Angry in the Great White North

The Green Party is in the news again. A senior member of the party, David Chernushenko, is resigning his position of Senior Deputy to the Leader in the Green Party, as well as stepping down as the nominee for the riding of Ottawa Centre:

A prominent Green party figure who lost the leadership contest to Elizabeth May last year is withdrawing as a candidate for the next election and quitting his post as senior deputy to Ms. May.

David Chernushenko, who twice carried the Green banner in Ottawa Centre, says he is leaving for his own business and environmental interests, but hinted in an interview he believes Ms. May is shouldering too great a workload in the party and should also share the public spotlight with other party members.

"I would certainly encourage her, for her own health, to try to share the load more," Mr. Chernushenko said yesterday.

That's very big of David Chernushenko, but really, I wonder just how concerned he is for Elizabeth May's health. I don't believe he wishes her ill, but what I'm hearing is that his departure is really more about internal party politics.

Some Green bloggers are saying as much:

David Chernushenko, the former deputy leader of Canada's Green Party, stepped down from his post today. Citing "business and environmental interests", but speculation is ripe that Chernushenko disagrees with party leader Elizabeth May's practices and internal policies.

Just what could be at the root of this friction? An interesting exchange happened during the Green Party leadership debate, when David Chernushenko was running against Elizabeth May to be the Green Party leader:

David Chernushenko:
I do however have to ask a question of Elizabeth and she'll be able to rebut when it comes. I'd like you to explain why you felt it necessary to call me and Jim Harris during the last election and ask us to consider asking Green Party candidates to stand aside in ridings where our running…

Elizabeth May interrupts:
That's not what I did David.

EM:
No, I don't like my actions being mischaracterized in a public debate and I apologize for interrupting David but I was a bit taken aback. What I felt at the end of the last election, and we were about a week from the vote, and I did talk to Jim Harris about it and I did call David as deputy leader because I felt the Green Party could take centre stage at that moment - we'd been denied the stage all through the election - to talk about putting principle ahead of power; to talk about what could happen if Harper was elected to all the platforms we cared about. Beyond that I didn't have a very well formed idea at all. I was calling them in desperation to say 'What could we do?' Could you for instance interest the Liberals if they were interested in talking about proportional representation? Was there room for a coalition there? We had about a week. I admit I was desperate. I had no actual plan but I certainly didn't call to suggest that people should stand aside for no reason. It was a question of what we could do to ensure the Green Party was front and center.

DC:
I do raise this here and I feel I have to because the same question was asked in the Montreal debate and I believe what was being asked of me and of Jim was - you posed the question; would I consider - would it make sense to ask Green Party candidates to step aside in riding where by doing so we would help to prevent a Stephen Harper government from being elected and I equally am very concerned about a Harper government but my response was no, I couldn't do that. I did not believe that was a principled thing for the Green Party to do because in fact I could never - we are running on principle - not running to try to keep one government out. We're running on trying to bring Green in and I as a candidate and one who has been a candidate several times could never ask another candidate; could never ask another riding association to have their candidate step down.

During the 2006 election, Elizabeth May was the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. So her request that David Chernushenko step aside in order to prevent the Conservatives from winning a seat because of vote splitting could be perceived as meddling.

But what I find interesting is that David Chernushenko was never likely to win that seat, nor did his participation in the democratic process result in the Conservatives winning the seat or even coming close:

Paul Dewar (NDP): 24,611
Richard Mahoney (Liberal): 19,458
Keith Fountain (Conservative): 15,126
David Chernushenko (Green): 6,766

Indeed, the NDP won the seat, and for those Greens who worry about vote-splitting, it is usually the votes leached from the NDP candidate that needs to be prevented. But it needs to be noted that David Chernushenko's showing was by far the best for a Green Party candidate in any election.

But with one week to go before the vote, Elizabeth May was in a state of desperation (not a good thing for a leader, by the way). And so she tried to get David Chernushenko to step aside so that...what?

Make sure the Conservatives wouldn't win? It wasn't even close.

Make sure the NDP won? They did without requiring the Green Party to concede.

Shift the Green vote to the Liberals and change the outcome? Mathematically possible, but only if every Green voter did exactly as they were told. Not likely, since a lot of Green voters would vote NDP as their second choice.

To somehow hurt David Chernushenko? Well, there aren't too many theories left.

Or is it simply that in the desperate state brought on by the fact that Canadian votes had had enough of Liberal sleaze and so were looking to the credible alternative offered up by the well-run Conservative campaign, Elizabeth May was thrashing around, and David Chernushenko ended up getting the strange request from the Sierra Club to quit the race.

To David Chernushenko, electing the Green Party matters. It is the reason to have a political party. For Elizabeth May, though, the real goal is to hurt the Conservatives. The environment comes second for Elizabeth May. I say that because it seems to me that electing some Green MPs in an election in which the Conservatives win would do more for the environment than electing no Greens members whatsoever in a Liberal win.

Especially if that Liberal win came about in part because the Green Party rolled over and played dead. If Elizabeth May thinks the Liberals would then feel beholden to the Green Party, she is sadly mistaken.

But Elizabeth May, both in 2006 and since becoming Green Party leader, has shown that for her the Green Party is just a pawn in her struggle to make sure Conservatives don't run the country. I wonder if David Chernushenko is fed up with being a pawn. It would explain why he is completing disconnecting himself from the party right now (except for maintaining his party membership), and declaring that he would focus on his role on the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, run by the government of Canada.

Working on the NRTEE to provide the Conservative government recommendations on how to proceed on environmental initiatives while keeping an eye on Canada's economic health is the sort of thing that has the potential to help the Conservatives. Indeed, David Chernushenko was appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the NRTEE, in part, no doubt, because of David Chernushenko's impressive showing in the 2006 election, where his 6,766 votes made him the only Green Party candidate to reach the threshold required for campaign reimbursement. That sort of performance gains you credibility.

That's the campaign Elizabath May wanted him to abandon because Stephen Harper had to be stopped. That's the credibility Elizabeth May didn't want David Chernushenko to have.

That David Chernushenko did so well as a candidate, and then accepted an appointment to the NRTEE from Stephen Harper, is not likely to have helped his working relationship with Elizabeth May. And that May is actively pursuing a strategy of selectively removing Green Party candidates from certain ridings in the belief that she can topple the Conservatives in the next election is no doubt a repugnant notion to the Green Party's most successful candidate ever.