OTTAWA—Mike Schreiner is realistic about next Thursday.

He knows the Green party won’t miraculously form government. He admits it’s an uphill battle to even get a single Green MPP through the doors at Queen’s Park.

But a breakthrough with voters here, an increase in the party’s vote share there? Schreiner believes that could be the key for the Greens to start picking up momentum.

“We have two key objectives in the campaign. One is to elect our first Green MPP or MPPs … And then also we want to see our provincial vote total go up as well,” the 48-year old father of two teenage daughters said Thursday.

“When you elect that first Green MPP, the next election … we’ve seen additional Greens elected,” Schreiner said, citing the party’s experiences in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island.

“And so getting past that hurdle where people know Greens can get elected.”

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For the first time since being elected leader in 2009, Schreiner looks closer than ever to clearing that hurdle.

Schreiner is running in Guelph, a provincial riding long dominated by former Liberal cabinet minister Liz Sandals. Sandals’ decision not to seek re-election appears to have opened up space for the Green party.

A recent Mainstreet Poll put Schreiner in the lead with 31.7 per cent of the vote, followed by NDP candidate Agnieszka Mlynarz following closely at 28 per cent. Schreiner’s lead is within the 688-person poll’s margin of error, however.

It’ll likely be a tight race, especially with the New Democrats remaining strong in provincial polling and the possibility of strategic voting.

“We’re really pushing hard against strategic voting,” Schreiner told the Star.

“One of the messages we’ve been really trying to deliver in this campaign is you’ll never get the government you believe in if you don’t vote for the party you believe in.”

So who is Mike Schreiner, and does he really have a shot at becoming Ontario’s first Green MPP?

Born a small-town Kansas boy who grew up on a family farm, Schreiner moved to Ontario in 1993 to follow his wife, Sandy. In 1995, he opened his first organic food business in Guelph, later going on to found a second. He also co-founded the Local Food Plus non-profit.

Schreiner took over the Green party in 2009, after longtime former leader Frank De Jong stepped down. During his leadership, Schreiner saw the Greens’ share of the provincial vote increase from 2.9 per cent in 2011 to 4.8 per cent in 2014 — down from the party’s outlier performance of 8 per cent in 2007, but moving in the right direction.

The Greens’ platform centres around the environment and social services. It includes changing Ontario’s cap and trade system with a carbon fee and dividend system — where a cost is imposed on carbon-based fuels at the point of extraction or import, and that money is distributed directly to Ontarians.

The party is also pushing for aggressive investment in clean tech, lowering payroll taxes for small businesses and non-profits to assist with higher minimum wages, guaranteed basic income and expanded mental health services. The platform includes a sizable “redirection” of money to transportation and transit infrastructure.

And the Green leader is hoping his pledge to do principled politics will resonate with voters in an election that has occasionally veered into downright nastiness.

Schreiner said he’s often heard that if he were running for a more established party — the “status quo” parties, he calls them — he’d already be in the legislature. But he said that the Greens most strongly reflect the causes he believes in, and he’d rather be elected “the right way, not the easy way.”

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“I believe deeply in honesty in politics, and I believe the Green party reflects my values,” Schreiner said.

“Anything that’s worth fighting for is hard. So I am fighting for a livable future for my children, I am fighting to tackle climate change and address income inequality, social justice issues and improving our democracy.”

Whether Schreiner will fight those battles inside Queen’s Park or from the outside will be up to Guelph voters on June 7.

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