While MPP and Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner said jumping ship to run for the Ontario Liberal leadership could be a “bold way” to push back against the Ford government, not everyone thinks so.
In fact, one expert thinks there are serious consequences for him even considering the move, including watering down his commitment to environmental issues, potentially alienating Guelph voters who elected Schreiner as a Green Party candidate, and inciting questions of whether he is simply interested in the pursuit of power.
But it also speaks to the dysfunction of the Liberal Party, said Julie Simmons, a political science professor at the University of Guelph.
“Because you have a group of people that have openly recruited him, rather than quietly doing it.”
Meanwhile, there are party members who didn't sign the letter, and are “dismayed by this. So that tells us that there is a divide there.”
So either he goes through with it and they look divided, or he doesn’t, and they look weak because they tried to recruit someone and it didn’t work, she said.
Simmons believes the recruitment effort also overestimates how much sway he really has with Green Party voters.
She said the Green Party would “continue on without him,” she said. “So perhaps there's an overestimation there of his personal ability to bring votes from the Green Party to the Liberals.”
When asked how he would amalgamate Liberal values with Green Party values, Schreiner said people know where he stands on the issues and that his values won’t change.
If the Liberal Party had more of an environmentally sensitive platform, Green voters might consider turning their heads. But regardless, Simmons said she thinks Greens will stay Greens.
“It depends why they're fans of him,” she said. If their vote was for the Green Party, they might be more hard pressed to change their minds; but if they voted for his stance on certain issues, “they might be comfortable with him finding a bigger platform.”
Even if he goes through with it and can sway the Liberal Party to have a stronger environmental mandate in the long run, she said he will also likely have to water down some of his environmental principles in the meantime to appeal to a broader number so he could become the leader of the party in the first place.
The only way to truly know whether he has potential to sway the vote and knock the Ford government out of power, she said, would be to look at every single riding to see how closely the Liberals lost seats to the Conservatives because the vote was split between the Liberals and Greens.
“And I don’t know that that data exists,” she said. “It could be that people chose to vote for the NDP rather than Liberals. But there's so many assumptions in there because you're assuming that every Green Party voter is willing to switch to another party as long as that party has a stronger environmental mandate.”
Plus, she said there are likely a lot of grassroots Green Party members who have “put their hearts and souls into their local constituencies, and believe in certain principles that are about having that Green voice standing on its own.”
Even just considering it has weakened his position with the Green Party, which she said will be "disheartening to many who are inside the Green Party.”
Still, Simmons said it’s difficult to feel as though you’re having an impact as the leader of a party with just one seat in provincial legislature; being part of a larger party has the potential to have a greater impact.
Ultimately, she said the question is what matters more: thinking about the possibility of playing that balance of power as the leader of a minor party, or being in power as a leader of a major party with a watered down commitment to the environmental policies that are the Hallmark of the Green Party.
