Green Party leader Frank de Jong By Tobi Cohen

Frank de Jong,leader of the Green Party of Ontario visiting at the Dearness Home in London. (Sue Reeve/Sun Media)

TORONTO (CP) — Make no mistake: Frank de Jong is in it to win it.

So too is de Jong’s Green party, which is no longer the loosely assembled fringe party once pigeonholed as having few policy ideas beyond tackling climate change and doing away with pollution.

Recent polls suggest the Greens have the support of between six and 10 per cent of the Ontario electorate, and they’ll be running a full slate of candidates in the Oct. 10 election.

But their leader — a 51-year-old elementary school teacher and political veteran with a penchant for opera and classical music — is anything but delusional.

De Jong is pinning his hopes on the results of next month’s referendum vote, which is taking place at the same time as the election, to decide whether Ontario should adopt a new, more representative electoral system.

He’s also crossing his fingers for a minority government, which would mean another trip to the polls within a couple of years — and a far better chance to put Green members in the Ontario legislature.

“Our hope is . . . that we’ll have a minority government, which means there will be a new election in two years,” de Jong said.

“It will be the first proportional representation election and so in two years, we would have those MPPs. That’s the best case scenario for us, obviously.”

The “issue driven” activist, who studied classical music at the University of Western Ontario and sings opera, traces his political roots to the Cold War.

“I moved to Toronto at the height of the Cold War, and generally, reading the paper, I realized like thousands of others that there were multiple warheads pointed at Toronto,” he said over a vegetarian omelette and black coffee at a popular restaurant in Little Italy.

It’s a quick bike-ride away from the home in his Davenport riding that he shares with his partner of 10 years, Kelley Aitken, a fiction writer.

“(I) worried that we were going to get blown to bits at any second of the day or night.”

In the early 1980s, de Jong got involved in the peace movement, joined the Toronto Disarmament Network and cut his political teeth railing against cruise missile testing.

It wasn’t until 1987 that he actually became a card-carrying Green party member — six years before he was voted party leader.

He later shifted his attention to nuclear power, lent his support to the pro-choice movement and turned his efforts towards saving Ontario’s old growth forests in Temagami.

“I was arrested three times,” he said proudly. He also admitted having smoked marijuana, although he “never exhaled.”

De Jong was arrested once for tree-hugging in Temagami, again for illegally painting bicycle lanes on the Bank Street bridge in Ottawa and once more for shouting down NATO head Manfred Worner at the Empire Club of Canada during a talk about establishing a NATO base in Labrador.

He and other activists were dragged out of the prestigious Toronto club a second time when they challenged former Alberta premier Ralph Klein on climate change.

“We beat all the raps and I have no criminal record,” he boasted with a chuckle. “Our pro bono lawyers got us off all the time.”

De Jong, who has six brothers and sisters, still sympathizes with traditional activists. He defended his decision to praise a Greenpeace stunt last month in which activists chained themselves to a coal freighter on Lake Erie.

But de Jong’s own days of protest are over.

“I don’t have to personally do civil disobedience anymore,” he said. “We are given a voice in politics and people put a microphone in my face so I don’t have to do rash acts anymore. Now I want to be the politician myself.”

It’s a lofty ambition, said University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman.

Wiseman said he’s been “impressed” by de Jong, but doesn’t believe he or his party will win any seats any time soon.

Wiseman said he doubts the referendum will pass the requisite 60 per cent majority requirement and believes whatever support the party has garnered will be reduced on Oct. 10.

“Even people who are voting on the basis of the environment . . . realize the Green party isn’t going to win a seat and end up choosing a party, if the environment is the ballot question for them, that they think is the closest . . . to the Green position,” he said.

“I don’t think the environment is going to be the ballot question for the overwhelming majority of people, not withstanding what they tell you in the polls.”

The smartest thing the Green party did was take a unique and widely popular stand on religious education, said Wiseman, but even that won’t be enough to win seats.

The party’s pledge to scrap Catholic school boards and amalgamate them into a single public board has drawn widespread attention, but few people have any idea what the party really stands for beyond a vague notion of support for environmental causes, he added.

The Greens don’t fit neatly on the political axis, admitted de Jong.

And unlike some climate-change crusaders like former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who was slammed for using more electricity in his Nashville, Tenn., mansion in a month than the average American household uses in a year, the physically fit de Jong — who cycled 800 kilometres last year to a Chicago conference on green economics — practices what he preaches.

He and his partner get their electricity from Bullfrog Power, which uses only clean, green renewable resources like wind and low-impact water and according to Aitkin, they live a pretty eco-friendly lifestyle.

“Like a lot of people in Toronto, we try to buy organic or local vegetables, fruits and groceries. We’re primarily vegetarian. We wash in cold water. We have a high efficiency washing machine and we use a solar air drying apparatus — (a) clothesline,” vouched Aitkin.

“We grow some vegetables in a small plot beside the house. We don’t own a car and we take (public transit) and ride our bikes mostly. We try not to be excessive consumers.”