Some Ontario Liberals have an idea. They think Mike Schreiner, leader of the Green Party of Ontario, should come be their new leader. They even made a website!
So, um, about that. They know why we have a Green party, right? And why Schreiner chose that one instead of theirs?
One of my rules of writing commentary is to not give the Green party too much attention. I’ll exploit a little loophole here, though: that’s mostly intended to counteract our weird habit of talking about the federal Green party as if it’s a serious electoral competitor. It never has been, and the internal chaos and self-sabotage it has been indulging in in recent years is a helpful reminder of that. But the Green Party of Ontario is a different entity. Schreiner himself is a thoughtful, serious guy.
He’s a perfect Green, really. The Green-voter coalition has always been an odd one. You’ve had a real mix of types, mostly unified not by any particular belief so much as by a sense that the other parties aren’t for them. (I’m no Green, but I share that sentiment, believe me.) At their best, Greens serve as a kind of conscience in our politics: they can act as a reminder of what sane and sensible policies would look like if our politics were sane and sensible. They can behave as if they aren’t corrupted by power (or its pursuit) or tied down by all the demands of overseeing a diverse caucus in a big-tent party. They can behave this way, of course, because they don’t have power or caucuses. They are what our politics could be if somehow stripped of all the nasty ... politics.
I’ve known a lot of Canadian Greens in my time, and this seems to be what they all have in common. They aren’t interested in compromising themselves and their beliefs in the service of political expediency — or, on some basic level, simply can’t compromise those things. There is undeniably something charming and honourable in that. It’s also why they are electorally irrelevant. Politics is the pursuit and use of power. Not being comfortable pursuing and using it is therefore something of an impediment to success in their chosen field. Choosing to be a Green is kind of a “cheat mode” for politics. You get to advocate for your policies and beliefs without needing to ever worry about being in power or having any responsibility for how things actually turn out. Again, you’re a conscience.
And you know who knows this? Greens. They aren’t there to win power or wield it. They’re there to have their say on the issues that matter to them — to be heard on the record and to maybe, once in a while, advance an idea or a policy that may do some good. They know their role and fill it, generally effectively. We are marginally better off for it.
It takes a pretty rare personality type to be content with that lot in life and to have the honest sense of self to realize that one is more suited to serving as a largely powerless conscience than as a power broker atop a complicated political machine.
Does anything I just described above sound like an Ontario Liberal leader in waiting? Do any of the Ontario Liberals proposing Schreiner as their next leader have any idea how bizarre it must seem to anyone who understands that people join the Green party precisely because they find the other parties, the Liberals very much included, unattractive? (And that’s putting it mildly.)
Understand, folks, that I’m not saying this to pick on the Liberals in any specific sense. Whatever policy disagreements I may have with them don’t blind me to the fact that they are, all in all, a pretty ordinary political party. They play the rough, cynical game of deal-making and power-brokering — of politics — well. Their recent woes aside, they’ve been very successful for most of my adult life. Again, because they’re good at politics.
And that’s why a guy like Schreiner chose not to join them. He’s a Green for a reason: he looked at the other parties and decided they weren’t for him. He could have chosen to run for any other party and to contest the leadership of any other party. He self-selected into the role of largely powerless conscience because that suited him, and I say good for him. To thine own self be true and all that.
But that effectively rules him out as a possible leader of another party, and he seems to grasp this better than a slew of Ontario Liberals do. Perhaps, if Ontario Liberals were simply policy wonks, untainted by internal divisions and unconcerned with power, Scheiner would feel differently.
Then again, if that’s what Ontario Liberals were really like, they’d be Greens.
And maybe that’s what they should be. Perhaps all those Ontario Liberals trying to “Draft Mike” should just go join the Greens. The Greens would probably benefit from their presence and connections! In the meantime, though, it would appear that a bunch of Ontario Liberals need to take a moment for a reality check: all the things they like about Mike Schreiner are exactly the things that led him to decide that he wasn’t a Liberal in the first place. And the fact that this seems to be beyond their comprehension may explain why a big chunk of the party is so epically bereft of good ideas that they’re left offering up this one instead.