Exactly one week before the May 9 election, Adam Olsen’s campaign office was the busiest storefront in the strip mall on Bevan Road.
B.C. Green Party volunteers were loading up a vehicle with campaign material before Olsen was heading to Salt Spring Island in an effort to get out the vote.
As Olsen is set to begin his interview with Global News, a man walks into his office to tell him “I’m voting for you for the first time.”
“There is nothing easy about running as a B.C. Green, but there’s nothing more freeing,” Olsen said. “We don’t get marching orders from the top. The party has developed a strong platform and it’s about each candidate articulating how that platform applies to their riding.
“You’ve got to earn every vote.”
Olsen may need every vote that comes his way as his riding, Saanich North and the Islands, will likely be one of the closest races in next week’s B.C. election.
In the 2013 election, the top three candidates in the riding finished within 379 votes of each other, making it the closest three-way race in B.C. political history. The NDP’s Gary Holman beat Liberal Stephen Roberts by 163 votes. Olsen finished just 216 votes behind Roberts.
All three candidates have returned in 2017 and believe they stand a fair chance of winning. Olsen has served as the B.C. Greens’ interim leader, which gave him a crash course on the inner workings of the Legislature.
Holman has served as the NDP’s ferry critic, an issue that is important for a riding that is home to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal and the Gulf Islands.
He is also a vocal opponent of the Liberals and says that voters have no choice but to consider voting strategically to unseat Premier Christy Clark.
“When you’re faced with the most corrupt government, the most monied government in Canada, then a strategic vote to get rid of these buggers and change the channel in British Columbia is absolutely valid.”
Roberts, a late entry into the 2013 election, has had four years to increase his profile in a riding that has a long history of voting Liberal.
The race has the makings for one of the most interesting races in the May 9 election. The stakes may be the highest for Olsen and the Greens. Aside from Leader Andrew Weaver, the incumbent in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, Olsen may be the Green Party’s best chance at winning another seat in the Legislature.
If Olsen wins, the Greens could still fall short of the four seats needed for official party status, but it could be the start of a snowball effect where voters in other parts of Vancouver Island, and even the rest of B.C., start to think that supporting the Green Party is no longer a wasted vote.
If enough momentum were to develop over the years, three-way races like the one in Saanich North could become more commonplace.
Are the Greens a threat to the NDP or the Liberals?
UBC political science professor Max Cameron notes that B.C’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it very hard for third parties to break through.
“What third parties tend to do is affect the election by implementing the distribution of votes between the other two political parties,” he said. “They can often be spoilers.”
READ MORE: Weaver says ‘neither Liberals nor NDP can be trusted with majority government’
Many may think that the Greens, with its eco-conscious ethic, will likely siphon votes from the left-leaning NDP, but candidates in Saanich North said the math isn’t quite that straightforward.
In the 2013 election, the NDP and Liberals both appeared to lose votes to the Greens in Saanich North. The Liberals received 2,768 fewer votes in 2013 than they did in the 2009 election. The NDP got 2,360 fewer votes.
The Greens, meanwhile, saw an increase of nearly 7,000 votes. Olsen notes that some of that gain came not from the two major parties but from disenfranchised voters who had refrained from voting in the past but were motivated to head to the polls to support the Greens.
“I think the Green vote surges early, this is what we’ve learned. There’s an attempt at visibility and then it peels away like an orange peel at the end. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in the last week.”Will strategic voting be a factor?The thought of three parties running neck-and-neck brings up the spectre of strategic voting, which became a topic of conversation during the 2015 federal election.Many who opposed then-Prime Minster Harper argued that voters needed to consider supporting the Liberal or NDP candidate who had the best chance of defeating the Conservative candidate in each riding, whether they actually preferred that candidate or not.
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