There’s a new excitement taking hold within Canada’s Green party as it sharpens its bold message with a full slate of candidates eyeing October’s federal election. A polling surge shows upwards of 10 per cent support nationwide and, perhaps more importantly, surveys suggest a substantially higher portion of Canada’s restless electorate — dispirited by hyperpartisanship in Ottawa as the global climate crisis becomes undeniable reality — are, for the first time ever, open to voting Green. If not for themselves, for their kids.Yes, we’ve all seen this movie before — and it ended with crushing disappointment in 2015, when Elizabeth May’s Greens saw support collapse by half in the final week of the campaign. Centre-left voters en masse went with their heads rather than hearts, ultimately painting their ballots Justin Trudeau red to ensure the end of Stephen Harper blue. But ask anyone in Canada’s Greens and they will tell you: the momentum is different this time. Trudeau’s ruling Liberals are neither new nor nearly so shiny. The Greens, in a series of impressive victories provincially and federally, have used these years to show they can be a winnable choice. And this time, they believe, there’s a genuine chance the October surprise will go the other way: delivering a bloc of Green MPs big enough to play a crucial role in Ottawa, if Canadians voters opt for a minority government.What the Greens see now is an unprecedented number of Canadian millennials, as they arrive as the most potentially powerful voting cohort, demanding aggressive climate action now — something on the scale of the Green New Deal proposed south of the border by Democratic rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. May, for her part, isn’t fond of the Depression-era language of the phrase. Canadians hardly need American inspiration — the Greens have been years honing a basket of economic policies that, says May, & ...
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