James O'Grady

Great question. The answer from my perspective, as a former Green, is the following: 

1. Strategic Voting: Every election in a first past the post electoral system when voters vote against who they don't want rather than who they do want, the result is that the Greens lose upwards of 50% of their voter support on election day. Fear being the main driver. 

2. A very weak ground game. For reasons I don't want to get into in public, the Green Party is very weak on the ground in almost every riding. When I ran the 2007 Ontario GPO campaign where we tripled our vote, we supported all the candidates in the province providing them with the very basics to succeed. This isn't the case any longer. Even though the party has 10x the amount of money, they concentrate it in a few ridings to try and win them. They've used this failed strategy for close to 20 years now without much success as you point out. My strategy worked better because I believe that in order for the best Green Party candidates to get elected, voters need to be talking about Green Party policy and ideas in every corner of the province or country. 

3. Environmental and climate change issues fall to the wayside during tough economic times. This is especially true when climate change deniers, like Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre spend all their time and a whole lot of money spreading misinformation about it and a carbon tax. 

4. One of my 2007 election campaign slogans was: "There is only one Green Party if you want real change." The idea behind it was to separate the Green Party from the other progressive parties on environmental issues. Of course they never continued with it and fail every election to prove the obvious: If the other parties were real green parties they would call themselves the Green Party. They had the chance, they never did. Why? Because they are not environmental parties. They do not understand sustainability and what the steps are to achieve it without causing the economy serious problems.

A revenue neutral carbon tax is a Green Party policy the LIberals stole. But, like usual, they failed to implement properly or to even explain the benefits to Canadians. Because they don't know. They don't have a real plan. It's all posturing. If you want Canada to become sustainable, the Green Party is the only choice because they are the only party that spends all day and all night, every single day of the year, forever, thinking about this problem. No one spends as much time or energy into solving the sustainability challenge. 

5. Fundraising > The Greens suffer from an inability to raise adequate funds to take on the bigger parties. They just don't have enough money to reach every voter once, let alone multiple times. 

6. Too many political neophytes > Too often complete novices become candidates. People who have not spent the requisite amount of time to learn how political campaigns are run.  Even the volunteers have little idea what they are doing. 

7. Unlike the other parties, the Green Party does not use a Geopolitical data tool to analyze daily campaign activity. While they start strong, they are unable to adjust the way the other parties do half way through a campaign. Which is one of the reasons they drop back in the final two weeks of almost every campaign.