When Green party leader Adriane Carr abandoned the NDP in early 1980s, it was a result of her frustration with the party’s failure to act on environmental issues she held dear. When Tzeporah Berman chose to trade her Green party membership for an NDP one last year, she said it was because new voices within the NDP had given her hope.

When The Tyee looked at the tension between the two parties in December (Where Will Green Voters Go?), support for the Greens was at 12 percent. It hovers there still, although one poll suggested that nearly 40 percent of Green supporters might change their vote before election day.

Tuesday’s leaders debate likely did little to change the dynamic. An Ipsos-Reid poll for BCTV News on Global suggested James won, but 52 percent said their impression of Carr improved. For most people choosing between the Greens and NDP, the issues remain the same: the size of the respective parties’ tents, tension between environmentalists and labour leaders, and the chance of having real influence in the Legislature.

While the NDP appears to be regaining some trust among environmentalists disenchanted in particular with the party under Glen Clark, in many ways the movement is hedging its bets.

Conservation Voters of B.C. has endorsed five candidates from three parties —the NDP’s Gregor Robertson, David Cubberly, and Rob Fleming, the Greens’ Carr, and Liberal Minister of Sustainable Resource Management George Abbott (who declined to accept the support).

And the new Priorities for Environmental Leadership initiative, which like the Conservation Voters has drawn on U.S. examples of environmental advocacy, aims to raise the profile of a handful of specific issues in a relatively non-partisan manner.

An ‘enemy’ converts

Berman, a Greenpeace veteran and program director for the international ForestEthics group, has put aside grievances with past NDP governments to choose potential influence in the Legislature. Once branded by then-premier Glen Clark as “an enemy of B.C.,” Berman says new NDP voices such as Vancouver Fairview candidate Gregor Robertson and North Island contestant Claire Trevena were the key to her conversion.

“I think the NDP recognizes that they need to craft new ways to lead and to govern, and they need to create policies that will not reinforce an artificial split between labour and the environment,” Berman said, in an interview from her Cortez Island home.

Berman believes the NDP’s affiliation with labour harmed its environmental policies in the past. “They played into and accepted the polemic of the jobs-versus-environment debate, she told The Tyee. “It’s true that it’s hard to craft a forest policy that’s going to support big business and support the future of forest-dependent communities, but it’s not impossible to create a policy that will benefit forest-dependent communities and our environment.”

Foy laments beatings

Of course, that’s a page from the Green party’s playbook. Many advocates for the environment point to the Greens as an important influence on NDP policy. And Berman isn’t the only one who felt stung by Glen Clark’s leadership. The Green-friendly Western Canada Wilderness Committee’s national campaign director Joe Foy is first among them. “I don’t want to see my brothers and sisters beaten up on the ends of logging roads and have some premier thinking that’s a good thing.”

While Foy is certainly overstating Clark’s view of the violence that marked protests in the Elaho Valley north of Squamish, the remark illustrates the depth of anti-NDP feeling held by some environmentalists.

Conversely, though, Foy describes Clark’s predecessor Mike Harcourt as “the best premier we’ve lived under,” despite his government’s support of extensive logging in Clayoquot Sound. Yet while Foy believes the NDP is returning to the more consultative approach of the Harcourt government, “in the NDP party there’s DNA that comes from the industrial unions.”

Although Foy wishes the NDP and the Greens would do more to work together so that the left of centre vote isn’t split — so that the Liberals might be defeated —he’s not betraying any sense of urgency. “I don’t want the bread to come out of the oven before it’s baked. I don’t want to go back to Clark, ever, ever again. And so if we’re going to build a better future, as one guy, I’m willing to go through some more pain.”

Enviro lobby’s list

Clark also looms large for Conservation Voters of B.C. coordinator Matt Price, who says Clark reversed the positive momentum created under Harcourt, who fought for more parks and more open land-use planning. “In some ways, [the reversal] just continued with the current government.”

Price is equivocal about the NDP platform. “They played it very safe. It’s disappointing that they didn’t take a visionary approach.” He laments the lack of specifics on alternative energy and economic diversification, although he welcomes opposition to open-net salmon farming and offshore drilling.

But the finer points of current and past NDP policy aside, Berman, Price and Foy have much in common of late. All played important roles in the Priorities for Environmental Leadership initiative, through which a dozen environmental groups hashed out four key areas where they want political action:

• Opposition to massive Highway 1 expansion from Surrey to Vancouver

• A campaign to revitalize gutted BC Parks services

• Stronger protection for endangered species

• Smarter salmon farming methods

Price, who helped draw the initiative together, believes it shows “a certain level of maturity” in the environmental movement.

Berman says the initiative is unprecedented in B.C. “And for good reason,” she says of the six-month debate to reach consensus on the key issues. “It was an incredibly difficult process. There are so many environmental issues today.”

No weasels, please

The initiative involves a door-to-door campaign, advertising and other promotion and an effort to extract political commitments from all parties. Says Berman: “What we decided to do was to lay out environmental priorities that had achievable solutions at hand — honestly, that leaders couldn’t weasel out of by saying ‘This is pie-in-the-sky environmental thinking, this is going to cost too much, this isn’t possible.’”

The initiative will be an annual effort, says Berman, that will be useful no matter which party is in power. Price, Foy and Berman all believe that focused, coordinated issue-based lobbying is the key to success. “You can only do a certain number of things at a time,” says Price.

Certainly the polls suggest that environmental battles will only be won through such efforts, and not through the results of the May 17 election, regardless of how many Green voters come back to the NDP. While the Green party vote will play a pivotal role in a handful of ridings, the NDP’s growth in support — to about 38 percent according to recent polls from 21.53 percent in the last election — has come almost exclusively at the expense of the Liberals. The Greens appear to be holding on to the 12.39 percent of the vote that they won in the last election.

In ridings where the Greens drew more than 20 percent of the vote — such as Nelson-Creston, where NDP veteran Corky Evans hopes to regain his seat from the Liberals, and Carr’s own Powell River–Sunshine Coast — converts from the Greens will be important to the NDP.

Power at the centre

But unless the NDP’s fortunes rise sharply as a result of the debate, party funding controversies, or some other scandal, those seats won’t decide the election. And if Carr is right that only 30 percent of Green supporters are inclined to vote NDP, there isn’t much to be gained by the New Democrats in the province as a whole. As such, the NDP’s aggressive play for the political centre — while disappointing to some environmentalists — is hardly surprising.

If Green supporters conclude that the election is beyond the NDP’s reach, they may be reluctant to switch allegiance. Both Price and Berman unequivocally welcome their presence on the political landscape. “I and everyone else should be glad that there is a party out there that’s pushing other parties to get better,” says Price.

“The Green party can play an incredibly effective role in moving forward an environmental agenda,” adds Berman, citing its influence internationally. “I would love to see Green leadership in the government.”

Certainly the Green platform fairly brims with provocative ideas and specific promises — legalize marijuana, replace open-ocean salmon fisheries with “terminal” fisheries, tax junk food and toxic products. But there are so many specifics, and although they do cast Greens as an “ideas” party, there is no single, practical thrust likely to attract much media or public attention during the campaign.

While the environmental movement is sharpening its focus and attending to affordable solutions, the costly Green platform sprawls all over the place. And there are gaping holes on subjects such as funding transportation infrastructure and how the party would balance the budget.

The referendum factor

While the more general NDP campaign focuses on the broad issues of trust and public process that dog the Liberals, the Greens haven’t found a clear, single subject that can galvanize public opinion. Given that the anti-NDP protest vote helped drive Green support up from two percent in 1996, the absence of such an issue may hurt the Greens on election day.

Berman laments the Greens’ decision not to support single-transferable-vote electoral reform in the May 17 referendum. It’s a decision that may doom the party’s chances of winning seats in the Legislature in this election and for the foreseeable future. Right now, support for the proposal is hard to measure. But polls that show few know about the referendum and fewer understand the STV system do not bode well. Given that the initiative must win by a 60 percent majority in 60 percent of the ridings, electoral reform seems doomed.

“I think it’s a travesty that there is no champion for STV in the province — that we have this opportunity, and we’re going to lose this opportunity,” Berman says, arguing that the system would create a “more wide-ranging opposition.”

But Carr, who is a strong advocate of the proportional representation alternative that would ensure Green representation in the Legislature, hasn’t embraced the option chosen by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. The Greens’ position is equivocal — voters and local Green party riding associations should learn about STV and make up their own minds. That may cost them not just in the future but on May 17 as well.

During the leaders’ debate, Carr tried to take credit for Green party leadership on electoral reform, but instead she appeared to congratulate the premier for his leadership on the matter.

Carr herself attributed the Green party’s polling peak — at, she says, about 19 percent in March 2003 — to the party’s opposition to the Olympics during the City of Vancouver’s referendum on that issue. Electoral reform was another issue that put the Greens in the news and in the public mind.

Yet for the purposes of this election, the party has effectively abandoned the issue. While the Greens’ equivocal treatment of this the electoral reform plank might not float the NDP barge, it could well sink the Green party raft.

Charles Campbell is a contributing editor to The Tyee.