OTTAWA—At a certain point this summer, Kim Hughes admits, things started to look “pretty overwhelming” for the Green Party Riding Association of Cowichan-Malahat-Langford.

In a place that, like pretty much everywhere else, has never elected a Green candidate to the House of Commons, there was a deluge of people that wanted to run. At its peak, a whopping nine candidates were mounting bids for the Green nomination this year, including the head of the riding association, who was among the four who duked it out to the end.

That left Hughes, who volunteered for the first time to work phones and pamphleteer in the last federal election, to take over as chief executive officer in the riding — “an auspicious title for a volunteer position,” she says — and manage the crowded contest as the next campaign was approaching fast.

But the heft of the task didn’t overshadow what Hughes hopes it means: that a surge of interest has positioned the Greens to do something that, for them at least, is momentous and unprecedented — win more than a single seat in a federal election.

“Usually people don’t want to jump on a ship that’s going to drown,” Hughes said by phone recently from her home in Shawnigan Lake, B.C. “They jump on a ship that they think is going to make it to the other side.

“They see there is possibility.”

The lure of that possibility is enhanced by recent history. In 2017, the Greens won three seats on Vancouver Island in the B.C. election, and they now hold the balance of power in Victoria. In Prince Edward Island this year, the Greens became the official opposition for the first time in a Canadian legislature. And then there was Paul Manly, the filmmaker and activist who won the federal byelection in Nanaimo-Ladysmith on May 6 and joined longtime leader Elizabeth May as the only Greens ever to win federal seats.

In the wake of these successes, and with a series of polls suggesting more and more Canadians are willing to vote Green, the coming campaign may well present an opportunity unlike anything the party has seen. In trying to seize it, the Greens face an array of challenges, from their history of defeat to the limited finances and ground operations of a smaller party that didn’t spend a single dime on local campaigns in more than a quarter of all ridings in 2015.

Given all this, they are bracing for a more bruising battle than ever before, even hiring a brawler in Canadian politics to help them weather it — a move that sparked concern amongst followers of a party that prides itself on positive politics.

“The promise of the Green breakthrough has always been something of the rainbow unicorn for the Green party,” said Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute.

“It’s the magical thing that you’re always chasing.”

Jonathan Dickie sits on the eighth floor of an office tower in downtown Ottawa, contemplating that chase.

The party has just come off its best year of fundraising outside election time, raising about $3.13 million in 2018. The Greens are now putting it to use, under Dickie’s leadership as national campaign manager. The party has increased staff to more than 50, hiring for strategic roles in communications and information technology.

Senior campaign leadership has been lined up, which includes Emily McMillan, the federal Green party’s executive director since 2012, and Henry Wright, a former Liberal operative who switched to the Greens and is serving as deputy campaign manager and senior adviser.

On this day in July, Dickie and his team at the Greens’ national headquarters are still working out preliminary details for the campaign, recruiting candidates for the more than 100 ridings where, as of mid-July, nobody was yet nominated to run for the party.

He crosses his legs and leans back in his chair in a small closet-like side room. Outside, around the corner, a group of staffers sit at large computer screens on long trestle tables in a room festooned with lush-green office plants, clicking away and muttering into landlines. At 40, Dickie has been with the party for more than a decade, but he’s never directed an entire federal campaign before.

He first joined May for the 2008 election, when she lost her bid to unseat Conservative cabinet minister Peter MacKay in the riding of Central Nova. Dickie stayed with her through to 2011, and managed May’s campaign when she was finally elected as Canada’s first Green MP in Saanich-Gulf Islands. He remained there until recently as the leader’s constituency co-ordinator in that all-important foothold on B.C.’s southern coast.

“There’s something about trying to achieve something that’s such a long shot, even in Saanich-Gulf Islands,” he says. “It certainly wasn’t an easy win, so it’s always been fun to make this sort of work.”

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This time around, though, Dickie sees a different dynamic than in those earlier campaigns. Surveys from Abacus Data, for instance, have placed the Greens in double digits for the past three months, most recently in mid-July, when 11 per cent said they planned to vote for the party. The Greens have never received more than 7 per cent of the popular vote in a federal election.

On top of that, the pool of voters open to potentially voting Green appears to have widened. Recent Abacus surveys have found more than 40 per cent of respondents would consider voting Green, a number that has trended up from around 31 per cent less than three years ago.

Kurl, from the Angus Reid Institute, said many factors could be at play. Some who supported Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party in 2015 may be upset by the SNC-Lavalin affair, the broken promise to change the voting system, or by the government’s decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion.

Now that Greens are elected at the provincial level in B.C., New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Ontario, Kurl said the party can also counter the familiar argument that a vote for the Greens is a vote wasted, because they can’t actually win a seat in our first-past-the-post system.

“It’s no longer the case in some situations,” Kurl said. “Elizabeth May has a stronger message and a more persuasive argument on that front than she did four years ago.”

The potential in this is not lost on Dickie. The party anticipates its opponents will notice this, too.

“We’re starting to take vote share away from the other parties, and we expect that they’ll pay a little bit more attention to us and put a little more effort into attacking us in this campaign,” said Dickie.

So, with an eye to the negativity that sometimes taints the electoral cycle, the party that preaches cross-party co-operation and positive politics turned, if only briefly, to an outside adviser with a reputation for getting his hands dirty.

He calls himself “the Prince of Darkness.”

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Elizabeth May stood before a gathering of Greens in a hall at the University of Guelph. The city known for its earthy inclinations elected Ontario’s Green Leader Mike Schreiner to Queen’s Park last year, and is the type of place the federal party believes it can draw significant support in the coming election.

A woman rose to ask a question. “My name is Valerie, I am from Hamilton,” she said. “I would like to ask Elizabeth how we are supposed to respond to people’s comments on Warren Kinsella. ’Cause I don’t know what to say to them.”

When news emerged that Warren Kinsella was hired to join the Green party’s “situation room” for the 2019 election, social media was set aflutter. Some Green supporters posted misgivings about bringing Kinsella into the fold, pointing out that he has criticized some of the party’s base as “anti-Semitic” for supporting a boycott of goods made in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel.

The move emerged at the same time as a rift between the federal Greens and some of its supporters over details of May’s plan to fight climate change. Alex Tyrrell, the leader of the Green Party of Quebec, has accused May of running a “centrist campaign” for her openness to continued activity in Alberta’s oilsands. He also echoed concerns about Kinsella, telling the Star the operative was a “poor choice” because he has attacked the party before and is “the self-described angel of ultra-negative politics.”

On that day in Guelph, May suggested she understood the concerns over Kinsella’s presence.

“The truth is that he is playing a very minor role in the national office, in a group that’s going to respond to attacks on us. I have a very strong ethical framework,” she said.

“I told him that what he did in politics previously has been despicable and he said yeah so — but if you are working with us that cannot happen at all.” (She later clarified on Twitter that what she had meant was that some of the negative campaigns Kinsella had worked on, and not necessarily his contribution to them, were “despicable.”)

Last week, Kinsella tweeted in the past tense about his association with the party: “I was delighted to help set up the Green Party’s quick-response capacity,” he wrote. May later confirmed that Kinsella’s work with the Greens had come to an end, though one of his colleagues at the Daisy Group consulting firm, Tom Henheffer, will take on a role in the campaign.

(Kinsella did not agree to an interview for this story.)

Dickie explained the dalliance as pure defence, an attempt by the party to grow up and handle itself in the big bad world of political relevance.

Kinsella was brought in, he said, “to look at our organization, look at our leader, our candidates, and do the research as if he was going to attack us,” Dickie said.

“We’ve never really had to deal with that before … We don’t want to sling the mud back but we do want to be able to defend ourselves much more quickly.”

If Kinsella’s stint can be seen in that light, it is among the moves the party is making to improve its political machine so it can translate good polls into votes.

Dave Bagler was president of the Green party during the 2015 campaign. When it was over, he determined the Greens spent money in too many places where they never really had a shot. This time around, he feels the Green machine is more sophisticated, with more experienced organizers in key battlegrounds who will get the resources and expertise they need to run successful campaigns.

“There’s more money and more people to get stuff done,” he said. “There’s more of us to avoid being spread too thin.”

The party is targeting some obvious seats. Dickie said Vancouver Island is a major focus, which isn’t surprising given the party’s two federal seats come from the area, and that it was the source of more than one in six Green votes in the last general election. Outside B.C., Dickie said the party will also focus on areas where the Greens have won at the provincial level.

The party also touts its “G-Vote” application, which they use to gather information from willing voters when volunteers and candidates knock on their doors. Bagler said this is the second federal election with “G-Vote,” and that it has already proven useful in the Nanaimo-Ladysmith byelection as a way to identify Green supporters and get out the vote.

“Personally, I feel it’s one way that as a small party we punch above our weight,” he said.

If all goes well, Dickie said “five seats is realistic” for the Greens in the next Parliament, and 10 to 15 would be the smash success they’ve dreamed of.

That could fulfil what May has already deemed the ideal result for her party this year: that they win enough seats to wield influence in a minority Parliament.

If that happens, you can bet Greens will party like they won a majority.

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