EKOS pollster Frank Graves believes the Green Party could actually win more seats than the NDP in the near future.

Speaking to a room full of Green supporters at the party’s biennial convention in Ottawa on Saturday, Graves said “it really might be that the Green Party could consider actually being able to leapfrog over the NDP in the next several years.”

There are a few factors that Graves said could contribute to the party’s success, but the single biggest is electoral reform.

And more specifically, a switch to some form of proportional representation.

Under a more proportional system, which the Greens are pushing for, the party could garner ten per cent of the vote — yielding, in Graves’ estimation, “at least 30 seats.”

In October, they won 3.5 per cent of the popular vote, but only one seat. Graves didn’t clarify which type of proportional representation would work best for the Greens.

Graves told Greens that moving forward the party should build a bridge to the labour movement and target NDP supporters.

“If you took the labour vote out of play, NDP results would have been 12 per cent – but wait – Green Party supporters are actually more pro-labour,” he said, suggesting that going after the labour vote should be part of the Green’s strategy going forward.

The pollster spoke at length about the party’s strengths and weaknesses and suggested there are two profoundly different futures for the Green Party, adding that the status quo would be a “tough slog”.

Proportional representation will present brilliant opportunities for the party, according to Graves, and given that most Canadians are on side with reform, the Greens need to ‘make sure it goes forward.’

“Moving to proportional representation will solve the biggest barriers to Green Party success,” he said.

The party also needs to capitalize on its strengths, suggested Graves.

One is their popular leader.

They should also to continue to champion their core issue, which is of tremendous and growing salience: the environment.

The Party’s biggest weakness, however, is a notion among supporters that voting for a Green in a federal election is a wasted vote, or leads to split votes. Other weaknesses Grave outlined include a lack of resources and the difficulty in attracting attention during federal election campaigns.

They also need get away from being perceived as a “one-trick pony,” he said.

But in order to achieve this kind of success, Greens have to know who they’re dealing with – that is, who their supporters are.

Graves presented a profile of Green Party supporters.

They tend to be younger, more cosmopolitan and open to the world, but also more economically vulnerable and more likely to question authority. Green supporters are far more pessimistic about their economic prospects and more civically engaged, he said.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has been getting a lot of help in advocating for proportional representation this weekend.

On Friday, the co-leader of New Zealand’s Green party spoke with May in Ottawa and sang the praises of his country’s proportional representation electoral system as Canadian MPs debate whether to adopt PR here.

“Parliament has become much more representative, so we have more women in Parliament than we’ve ever had before,” said James Shaw.