Angry in the Great White North

The Green Party wants Canada to switch to proportional representation.

Of course they do and here's why.

Green Party voters are predominantly guilt-ridden wealthy upper-middle class people, who because of their financial independence have the time to spend worrying about the environment at the exclusion of anything else.

The problem for the Green Party is that there is no riding in Canada in which guilt-ridden wealthy upper-middle class people form the majority.

That's what makes the riding system so powerful.  We break the country down into 308 sections called ridings.  Each riding is a cross-section of Canada.  Some are more rural than others, some more culturally mixed, and so on, but no riding is purely one thing or another.

So the challenge for each party is to construct a platform that they can sell in a riding to a large number of people with different goals and priorities.  To make it easier, each party gets 308 chances to do it, and each mix is different, so a well constructed platform ought to be able appeal to some riding somewhere.

The Green Party has not been able to construct such a platform, and the riding system repeatedly rejects attempts by the Green Party to get in on their one-issue platform.

So I wonder, what's the problem?

The Green Party platform is heavily torqued to environmental issues, to the expense of anything else.  The Green Party platform, beyond the environmental, is derivative and unimaginative.  It simply repeats what we see in the NDP and the Liberal Party, or what we see in Green Party platforms in Europe.  Needless to say, Canadians figure they can get the real thing with either the NDP or the Liberal Party, and the Green Party is left out in the cold.

So does the Green Party try to create a truly Canadian platform that is significantly differentiated from the other parties?

No.  Instead, the Green Party adds up the dribs and drabs of votes gathered here and there across Canada from those guilt-ridden wealthy upper-middle class people with time on their hands, constructs a mythical riding win from that mathematical (not geographical) aggregation, and demands that the rules be changed to recognize this.

I don't buy it.  The riding system does make it hard for the Green Party to win.  Good.  The riding system makes it hard for any party to win.  That's the point.  It raises the bar, and makes the parties work harder.

Maybe that's what Elizabeth May hates.  Maybe she hates the hard work that it takes to make a viable party.  She just can't understand why simply barking "climate emergency" every 15 seconds doesn't get her a seat and an MP's pension for life.  So she blames the system for her failure.

In a way she's right.  The riding system, as constructed, will likely reject the Green Party over and over again, until the Green Party changes in some dramatic way.  But that doesn't make the riding system wrong.