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Now this might seem hard to believe, but there was a time when the Green Party of Canada was riding high. If just a few things went their way, they were on track to becoming a mean Green winning machine and supplant the NDP as the progressive party of choice.
And that moment was only six years ago in 2019.
Jagmeet Singh was fighting for his political life in a by-election and trying to get seat in Parliament. Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott had resigned from the Liberal caucus and were negotiating with the Greens to defect.
The party doubled their caucus in a by-election when Paul Manly won what had always been a safe NDP seat in Nanaimo. And then during the federal election, they elected their third MP, Jenica Atwin, this time in New Brunswick.
The Greens were the official opposition in Prince Edward Island and held the balance of power in British Columbia. Climate change was a major political issue from coast to coast to coast. It was a good time to be Green. And it seemed like a good time for Elizabeth May to finally pass the torch of the party she had led for so long.
But alas, it was not to be.
Singh won his by-election. Wilson-Raybould and Philpott passed on the Greens to sit as independents. Manly lost his seat in the 2021 election. John Horgan’s New Democrats won a resounding majority in British Columbia and in PEI, the Greens went back to being the third party.
And that leadership race resulted in a relatively unknown Toronto lawyer named Annamie Paul taking the crown. She went on to hound Jenica Atwin out of the Greens over allegations of antisemitism before self-immolating as party leader, retiring, and returning to political obscurity.
Elizabeth May came back to become party leader. And since then, the party has been a cavalcade of absurdities too long to document here. But for me, the lowest point might have come at the end of last year.
That’s when Elizabeth May, after consulting with Prime Minister Mark Carney, voted in support of his budget. And then not too long after, he went and signed an MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith committing to more pipelines for the oil sands.
For Mark Lerien-Young, none of the rolling disaster that is the Green Party of Canada has come as a surprise. After all, he was watching from the inside as much of it went down.
Mark is a longtime writer, journalist, humorist, science podcaster, environmental activist and former Green Party of Canada employee and campaign manager. And he’s just written a book about what it was like to try to navigate the egos and incompetence of the Greens. The book is called Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics, and in it, he gives and insider account of the cult of Elizabeth May.
And some of the details make working in that party sound like living in a house of mirrors. Mark says that at a certain point he came to realize that many people in the Green Party didn’t actually want to elect more MPs because that would mean more work for them.
He writes that “Many books you read come with the proviso that all persons are fictional and any resemblance anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. My disclaimer is that the Green Party of Canada is purely fictional.”
In our conversation, Mark was brutally honest about the frankly absurd way that a party that more than a million Canadians voted for in 2019 does business. And why despite their abysmal recent performances, Elizabeth May is here to stay.
