GREEN LEADER SCHREINER HERE TO TEST LOCAL WATERS ABOUT JUMPING SHIP TO LEAD LIBERALS
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com OPINION
HUNTSVILLE — The tug of war for Mike Schreiner takes centre stage here tomorrow.
The Ontario Green leader will be at the Active Living Centre Tuesday morning, where more than 150 party members have signed up to attend the event scheduled long before the Liberals tried to recruit him.
And before his own party members shot back last week with their own entreaty to keep him.
The meeting is ostensibly about keeping the fight up against Bill 23 — the Ford government’s More Homes Built Faster — which passed before Christmas.
But Schreiner is travelling the province gauging Greens for how they feel about him crossing the floor.
His Parry Sound-Muskoka lieutenant Matt Richter, who put a scare into MPP Graydon Smith in last June’s election, won’t be attending. He will be in his classroom teaching.
He’d like to see his leader stay. But if the move advances the environmental cause ….
And it could open the door to Richter taking a run at a vacated leadership.
The Liberals could do (have done) worse that Schreiner who they see as a more likeable, votable leader.
It’s been easy for the popular leader to occasionally stand up in Question Period and rail against the government’s environmental policies including its much maligned Greenbelt “trade-off.” But he has little to lose — or does he/we?
Schreiner — a second term Guelph MPP and his party’s lone member in the provincial Legislature — is here testing the local waters.
He’s back on the hustings, telling a similar gathering last week in Owen Sound: “I think people are going to continue to keep pushing and telling the Premier, Doug Ford, to ‘keep your promise, keep your hands off the Greenbelt.’
Publicly local Greens, who fought hard for decades to take raise their party to Tory challenger status, will turn out to show their support for their beloved leader.
Party leadership last week in their own love letter to him have told the Grits to get their grubby Liberal mitts off him.
So it’s now up to the ridings grassroots here to help Schreiner make up his mind.
Yet they face the same dilemma voters at the polls did last year, whether to cast lots with their conscience or back a potential winner.
Liberals are banking on the latter.
Not that members of the province’s former government who have been shut out of “official party status” at Queen’s Park two terms running are as politically astute as the once were.
That’s what Schreiner is here to weigh. Public opinion is split.
He certainly wouldn’t want to see these same friendly faces from last spring campaigning against him in 2026.
Unless he can convince them to also turn coat in a long game.
But if Schreiner leads a losing Liberal party in three years, he would give up his environmental voice in the lower house.
For a party perceived — both provincially and federally — as only being about the environment it’s a tough call for its Ontario leader.
Who’s next, then, to jump ship? Elizabeth May.
And what’s at stake?
The planet or the party?
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