how this would please the Liberals tremendously and how it would legitimize the strategic voting pattern even more.

The obvious question, then, must be - Why have the Green party in Canada at all? At least on the federal level.

This entire story reminds me of other, albeit very rare, examples around the world, like when the Hungarian Communist party voluntarily voted itself out of existence in the early 1990s. The big difference being the Communists had actually ruled that country for 40 years, had internal schisms and had realized their era and their ideology were coming to a close. They were no longer needed or relevant. The Canadian Greens are engineering a similar end to their own existence, with the distinction of never having elected a member to the Parliament, never having influenced a single major policy or piece of legislation, never having put their stamp on a piece of Canadian political heritage.

So, Hungarian communists get a 120 on the political IQ scale. Canadian greens get about a 12.

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