Recent opinion polls suggest two in five Islanders would vote for third or fourth party candidates if an election were held today.
That’s great news for the Green Party and for the NDP, even though the Greens are polling an historic high 34 per cent of decided voters while the NDP is the choice of just six per cent.
When the Green Party elected its first-ever MLA in 2015, the party garnered 10.8 per cent of the popular vote. The NDP was the choice of 11 per cent and while it came close in one Charlottetown riding, the party failed to win a seat.
Since then, they’ve been moving in decidedly opposite directions. Bolstered by the stellar performance of leader Peter Bevan-Baker in the provincial legislature, Green Party stock continues to rise. When Hannah Bell won a byelection last fall, it was clear an increasing number of Islanders were broadening their political horizons beyond the traditional Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties.
In Corporate Research Associates last quarterly poll, the governing Liberals did get a bounce to 42 per cent support, up from 37 in November. But the Greens were next at 34 per cent, well ahead of the PCs who tumbled into third place at 17 per cent support.
For the NDP, which slumped from 11 to six per cent, it’s time to rebuild. After coming in a distant fourth in last fall’s byelection, Mike Redmond resigned as leader. Earlier in the year Gord McNeilly, a star NDP candidate who came within a whisker of winning his seat in 2015, left the party to join the Liberals.
The NDP will elect a new leader from three candidates – Joe Byrne, Susan MacVittie and Margaret Andrade – at a convention April 7. They may not have much time to prepare for next election. The fixed date is the fall of 2019, but a federal election at the same time makes that unlikely. Some believe the MacLauchlan Liberals want to go the polls sooner than later, meaning an election in the spring or summer of 2019. Others predict it could be called even earlier, maybe this fall.
Would that leave enough time for the NDP to organize and mount credible campaigns in all 27 districts? If not, would there be a chance to collaborate with the Greens? It was reported last fall that the NDP had offered to throw its support behind Hannah Bell and not field a candidate. The Greens declined the offer. Bevan-Baker said while the door is not closed to future collaboration, it would be a decision of the party’s full membership.
Depending on the results of a referendum on electoral reform being held in conjunction with the next election, there may be less need for this type of strategizing. If Islanders opt for proportional representation – a voting system that awards seats to parties proportional to their share of the popular vote – it’s likely multi-party legislatures will be in place after the 2022 election.
In the meantime, the NDP needs to find its voice and develop policies that appeal to an increasing number of disgruntled voters who are giving third and fourth parties a much closer look. They’re measuring all the parties and so far, the Greens are way ahead in terms of peeling support away from the Liberals and PCs.
We’ll soon find out how the NDP measures up.
- Wayne Young is an instructor in the journalism program at Holland College in Charlottetown.
