National Affairs
By-election results hardly meaningful
Claire Hoy

In 1969, just down the road from where Green Party Leader Elizabeth May recently captured political attention by finishing second in a federal by-election, a soft-spoken Anglican preacher, Rev. Kenneth Bolton, stunned Ontario's political class by winning a provincial by-election for the NDP in what was then the Conservative heartland.

Bolton's shocking win in Middlesex-South came in a riding which not only had a virtually unbroken record of voting Tory, but came against a popular premier John Robarts, and an entrenched party regime which had held power without interruption since 1943.

Much to the delight of the NDP, the media was literally flooded with features and predictions (and public opinion polls) about what Bolton's upset victory meant for the next election. The end of the Tory dynasty was at hand. A new era of left-leaning politics was just around the corner at Queen's Park.

To meet this emerging force for change, veteran NDP leader Donald MacDonald quit and was replaced by the energetic, articulate and impressive, 32-year-old Stephen Lewis.

Things were looking up for the party.

Until, that is, new Tory leader Bill Davis called the 1971 general election.

Not only did Bolton get tossed out - when a Tory was re-instated - but the NDP dropped two seats overall, and Davis captured one of the largest majorities in Ontario history, the ninth consecutive Conservative win in this country's largest province. It would be another 14 years before the Tories finally lost.

History should teach us things. Bolton's 1969 win - and 1971 drubbing - underscores the point that by-election results often have little to do with general election results. Yet the political class, including the media, can't resist extrapolating the results from one single riding - where nothing is at stake except the fate of one seat - into something deeply meaningful for the entire body politic.

As a result, the aforementioned May - whose party has never won a single seat in Canada - is currently enjoying the same sort of media coverage normally reserved for politicians who have won something. There she was, pictured in Saturday's Toronto Star, holding an election sign and waving at passing motorists, as the illustration of a story on how the supposed growth of the Green Party - and Stephane Dion's victory - is squeezing the NDP out of the picture.

It is one thing for a party to finish second in a by-election by running the only real high-profile candidate it has - although she still lost - and quite another to make a meaningful impact in a general election, where limited resources and a lack of an electoral success works against them.

A recent EKOS poll, taken in the wake of the aforementioned London by-election - a sure way to skew results - gave the Green party 7.6 per cent support, up from the 4.5 per cent in the last federal election.

Even if that could be translated into a general election scenario - which it can't - it still makes Green a fringe party at best. Yet because of May's strong by-election showing, and the party's purported growth in the polls, the media now teems with stories about how Canadians have suddenly set aside their more traditional concerns and embraced the tree-huggers in a national hysteria over the environment.

Never mind that public opinion polls tend to inflate real public interest in the motherhood issues, the environment among them. That's because people often view poll questions as akin to a test in school. They don't want to fail. So if they're asked about the environment, they're unlikely to say they don't give a damn, whether they do or not.

Several years ago, based on readership surveys showing that readers wanted more environmental news, the Ottawa Citizen launched an entirely new daily section on the environment. It didn't last.

Why? Because all those people who told the pollsters they wanted it weren't reading it, and with nobody reading it, advertisers weren't keen on putting their money into it.

This is not to suggest that the environment isn't a legitimate political issue. Of course it is. But even those who see it as an issue don't all agree on the specifics and don't all vote the same way.

There is no doubt that Dion cleverly capitalized on his role as former environment minister in signing the Kyoto Accord to help him win the recent Liberal leadership convention. (Funny how little coverage there's been on the fact that having signed Kyoto, Dion and his Liberals subsequently failed to live up to its' promises.) And Dion's ploy, combined with May's by-election showing, have prompted the other party leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to take more interest in the environmental file.

Fair enough. It's just that before you get too excited by the supposed impact of a single by-election result, and an opposition leader waving green scarves for the television cameras, just keep in mind that it rarely, if ever, means as much as the political class likes to think.