EDITORIAL: Green Party doesn’t belong in debates

Elizabeth May and the commission that oversees electoral debates have reached an agreement on the Green Party participating in future televised debates.  

Neither party was willing to share details of what had been agreed to. We have some suggestions, though, as to what we’d think is fair for a party that has just one seat in a Parliament that has 343 MPs.  

A sensible rule would be that a party should have official party status in the House to be eligible for a debate. Only parties with 12 seats or more would take part.  

The Green Party was dumped from the debates at the last minute before last April’s election because it hadn’t met certain requirements.  

The Debates Commission requires a party to run candidates in 90% of ridings; it has to have at least one MP and show at least 4% of support in polls 28 days before voting day.  

May is the Green Party’s sole MP after its only other MP was defeated in the last election. The commission had previously approved the participation of Greens in the debates based on a prediction by May that they would endorse candidates in the required number of ridings. That didn’t happen. Co-Leader Jonathan Pedneault said at the time the decision not to run a full slate was strategic. They pulled candidates in ridings where a Tory stood a chance to win if they split the vote.  

That’s a ludicrous reason for not running a full slate of candidates.  

“Deliberately reducing the number of candidates running for strategic reasons is inconsistent with the commission’s interpretation of party viability,” the commission said in a statement at the time.  

It’s a bizarre election strategy for any party leaders to fail to nominate candidates when they can do so. It shows they don’t care about their own party’s beliefs and ethos. They just want another party to lose. Pedneault failed to win a seat in the election and is no longer co-leader.  

The Green Party under May has become largely irrelevant. She has dominated its strategy and policies so much that it might as well be called the Elizabeth May Party.  

When the Greens start acting like a real political force, rather than a one-woman band, then we’ll take them seriously.