Elizabeth May of the North?
The Green Party might just strike gold today.
While Elizabeth May’s election-day triumph may have been slightly overlooked due to the NDP’s surprising assent to the opposition benches, the Green movement in Canada seems to have stalled.
Tonight, Kristina Calhoun might change that.
Don’t feel too bad if you’ve never heard of the interim leader of the Yukon Green Party. She may, however, be the first surprise come-from-behind darkhorse winner in this spate of relatively paint-by-numbers provincial elections.
In fact, this past May showed the Yukon’s true colours - with 19% of the territory voting for the federal Green Party.
The limited polling being done in advance of the territory’s election puts the fledgling territorial party at between 2% and 7%. Not bad for a party that was just registered in the territory and is only fielding two candidates (one of them is Calhoun herself.)
And while the other candidate is running in strong conservative country (the territorial counterpart to the Tories goes by the Yukon Party) Calhoun is running in Riverdale North where, believe or not, she has a shot.
A cursory glance at the last Yukon election won’t tell you anything, as the Greens didn’t field any candidates. Polls aren’t indicative either, because we have no way of knowing if those who said they were going to vote Green lived in one of the two ridings where a Green candidate was running. Assuming the only respondents who said they were going to vote Green were actually able to, those numbers would look very small (as the two ridings would, ostensibly, only account for 1/17th of the province and therefore of the hopefully representative sample.)
And, besides, races like this can be notoriously unpredictable, as there are so few people in the districts. Riverdale North hosts just under 1000 voters.
So our best representation of the riding should come from this past federal election. I’ll start out by saying that, more often than not, superimposing federal results on provincial/territorial elections doesn’t work (and vice versa.) However, I’ll contend that if someone votes Green, they do so our of a belief in Green politics and would be more likely to keep voting Green. Maybe not.
Anyway, we’ll have to dig down a bit deeper past that 19% if we want to know how the Greens will preform in this district.
For those who want to follow along at home, check out this very cool Google map representation of the riding. and, for the sake of comparison, here’s a map of Riverdale North.
Three things to keep in mind;
- The Greens are strong in this area. They won several polls around Whitehorse in the federal election.
- The federal polls do not match up perfectly with the territory’s electoral districts. They line up closely, but the big outlier is poll 22 which stretches all around Whitehorse and will throw in some rural (read: Conservative) numbers into the otherwise suburban district.
Okay, so, if we look at the combined results of the federal polls that correspond with Riverdale North (there’s eight of them), we see a pretty close race,
So now we have a race where the NDP are essentially pushed out, and the Liberals eek out a healthy lead. The Liberals poll 3% better than the rest of the territory (33%), which was taken primarily from the Tories (34%) while the NDP are down just a littler over a point (14.5%) while the Greens poll about two points higher here than the rest of the Yukon (19%.)
Parts of this area also went more Green than others. Certain parts of southern Riverdale went 25% Green, beating out the Tories.
How did this riding shape up in the 2006 Yukon election? Take a looksie;
In the broader scheme of things, Riverdale North panned out roughly as the entire territory went. The Liberals and Tories did a bit better at the expense of the New Democrats.
So the riding isn’t exactly NDP friendly. and opinion polling puts the Liberals between 15%-39% (26% in October), the Tories between 22%-40% (35% this month) and the NDP between 26% and 35% (tied with the Tories at 35% for the first few days of October)
So what we have in this riding, between rapidly declining Liberal support and a soft NDP vote in the riding, is a big margin for the Greens to sneak in. It’s important to keep in mind that the Yukon Party candidate is the incumbent and the minister of Health, but with ridings this small, cabinet upsets aren’t unheard of.
The Greens were also handicapped, like their federal counterparts, from being excluded from the debate.
If I were a betting man, would I put money on Calhoun? Probably not without a few Scotches in me first, but even if she dosn’t win, this could be an interesting riding to watch.
