IN the early years of the 20th century, Vancouverites would turn out in droves every year to witness the ancient spectacle of steelhead salmon spawning in the creeks of the city's Marpole district.
On Vancouver's east side, salmon-rich Brewery Creek meandered westward from a point south of Kingsway and emptied into False Creek. Nearby, coho and chum salmon spawned the length of China Creek, from its mouth near Main Street to its headwaters several kilometres away, at 45th and Knight.
They're all gone now.
One of the dozens of salmon streams that once criss-crossed Vancouver was Tatlow Creek. It eventually ended up a trickle in a culvert that ran underneath West Point Grey Road, in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood.
In the 1990s, a group of local residents got together with the ambitious plan of "daylighting" the creek, and letting it run free through little Tatlow Park to empty into English Bay. They even allowed themselves to imagine salmon spawning in the creek one day.
No salmon have returned to spawn in Tatlow Creek -- yet. But Tatlow Creek was daylighted, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the activist Mel Lehan, a former schoolteacher and stay-at-home dad who'd played a key role in winning permanent protection of the city's Point Grey foreshore.
For Lehan, the big deal about restoring Tatlow Creek was that it was an exercise in proving an idea. People and salmon can share the same neighbourhood. Cities can still have healthy creeks running through them. The economy and the environment don't have to cancel each other out.
It was because of such ideas that Lehan decided to mount a long-shot run on behalf of the NDP to take the Vancouver-Point Grey riding from its incumbent MLA, Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell, in the May 17 provincial election.
Campbell, meanwhile, was animated by other kinds of ideas.
During his five years as premier, Campbell eliminated the environment ministry, gave tax breaks to SUV-buyers, handed out huge subsidies to oil and gas companies, mining companies and forest companies, and rammed ahead with an unnecessary oil-fired generating station on Vancouver Island.
He ripped a 14,600-hectare chunk out of a provincial park and gave it to mining giant Teck Cominco, one of his party's biggest political donors. He stripped local governments of their authority to zone against salmon farms, secretly waived pollution fines, rolled back pulp-mill pollution controls, and weakened drinking-water protection.
I could go on like this for several more paragraphs, but the important thing is that when the Vancouver-Point Grey ballots were counted, Lehan had pulled down 9,557 votes. But Damian Kettlewell of the Green party -- the "environmentalist" party -- had taken 3,758 votes. So Campbell won, with 11,759 votes.
In varying degrees, the same kind of vote-splitting among centre-left and environmentalist voters repeated itself last Tuesday in 14 of B.C.'s 79 ridings.
Campbell's Liberals won the election with 46 seats and 46 per cent of the vote. The NDP won 33 seats with 41 per cent. The Greens took nine per cent of the vote, but won no seats. If the polling firm Ipsos-Reid is correct about Green voters being two-and-a-half times more likely to identify the NDP over the Liberals as their second-choice preference, a strictly mathematical calculation suggests that, at the very least, Campbell's Liberals would have been denied a half-dozen ridings.
In other words, had it not been for the Green-NDP division, B.C.'s ruling party may well have been defeated last week.
The B.C. election offers critical lessons for supporters of the Green party everywhere in Canada -- and of all other third parties, even the federal NDP. And the biggest lesson is about Canada's obsolete first-past-the-post electoral system.
For several years, B.C.'s NDP and Green party leaders have stubbornly ignored the entreaties of their own supporters to heal the crippling rift between them. They further snubbed a proposed single transferable voting (STV) system -- a form of proportional representation -- which narrowly failed in a referendum that coincided with last week's election. Still, because the vote was so close, Premier Campbell and the NDP's Carole James have pledged to revisit the whole business of electoral reform. Rank-and-file Greens are positively chafing for it.
It's a good thing, too. If it takes in B.C., it could catch on elsewhere. In the coming years, some form of proportional representation may be the only thing that will keep Canada's multi-party system healthy and effective. It may be the only thing that will give Canadians anything remotely resembling the types of electoral choices they want. The world is changing.
If we'd had proportional representation a few years ago at the federal level, we could have avoided the debilitating "unite-the-right" warfare that killed off the venerable Progressive Conservative Party.
If B.C. had an STV system already in place for Tuesday's election, the result would likely have allowed an NDP-Green coalition government, or maybe even a wobbly Liberal-Green arrangement.
Without some kind of proportional representation, it will probably only be a matter of time before the choice between a federal Liberal party candidate and one of those increasingly Blairite New Democrats will be merely how to split and throw away a centre-left vote.
But far more important is the rising urgency of "environmental issues" such as climate change, the exhaustion of the planet's ecological carrying capacity, and a widely anticipated, economy-wrecking explosion in global oil prices. All these things should be expected to make Canadian politics unrecognizable within a decade, and preparing for such a range of potential calamities by having Green candidates to waste votes on every few years isn't going to be good enough.
When it emerged in Canada more than 20 years ago, the Green party could properly claim that even if it didn't really expect to form a government, its very presence would push the other parties to address environmental issues and become a bit more "green."
Well, the results are now in, and in B.C., where the Greens are strongest in Canada, the opposite has happened. Victoria Times-Colonist columnist Jack Knox put it this way: "The irony is the Green party may have done for the environment what the Bloc Québécois did for Quebec, turning it into a political ghetto of diminished significance."
Indeed, one public-opinion poll conducted during the B.C. election campaign showed that only seven per cent of the electorate considered "the environment" a serious election issue. And, unlike the Bloc, the Greens still can't even elect an MLA. Despite wise candidates such as Mel Lehan, B.C.'s NDP is arguably less "green" overall than it was 20 years ago, and Green-NDP vote-splitting on May 17 cleared the way for the re-election of what is arguably the most anti-environmental government in B.C.'s history.
The day after the election, Lehan was candid and gracious about what had happened. He didn't blame the Greens.
"We're all to blame," he said. "What has happened is the height of irresponsibility. It's all of us."
Terry Glavin is a B.C. author, critic and journalist. His most recent book, The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean, won the 2001 Hubert Evans Prize. He is the editor of Transmontanus Books, and lives on Mayne Island, in the Southern Gulf Islands.
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