A Climate for Change? Green Party Success in Guelph Ontario

Abstract

In the summer of 2018 Canadian history was made in Guelph Ontario when Mike Schreiner became the first ever Green MPP to be elected. Taking 45% of the vote, Schreiner’s win marked the first time that four different parties were elected to the Ontario Legislature since 1951. Then, in the fall of 2019, Steve Dyk the Green MP for Guelph, came in second to Liberal MP Lloyd Longfield, in Canada’s 43rd federal election. It is evident that voters in the riding of Guelph are experiencing a shift in political mindset. My research proposes to look into what factors have contributed to this shift and what the changes in ideology, identity, and values in Guelph have occurred to spark this political change and it will explore whether the changing political compass in Guelph is due to swing voting or to new alignments of partisanship with the Green party. Is this a one-time occurrence due to protest voting? Is Green party success sustainable in Guelph? Will this success lead to others across Ontario and Canada?

Drawing on more established Green Party literature from parliamentary systems in the EU and Australasia, this dissertation proposes seven themes of emergence and success for Green politics. These themes are post-materialism, permissible voting systems, a strong economy, party funding, populism, environmental or social movements, and party competition. Then, taking these themes, the federal and provincial Ontario Green Parties in Canada are examined to determine which of these themes are relevant to the Canadian case, with the results being mixed. As this is a case study of the 2018 Guelph election, to provide context and further explanation, the demographic and political history of both Ontario and Guelph are reviewed in detail and then compared to this project’s seven themes. The results find that, with a few situational exceptions, the Green victory in Guelph followed its national and global counterparts in success.