Don’t Count Greens Out, Says Campaign Chair Adam Olsen

Lagging in candidate nominations, donations and public opinion surveys, earlier this summer the BC Green Party fired its campaign director.

“We made some decisions as to the direction we needed to go and that’s what we did,” said Adam Olsen, the MLA for Saanich North and the Islands. Olsen, not running for re-election, is serving as the party’s campaign chair.

He declined to discuss the reasons the party dismissed its director of campaigns and strategy, Naomi Devine, so close to the election, but he said, “Organizations make decisions for a reason.”

For those looking, there were plenty of signs the party was struggling to prepare for the election.

At the start of the summer, the Greens had nominated candidates in just 18 of the province’s 93 constituencies.

In the three months that ended in June, the party raised just $336,000. That may be typical for the Greens but leaves them far behind the other major parties. For every dollar the Greens brought in, BC United raised two, the Conservatives three and the NDP nearly seven.

Since the start of the year, as support for the Conservative Party of BC has soared, opinion surveys have found support for the Greens no higher than 15 per cent and as low as six per cent.

The party that elected three MLAs in 2017 and held the balance of power, and that managed to hold on to the seats of its two incumbents who ran in the 2020 pandemic election, appeared to be floundering.

With Olsen not running and the party’s leader, Sonia Furstenau, moving from Cowichan Valley, where she’s won twice, to the NDP stronghold of Victoria-Beacon Hill, the party has been on track to lose the only two seats it holds.

The party has since turned a corner, Olsen insisted. “Over the last number of weeks I’m quite thrilled with the progress we’ve made,” he said in a mid-August interview.

“You’ll see many more candidates being announced in the very near future, and we’re putting together what I think will rival the past two platforms as being a very hopeful platform that shows British Columbians we don’t have to just accept the status quo, we can actually have a coalition for the future, one that we’ve frankly been talking a lot about as the BC Green caucus over the last seven years.”

Along with Olsen’s appointment, the party had brought in Maureen Balsillie to be the campaign director. Balsillie worked previously on two winning campaigns in Ontario, and Olsen said she has the organizational skills the B.C. party needs.

As of last Saturday the party’s website listed candidates nominated in 34 constituencies, and it has been releasing platform planks, including on education and transit this week. The party was planning a health-related announcement today.

When he spoke with The Tyee, Olsen was setting out on a tour that would take him to a short list of constituencies for events with candidates where the party hopes to do well: Courtenay-Comox, Powell River-Sunshine Coast, West Vancouver-Sea to Sky and Kootenay Central.

“With a cohort of Greens in the legislature we can be a thoughtful broker for our democratic institution,” Olsen said. “You’ll see in our platform that we’re a serious political party and our goal is to elect a group of Greens who can really hold government accountable.”

The NDP government needs to be held to account for its failures, he said, giving the examples of housing, LNG expansion and the environment in general.

Olsen said that to him the approaching election feels a lot like the one in 2017 when votes were evenly split among the two largest parties and the three Green seats allowed the party to play a role creating a stable, democratic government. “I think we could be in a very similar situation where we’ve got a Parliament that looks a lot like it did in 2017.”

Jillian Oliver, a political strategist who was a director of the Greens’ 2020 B.C. campaign, said the challenges the party faces are ones they have long faced. “I think it’s a brand issue and viability,” she said. “The No. 1 issue for them is just people thinking that they can win. Or that they can’t. That’s the biggest barrier.”

An Angus Reid Institute survey conducted in late August after BC United suspended its campaign found the “BC Greens appear to be struggling with voter retention.” Only about half of the people who voted for the party in 2020 planned to do so again. Even among the 10 per cent currently supporting the Greens, about a third were considering changing to another party.

Green candidates are the second choice for many voters, and a large number of people will give the party serious consideration, even if they don’t end up voting for them, Oliver said. “When people are just looking for change it’s not always the natural place where they put their vote.”

Oliver, who did polling on contract for the Greens until 2022, said that often when voters are looking for change, they turn to parties that have a well-known brand and have formed government previously.

Combating that tendency requires voter education and finding ways to show that the party or its candidates have momentum and viability, such as through large numbers of lawn signs, she said. “I don’t think provincially the Greens have created that sort of tipping point yet in enough ridings, or on a provincial scale, to have that mass migration of votes.”

The Greens have been focused on building their ground game in some key constituencies and can legitimately hope to win a few of those races, Oliver said. “I think they’re still in the game for that this election.”

That can be a better approach than trying to maximize the party’s number of candidates, she added. “My personal view is it’s better only to run a 75 or 80 per cent slate than to have one candidate in a totally unwinnable riding that’s going to derail you during the race for three days. I’ve been a press secretary on a campaign where that happens and it sucks.”

The strategy includes building support over multiple elections and being positioned for an eventual breakthrough. That takes time, she said, noting that the BC Green Party elected its first MLA just over a decade ago.

All parties have challenges and there can be a lot of internal politics that end up wasting time, Oliver added.

The Greens in particular have a core value of participatory democracy that people are deeply invested in. “It’s a really laudable internal value, but it also ends up being more costly in terms of time and resources, I think,” she said.

With the election scheduled for Oct. 19, campaigns appear to still be waiting to really get going, she said. “Most people don’t even really know there’s a provincial election yet.”

Speaking before BC United folded its campaign, she predicted that as more people tune in and get a sense of who the BC Conservatives are, the party’s support will drop.

“There’s a lot of fundamentals for [NDP Premier David] Eby; he has still a pretty good approval rating,” she said. “I think it’s going to move back pretty quickly to more of a dynamic where the NDP are much further ahead within a couple weeks of real campaigning.”

For the Greens, she said, a reasonable goal for the election is to have a strengthened caucus, knowing that the party’s MLAs can be effective even without holding the balance of power.