Greens elbow aside NDP to place third

By 7:30 on election night, the Green Party's John Streicker was already a clear winner, regardless of the results.

By 7:30 on election night, the Green Party’s John Streicker was already a clear winner, regardless of the results.

His one-room campaign office, little more than a downtown Whitehorse shack, was packed with supporters, brimming with enthusiasm.

Tables were laden with food and the bar table sagged under the weight of cold Yukon Gold (well-priced at two bucks a pop. It was $4.50 for a bottle of Budweiser over at Darrell Pasloski’s Conservative campaign reception).

“We’ve already won,” a grinning Streicker said when he arrived. “Now we’re watching the election results, and that’s a challenge.”

Because it’s all about the votes in the end, and Streicker didn’t get the most, but you wouldn’t know that to see the party he and his supporters threw last night.

It epitomized Streicker’s Green campaign, throughout which he stressed again and again that the parties must work together; that they must move beyond the traditional rivalries of left-wing and right-wing to overcome the mounting problems brought by climate change. Every parliamentary hopeful who opened the flimsy wooden door of that hut was welcomed as a hero.

When New Democrat Ken Bolton walked in, a cheer of “Ken!” rang through the room. Applauded and back-slapped, he was graceful in his defeat.

Streicker won 1,880 votes to Bolton’s 1,306, a coup in a territory that has looked favourably on the NDP in the past.

But it wasn’t just the NDP that Streicker surpassed. He more than tripled the number of votes and the percentage of the popular vote the Yukon Greens won in the last federal election (13 per cent versus four per cent in 2006). Not only that, he nearly doubled the seven per cent average the Greens won nationally.

Next through the door was Darrell Pasloski. Although Streicker himself admitted that some of his supporters strategically voted for Liberal Larry Bagnell to keep Pasloski from power, the Conservative candidate was greeted with the same enthusiasm.

“We encountered a lot of people who voted strategically,” Streicker said before Bagnell arrived. “In fact, there are people in this room tonight who voted strategically, and so we lost votes to Larry .... When people would talk to me about strategic voting, I would say to them, ‘We respect your choice.’

“But if you always strategically vote, then at best you are only getting your second-best or your third-best choice and so we don’t think that’s the way to do politics here.

“We recognize that the problem is really the electoral system itself, but we know that we have to get in under this electoral system before we can start to shift things over, so it’s going to take some time.”

When Bagnell did arrive, three young Liberals preceded him, triumphantly bearing a Larry Bagnell lawn sign.

The incumbent and winner looked surprised at first when the packed dance floor started chanting his name,  then quickly succumbed to the party.

His attendants dispersed to the bar and Bagnell proved that not only can he hold his seat, but he can hold his own on the dance floor. 

But for all the revelry, there were also moments of dismay. There was a collective moan when the final results from Central Nova (N.S.) came in.

It was in that riding where Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was soundly beaten in by Conservative Peter MacKay; the Minister of National Defence won 18,239 votes to May’s 12,620. And although the Green Party won the support of almost seven per cent of voting Canadians, it was not enough to get a single member into the House of Commons. 

Streicker, however, maintained his optimism throughout.

“I feel like we’ve come such a long distance in such a short time, and the party is definitely growing and I feel all the votes that we get are very intentional votes,” said the Marsh Lake resident.

That was before the numbers were in from all across the country. By the time the final tally was made, Streicker was already looking toward the next election.

“The first goal is to think about how the party is going to grow over the long term, think about it as a multiple election cycle and let’s remain positive because politics wants to drag people down to the negative side of things and you have to work hard to remain positive,” he said.

“We’ve done that; we’ve been successful. Voters come up to us on the street and say, ‘Thank you’ for keeping a positive message, for viewing the Yukon as a place to invest in with our energy and our interest, so we feel like we’ve won.”

At half-past midnight, this reporter had to bow out gracefully.

Someone had busted out a pair of roller skates, the beer cooler had been replenished, and the party was quite literally swinging.

Streicker was showing off his dance moves, picked up, he said, during his years in the Caribbean.

A young woman who said at the beginning of the evening that she was disappointed and scared by the prospect of a Conservative majority, didn’t look frightened anymore.

She looked, like everyone else in the room, happy and ready to do it all again.