MONTREAL—Under the guise of a nicely wrapped gift, Green Party leader Elizabeth May handed the Liberals an empty box this weekend.

With a byelection about to be called to fill the Labrador seat left vacant by the resignation of ex-minister Peter Penashue, May urged the New Democrats to join the Greens in giving the Liberals a free run at winning the riding back from the Conservatives by sitting out the campaign.

May wants the opposition parties to use the Labrador byelection as a test run for electoral cooperation by allowing a single non-Conservative candidate to come forward.

The problem is that the Labrador byelection offers a more compelling preview of the reasons why the plan will not get off the ground than a showcase for its highly hypothetical merits.

Let’s deal first with May’s contribution. It is a timely reminder that it is easier to renounce something that one has no hope of ever owning.

In 2011, the Green Party won 139 votes in Labrador; that’s less than 2 per cent of the votes cast in the riding.

And while the Conservatives took the seat by only 79 votes, one can’t assume that, in absence of their first choice on the ballot, the Green votes would have switched en masse to the second-place Liberals or even that those who supported May’s party would have bothered to vote at all.

According to the Green leader’s analysis, the Liberals’ close second-place 2011 finish makes them the obvious choice to hold the opposition fort in the byelection.

But politics does not really lend itself to freeze-framing voting choices. In Labrador as elsewhere, voters are not immune to shifting provincial and federal currents.

In Newfoundland and Labrador for instance, support for the provincial NDP has been rising steadily over the past 18 months.

In St John’s, only one seat currently sets the New Democrats apart from the Liberal official Opposition.

With MLA Yvonne Jones about to relinquish her riding to run for the federal Liberals in Labrador, a provincial seat will soon be at play and, with it, the title of official Opposition in the House of Assembly.

Improved NDP fortunes at the provincial level may well not translate into a game-changing surge of support in a federal riding with historical ties to the Liberals such as Labrador. But it hard to imagine the province’s New Democrats making common cause with the Liberals in Labrador even as they are trying to wrestle them to the ground provincially.

The provincial rivalry between New Democrats and Liberals is hardly unique to NL. It is a major fact of political life in Ontario, British Columbia and, increasingly, Atlantic Canada. And as the weekend’s Liberal leadership debate demonstrated, no national party is willing to concede large swaths of the country and eventually federal power to a rival, as progressive as that rival may be.

In practice, it would likely be easier to bring provincial New Democrats and Liberals under the federal umbrella of a new progressive party that combines the best elements of their current federal wings than to attempt to cobble together piecemeal counterintuitive electoral alliances.

It is possible that May has another more strategic agenda. As Green party leader, she has no interest in seeing either of her progressive rivals dominate the opposition landscape. That would increase the risk of a hemorrhage of Green support to whichever party has a demonstrable fighting chance of beating the Conservatives.

But if May does not have such an agenda, she might want to consider that her calls to her coterie of Labrador supporters to embrace the Liberals in the upcoming by-election could end up doing her case for cooperation more harm than good.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

By the time Labrador goes to the polls in a byelection, the federal Liberals will have chosen a permanent leader.

The Labrador vote will be his or her first electoral test.

Little would advance the cause of a more cooperative arrangement between the opposition parties than a Liberal byelection defeat to the Conservatives in the honeymoon phase of the tenure of a brand new leader.

Read more about: