Peter Johnston doesn’t have any illusions about his party’s chances on election day. The deputy leader of the Alberta Greens hopes his party will elect a couple of MLAs, but he doesn’t expect any dramatic power grab.

“If we can just get one person in, it would really open the door,” he says. “They wouldn’t be able to keep us out of the debates.”

With no seats in the legislature, the Green Party suffers from a huge visibility and credibility gap. Its leader, George Read (who’s running in Calgary-Elbow), will not appear on the televised leaders’ debate on February 21. And although the Green Party might seem like the natural choice for environmentalists, the “green” vote won’t necessary go to the Green Party on March 3.

The battle for the votes of Alberta’s environmentalists has some clear front-runners, and surprisingly, the Green Party isn’t among them. The Conservation Voters of Alberta, a coalition of environmentalists working to make the environment the top issue this election, says the Liberals have the strongest environmental platform, primarily because of their promise to place absolute caps on carbon emissions. (For more detailed candidate endorsements, check out www.conservationvoters.ab.ca.)

GREENS LEFT OUT

That endorsement is a bit of a snub, considering that the Green Party regards itself as the political wing of the global environmental movement.

However, Lindsay Telfer, director of the Sierra Club’s Prairie chapter and a member of the Conservation Voters of Alberta, points out that the Greens haven’t offered environmentalists a detailed policy on which to base their endorsements.

“The Greens’ platform is very weak on detail,” Telfer says. “It makes it difficult for voters to assess. I mean, it’s the Green Party, so you assume they are going to have good policies, and you assume they are going to move the agenda forward, but they really didn’t provide detail in their plan on how specifically they are going to do that.”

The perception that the Greens have no chance of winning here in oil-rich Alberta might also have something to do with their lack of endorsements. Greenpeace activist Mike Hudema says he didn’t even look at the Green Party’s platform, because he was so focused on pushing for promises from the “three majors” — the Tories, the Liberals and the NDP.

Johnston himself has said that Green candidates have only a slim chance of getting elected. So why should environmentally minded Albertans cast a ballot for them? “We do get that question a lot,” Johnston admits. “Even if we don’t get someone in the legislature, every vote does count because the established parties study our votes just as much as everybody else’s, and if we continue to increase our vote by eight per cent every election, they’ll take note of it. We have to get votes in order for the Greens to have an influence.”

Ultimately, the Green Party plan has more to do with influencing the policies of other parties than assuming power themselves. Even with a couple of members in the house, Johnston argues that the Green Party would be able to stir up public unrest on the environment, just as investment consultant and landowner advocate Joe Anglin did with Bill 46, the contentious EUB bill.

LIBERALS AHEAD BY A NOSE

Telfer acknowledges the good work the Greens have done on Bill 46, but she says the Liberals’ climate change plan “takes the cake.”

Their promise of an absolute cap on greenhouse gas emissions in five years was exactly what many environmentalists were looking for. (Absolute caps mean that greenhouse gas emissions cannot rise. Under the Tory plan, for example, the amount of emissions per barrel of oil would decrease, but Hudema points out that the number of barrels produced could increase, which means emissions could still rise.)

Although both Telfer and Hudema would have preferred a promise to halt new oilsands development outright, and while several Green candidates have talked about doing precisely this (even though such a move is not mentioned in the official Green Party platform), they nevertheless feel the Liberals’ plan is better and more detailed than the Greens’, or that of the New Democrats.

“The NDP are saying much the same things,” Telfer says. “Their platform isn’t substantively different. The Liberals have just provided more details.”

The one item that the NDP are very specific about is their proposal for an Alberta Renewable Energy Corporation, a government-owned company that would develop the renewable energy market. “It’s an amazing plan,” says Hudema. “But it’s long-term. In addition to that, we were looking for some activities that were short-term, that are really going to have an immediate impact.”

The NDP’s promise to consult with industry and citizens on greenhouse gas emissions targets also sent up a red flag for Telfer. “The targets should be set by science,” she says. “It’s the strategies that you use to meet those targets — that’s what we need to consult on.”

That’s not to say Telfer has completely dismissed either the NDP or the Greens. In fact, she thinks the Greens might actually win a couple of seats, particularly in Lacombe-Ponoka, where Anglin has been running a strong campaign. Alberta Conservation Voters is endorsing individual candidates in each riding, and candidate endorsements are based on individual environmental commitment and not necessarily party policy. Besides, there’s still a week left before the election, and Telfer is watching party announcements closely.

For his part, deputy Green Party leader Johnston says he’ll keep campaigning, regardless of the results on March 3.