As the NDP heads into a policy convention this weekend licking its election wounds and collecting its thoughts on party direction, the Green Party is next in line to assess what went wrong with its own strategy.

The Greens went into the 2015 election with two seats, gunning for over a dozen more by focusing resources on potentially winnable ridings.

It came out the other side with just one.

Party higher-ups are still putting the final touches on their official election post-mortem, but recently released spending data has shown precisely which ridings they targeted — and the financial resources the party poured into them.

Not that they ever kept the broader strategy secret.

In April last year, months before the federal election campaign kicked off, then-Green Party President Dave Bagler spoke openly about it. As Bagler put it, they were going to ‘put more dollars into areas where they had a significant shot of winning’.

For the most part, that meant B.C.

One of those areas, Bagler telegraphed, was the Victoria riding held by the NDP’s Murray Rankin. Adjacent to Green Party Leader Elizabeth May’s Saanich—Gulf Islands seat — the base of Green power — Bagler said they were going to come after it with everything they had.

That turned out to be $155,195 – roughly 12 times what the average Green Party candidate spent (only 309 have filed expenses with Elections Canada – many didn’t spend anything), but it wasn’t enough to get former CBC radio host Jo-Ann Roberts elected.

Rankin would spend more: $214,728, the fourth most of all candidates who’ve filed so far with Elections Canada, according to a recent report by the Canadian Press. Roberts spent 66 per cent of the riding’s spending limit, but Rankin hit 91.

And he won by 6,731 votes.

Sonia Theroux, Roberts’ campaign manager, said it was clear Rankin was outspending them during the election.

“We felt that,” she said.

“I did get a sense [we were behind], but even though to do my job, I was in denial of it; mid-writ period, it did feel like we were losing the wind in our sails.”

His team had more experience, more money, and she thought the local Greens likely started far behind in identified supporters.

They had come so close in the 2012 byelection that elected Rankin, though — losing by 1,118 votes — so hopes were high.

Roughly two weeks before the election, however, they had a narrative problem.

Rankin’s campaign message was ‘stop Harper’ — that is, vote for the candidate most likely to do that — and it stuck.

“We were trying to demystify that for ten months,” she said.

Despite feelings of early momentum, they heard it repeated at the doorstep until the very end – even though voters hadn’t elected a Conservative in Victoria since the 80s.

Canvassers became discouraged.

As much as Rankin spent, though, two Green Party candidates outspent him: Elizabeth May ($215,092) and Gord Miller, who spent more than any other candidate ($226,402) — just shy of the riding’s spending limit — only to finish fourth in Guelph.

They, like Roberts, were examples of the election strategy Bagler articulated last April — spend a lot of money in key ridings and very little in the rest.

As was borne out by the election results, it didn’t work. But Bagler doesn’t think it was necessarily the wrong strategy.

“Given the resources of the Green Party, I think you have to double-down on focusing on those ridings,” he told iPolitics. “But focusing means more than just money. It also means focusing volunteers, focusing your experienced campaigners.”

Bagler admitted that while they had a number of star candidates running in winnable ridings, they probably still spread too thin.

“Realistically you’d want to focus just on – I’ve thrown the number four around. I’m not sure that’s the best number, the magic number, but…we had the candidates to do 15. We had great candidates in all those ridings,” he said, rattling off the list – former TV meteorologist Claire Martin, former CBC host Jo-Anne Roberts, former Ontario Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller, and Spanish Professor Mary Lou Babineau on the East Coast.

“I think that was just too ambitious to…go from one to fifteen,” he said.

He then offered up a refined version of their strategy that he thought, in hindsight, might have worked better.

“Saanich—Gulf Islands, obviously to try and re-elect the leader, that’s your first priority, a no-brainer. Victoria because it came so close in the byelection. And maybe, say, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke because it’s another southern Vancouver Island riding. The fourth, Thunder Bay…Bruce Hyer’s riding.”

Theroux felt similarly and said there seems to be a consensus among Green campaign managers and senior Greens on the West Coast that there were “too many target-to-win ridings” — that they were too ambitious.

“We went from one to ‘let’s do this over a dozen ridings’,” she said.

All the same, Theroux wasn’t convinced the problem was money as much as it was organizational experience and fatigue from the long campaign.

“The Green Party’s a baby party in learning what ground campaign means,” she said.

The party was able to “scale up significantly from 2011,” Bagler added, and while they didn’t get the results they were hoping for in targeted ridings, they still “learned a lot of lessons” that will serve the party well in the future.

Dan Palmer, Green Party spokesperson, told iPolitics those lessons won’t all come out until the party’s official report is finished.

The next step will be to translate them into a winning strategy in time for the 2019 campaign.

In Palmer’s view, though, the 2015 election was unique — a one-off where the mood of so many voters turned to dispatching the Harper government, as in Victoria, that it changed the way many chose to vote.

That was reflected in the last weeks of polling, making it hard to assess the strategy of targeting specific ridings.

While the total number of Green votes marginally ticked upward without their seat share increasing, Palmer highlighted some regional success with the strategy: they managed to nearly double their vote share on Vancouver Island, increasing from about 56,000 to 110,000.

Moreover, until the Liberal government decides how it plans to change the electoral system, a key Liberal platform promise, it’s premature to start talking 2019 strategy.

“We don’t know what that system will be, so it’s difficult to re-adjust until we have a final answer on that,” Palmer said.

The party, meanwhile, will be beating the drum for proportional representation loudly over the next year.

“Short-term focus for us on that is public education, rallying our members to get people on board with the idea PR is what we need, and keeping that pressure on the government to stick to Prime Minister Trudeau’s word,” he said.

As for party direction and a path forward — a lot will be determined at the next party convention.

“We have our convention in August,” Palmer said. “That’s going to be a place where we rebuild a bit of our policy and how we adjust to this post-Harper world — and this Liberal government.”