After her 13 year-stint as leader of the Green Party ended in 2019, Elizabeth May returned to the post this past November. In accepting the mantle for a second time, May claimed, “We are the only relevant party.”.Hardly.. Noah JarvisNoah Jarvis .Beginning in the 1980s, Canada’s Greens modelled themselves after their successful West German counterparts Die Grünen. By 2004 leader Jim Harris was predicting the party would elect several MPs. When that didn’t happen, and following complaints about his top-down leadership style, Harris exited..Enter May in 2006, then executive director of the Sierra Club and a former environmental policy advisor in the Mulroney government. By 2011 she’d made her way into the House of Commons as MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands and quickly set herself up as part of the Ottawa establishment — Maclean’s declared her Parliamentarian of the Year in 2012. Sympathetic journalists were always declaring that she was on the verge of a major political breakthrough..It hasn’t happened yet. From a high of 6.8% of the popular vote in the 2008 federal election, the Green vote fell to 2.3% in 2021. There are reasons for this failure to launch. While the Greens hitch their wagon to moral panic over climate change, most voters are more concerned with their own rising cost of living and post-pandemic recovery now than with the possibility of rising sea-levels in the future. Moreover, the party lacks a reliable regional support base, a perennial problem for any ideological party in a country where the major political allegiances are regional..An earlier generation of Liberal leaders used to refer to the NDP and their predecessors as “Liberals in a hurry.” Perhaps a coherent ideological Green Party, as the NDP once was, could overcome this lack of a regional base. After all, the Greens have an ally in the Bloc Québécois and their provincial counterpart, the Future Quebec Coalition. But the Green cause has been sunk by the co-opting of their message by the current Liberal-NDP coalition. Why would environmental alarmists support a fringe group when the Liberals and their allies can actually pass legislation?.Then there are the enormous internal problems. Both Harris and May placed great emphasis on running as large a slate of candidates as possible, since taxpayers subsidize party operations based on votes received rather than MPs elected. But this means the party has often been forced to accept without proper scrutiny as a candidate anyone prepared to wave the banner. This approach resulted in a slate that include radical fanatics and disillusioned socialists — as well as conspiracy followers — and other assorted misfits. A central problem is the persistence of apparently anti-Semitic candidates who consider opposition to Israeli foreign and domestic policy a core issue. Most Canadians don’t.. Green Party Leader Annamie PaulAnnamie Paul .As a challenger party, comparisons with the success of the Reform Party in maintaining a responsible internal order offers some obvious lessons. While Reform claimed a similar commitment to “grassroots democracy,” leader Preston Manning took firm steps early on to expel candidates who threatened to erode the party’s credibility or palatability. The party also had a reliable regional base..When May stepped down for the first time in 2020, the election of Annamie Paul suggested the party had got the message about fixing its problems. Paul was a moderate, a woman of colour, and Jewish. Most importantly, she planned to run the Green Party as other political parties act, with a strong central leader..But the 2021 Gaza-Israeli conflict once again exposed the tension between the pacifist and anti-Israel factions within the party. And after a poor showing in the 2021 federal election, Paul quit. In encouraging her to step down, May wrote in the Toronto Star she had no intention to returning to the leader’s post. Yet now May is back at the wheel as “co-leader” alongside Jonathan Pedneault, a gay, black, Quebec filmmaker. This intersectional dream-team is an illusion, however. May is still the face of the party; Pedneault, who has no organizational experience, is in charge of reorganizing the party’s dreadful internal affairs..Nothing has changed for the Green Party..The Green Party hasn’t failed because Canadians need more time to get to know May. After 13 years, Canadians know her very well..They just prefer to cast their votes elsewhere..Noah Jarvis is a political science student at York University and a youth leader in the Canada Strong and Free Network’s Conservative Values Tomorrow program. A longer version of this story first appeared in C2C Journal.
