TORONTO — Green Party Leader Jim Harris told hundreds of cheering supporters last night that the environmentally oriented party has emerged from this election as a new force in Canadian politics.
"We are just rocking tonight," Mr. Harris said amid tumultuous applause. "We are on track, if you believe the polls from a couple of days ago, to win 800,000 votes in this election."
Speaking in a Toronto bar, he said the party has overtaken the NDP in many Quebec ridings and has emerged as a strong contender in provincial elections.
He said that at the beginning of the last election, only one polling company was keeping track of the party's support. Now, he says, "every major polling company knows that we are on the map."
With a minority government in the offing, he says the Greens will be back, stronger than ever, in the next election.
Mr. Harris made his remarks before final results were in across the country, which showed the party on track to attain only about 625,000 votes, or 4.5 per cent of popular support.
With this figure, the Greens easily exceeded the 2-per-cent threshold needed to be eligible for federal election financing of $1.79 a voter. The money means the party will once again have the finances to mount a credible campaign in the next election.
But the tally was only a slight improvement from 2004, when the Greens attracted 4.3 per cent support and 582,000 votes. The results show the party remains hampered by the first-past-the-post voting system.
Parties need concentrated support in individual ridings to have any hope of winning, yet in most systems of proportional representation, the Greens would probably have gained about 14 seats and been an influential force in Parliament.
Before the results became known yesterday, Mr. Harris reflected upon what he felt was a successful campaign. He said Liberal Leader Paul Martin's call during the campaign for Green supporters to switch allegiance to forestall the Tories was a sign of how important the party has become.
Mr. Martin's action "just highlights how front-and-centre the Green Party is when you have an existing Prime Minister begging your voter base," Mr. Harris said.
In the final days of the eight-week campaign, Mr. Harris concentrated on Toronto, Montreal, British Columbia and Alberta, where party strategists felt they had the best chance of attracting votes.
In his Toronto riding of Beaches-East York, Mr. Harris ran fourth, picking up 6 per cent of the vote.
While the Greens attracted support without much effort in 2004 as a fresh, new party, this time activists said they had to earn their increased share of the vote.
"This election, we've had to campaign for our votes. I think we were the novelty story in 2004 and this election we have actually had to go out and work for it," said party media director Dermod Travis.
This was the first time the Greens had run a campaign similar to the other mainstream parties, with a leader repeatedly criss-crossing the country and voters taking a curious look at the new political entity.
The Greens were certain that they had been under the voters' microscope like never before. The party's campaign website, for instance, got about one million hits a day, more than three times the level of 2004. The platform was the most downloaded item.
Although Greens ran in all 308 ridings, insiders conceded before the vote that they had a shot in only a handful: three in environmentally minded British Columbia and one in Ontario. They lost them all, coming in fourth place in each contest.
The best hope for an Ontario breakthrough was in Ottawa Centre, the seat won in the last election by the NDP's elder statesman, Ed Broadbent.
With Mr. Broadbent retiring from politics, David Chernushenko, the bilingual owner of a consulting firm, was thought to have a chance.
The Greens had a good showing in Saanich-Gulf Islands in British Columbia, but managed to get only about 10 per cent of the vote.