Greens set to upset Tory dynasty in Parry Sound—Muskoka

Green Party candidate Matt Richter is expected to turn one of Ontario's most reliably Progressive Conservative ridings green in the provincial election on June 2, a Mainstreet Research riding poll shows.

Richter has the backing of 43 per of voters in Parry Sound—Muskoka, well ahead of Progressive Conservative (PC) Graydon Smith, who has 36 per cent support.

If the Greens are successful, it would be their second seat at Queen's Park, after party leader Mike Schreiner's in Guelph.

Richter has been running for the Greens in Parry Sound—Muskoka since 2007. In 2014 and 2018, he placed a respectable third, coming in ahead of the NDP in 2014, and well ahead of the Liberals in 2018.

Provincially, Parry Sound—Muskoka has been solidly PC since its creation in 1999, when then-deputy premier Ernie Eves was elected with 57 per cent of the vote. The six following elections were won by Tory Norm Miller, who frequently got more than double the votes of his second-place challenger.

Miller is the son of former PC premier Frank Miller, who won five straight elections in the area in the 1970s and '80s.

Norm Miller, now in his mid-60s, announced his retirement from politics last November.

The race was upended in early May, after Liberal candidate Barry Stanley was dropped by his party when he was found to have self-published book in which he claimed that homosexuality is caused by infants “rebreathing” their own air shortly after birth.

When challenged about the book, Stanley said its argument was "sort of folk theory. ... There’s no proof to anything I have there.”

The Liberals got rid of Stanley too late to replace him on the ballot, so they won't have a candidate.

MP Elizabeth May, a former leader of the federal Green Party, says local voters are motivated by climate events such as heavy flooding in recent years.

"This is an area where the level of public concern about climate change is above normal," she said. "When you have a lot of people in a local area who are saying, 'The climate emergency is real; my insurance didn’t cover all my damage,’ it’s no longer a theoretical issue for a lot of people."

The New Blue and Ontario parties have 7.6 per cent support between them; if those votes had gone to the PCs, the race would be more even.

"We have a very perverse voting system," May said. "So when ... a party like the Progressive Conservatives splinters, (you'll) see better chances for smaller parties like the Greens to win more seats."

This could be another example of small, right-wing parties apparently becoming a secret weapon for non-PC candidates: They appear to have given the Liberals the lead in Peterborough—Kawartha, and reduced the PCs' edge in Etobicoke Centre.

However, Queen's University political-studies graduate student Tim Abray cautions against deciding that those voters are coming out of the PC pool.

"A lot of people who are voting for these populist candidates are disaffected voters," he said. "A fair number of them may not have voted recently. Unless you’re asking them (whom they'd) vote for instead, it’s dangerous to assume."

Abray cites a few reasons for the Greens' performance.

One is that, when there's an opening left by something like Stanley's disappearance from the race, voters looking for a home feel generally positive about the Greens, even though they've never seriously considered voting for them.

"And they don’t, until a good reason presents itself, and I think that’s what’s happening this time in Parry Sound—Muskoka."

Two more reasons are Schreiner's strong performance in the leaders' debate and the fact that Richter's profile in the community has grown over several elections.

"You’ve got a candidate for the Green Party that's been incredibly persistent in that riding," Abray said. "He has run over and over again, patiently, and that gives people time to know him."

This Mainstreet Research poll of 450 people was conducted on May 24 by automated telephone interviews. The poll is accurate to within ±4.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, and is weighted for age, sex, and region to be representative of the entire adult population of Canada.

Mainstreet Research is part owner of iPolitics and QP Briefing.