Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May speaks in Toronto prior to a fireside chat about the climate, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2019. The Greens say introducing universal pharmacare would cost $26.7 billion next year — the biggest new spending item in a costed platform released today. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston

A doubling of the Greens’ seat count is the benchmark for a successful election for the party, the party’s campaign manager told iPolitics, although it’s official party status that they’re really aiming for following the Oct. 21 vote.

“We think we can elect anywhere between four and 12 (MPs),” said Jonathan Dickie, the national campaign manager of the Green party, said in an interview Friday when asked what would be a win for the party in the 2019 federal election.

“Certainly, official party status would be a major gain for us.”

With party status, the Greens would be guaranteed a set number of speaking slots in question period, guaranteed input during debates and other Chamber proceedings and positions on committees, as well as a yearly caucus stipend, courtesy of Parliament.

Dickie also cautioned that he doesn’t like making projections about his party’s outcome, because “it’s still fairly early in the campaign.”

Dickie’s been with the Green party since volunteering with Leader Elizabeth May in her attempted takedown of longtime Conservative MP Peter MacKay in Nova Scotia’s Central Nova riding in the 2008 federal election. After that, he stuck with May through her cross-country move to the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands, during which he was her campaign manager and helped her become the first Green party candidate ever elected to the House of Commons in 2011. He’s worked with May and the Greens ever since.

To the Greens favour, climate change has been a central point to discussion throughout the federal election campaign. The issue has been further thrust into the political spotlight by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s meteoric rise in fame. Her presence undoubtably fuelled excitement around last Friday’s climate strike in Montreal, which fit into marches held around the world to protest inaction on climate change.

READ MORE: Greta Thunberg leads Montreal climate strike where youth put politicians on notice

Dickie pointed to the release of the landmark report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last October as a time he observed a shift in public opinion about climate change. In that report, the IPCC said there was only 12 years remaining to keep global warming below 1.5 C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people would be at a worse risk of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty.

“We’ve just noticed in national polling that … climate change is now within the top three (election issues) almost every time and often times is the top issue,” Dickie said.

Six in 10 Canadians said they wanted the government to take action to address climate change even if the economy suffers as a result, one poll conducted by Mainstreet Research for iPolitics less than two months before the election started showed.

In another Mainstreet poll, 60 per cent of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who skipped a local debate on climate issues. There are more than 100 local candidate debates about climate change that are scheduled in ridings across Canada on Thursday.

Electoral results prior to the federal campaign also show a trend of Canadian voters willing to go Green. Just months after the April election in Prince Edward Island yielded a Green party opposition in a provincial legislature for the first time in Canada’s history, Paul Manly became the second Green party MP ever elected to the House of Commons to represent Nanaimo-Ladysmith in the final byelection of the 42nd Parliament in May.

In the early days of the 2019 federal election campaign, Mainstreet had the Greens in third place nationally, with almost a three percentage point lead over the NDP at one time. In its current poll, Mainstreet puts the Greens in fourth place, with a nine per cent share of the vote. The NDP are slightly ahead in third place with 10.3 per cent of the vote.

However, the Greens have a history of performing below where they poll come election day. In 2015, the party received about 3.5 per cent of votes nationally, after popular polls regularly reported that they were expected to receive five per cent of the vote in the weeks leading up to the election. In 2011, the Greens received about 3.9 per cent of votes in the country, with multiple major pollsters projecting that they would receive about six per cent of the vote, just a day earlier.

Dickie pointed to the Green Party’s record-breaking recent fundraising as a showing of meaningful support by potential Green voters, which is a difference he thinks will show at the ballot box this time around.

“We think we’ll be able to turn more of that into support come election day,” Dickie said. “Usually in the past the top issues tend to be jobs (and) the economy, and voters haven’t seen us as being as strong on that issue. And in past elections a lot of voters have made strategic voting decisions and we’ve also gotten squeezed out in that as well. This election does seem very different.”

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