Template:Infobox Canada Political Party
The Green Party of British Columbia is a political party in British Columbia, Canada.
The party was formed shortly before the 1983 provincial election in which it fielded four candidates and received 0.19% of the vote in that election under the leadership of Adriane Carr who won 1.83% of the vote in Vancouver-Point Grey. A federal byelection in the riding of Mission—Port Moody in the same year saw the party's first federal candidate, Betty Nickerson, but the party's official status was not yet recognized by Elections Canada and she appears in electoral records as an "Independent".
Adriane Carr stepped back from active involvement in the party in 1985, the same year the party abolished the position of leader. Thereafter, it was represented in the media by three spokespersons. In 1986, the party won 0.23% of the vote and fielded nine candidates. In 1988, in response to a proposal to field only female candidates in the following election, Carr and her husband Paul George returned briefly to active involvement to defeat the proposal. From 1988 to 1992, the party was deeply divided between supporters of Carr and Greenpeace founder Jim Bohlen and its Ecofeminist Caucus. During this period, its internal politics were dominated by a compromise faction led by electoral reform activist Steve Kisby.
However, this period of relative stability ended with the party's failure to make a breakthrough in the 1991 provincial election, despite increasing its province-wide vote share to 0.86% and fielding a slate of 42 candidates. Individuals from all factions were implicated in the debacle which saw future leader Stuart Parker suffer a breakdown mid-campaign, George win less than 0.5% of the vote running against then-premier Rita Johnston and the party selecting a spokesperson who promoted Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thereafter, a period of extreme instability commenced for the next 18 months during which the party's membership rolls dropped to 59 members province-wide in Janury 1993 from just shy of 1000 in October 1991.
In 1993, the party elected a new leader, Stuart Parker, who managed to take the party to running close to a full slate in the 1996 election, but was only able to garner only 2% support province-wide. Parker's first term (1993-96) was characterized by near-continuous touring of rural BC which had, up to that point, negligible or highly intermittent organization outside of the Okanagan and Comox Valleys. The direction of the party under Parker was set by many disgruntled ex-NDP members, and the policies of the party under Parker were notably leftist. Parker's second term as leader, the party rose to a peak of 11% in public opinion polls between 1996 and 1999 almost exclusively at the NDP's expense. Although he was arrested in logging road blockades in 1993 and 1997, Parker's Greens actually invested more resources in opposing the BC Benefits package of welfare reforms and working on other social issues than it did on any significant environmental issue.
While remaining sharply critical of Glen Clark's NDP government, Parker spearheaded highly controversial negotiations to form municipal electoral alliances with NDP-affiliated parties in 1998 after vote-splitting all but wiped-out leftist representation at the local level in Vancouver and Victoria in 1996. These negotiations, signed-off on by Clark, yielded tripartite agreements between local labour councils, Greens and New Democrats in Vancouver and Victoria, leading to Red-Green coalitions contesting the 1999 municipal elections in both cities with the support of organized labour. Neither coalition formed government but both made substantial gains, resulting in the election in Victoria of Art Vanden Berg, the first and only person in Canadian history to run as a Green and be elected to City Council. In Vancouver, the coalition effort also elected Parks Commissioner Roslyn Cassells. (Other Green Party members elected to municipal government in Canada have run as independent or unaffiliated candidates in small jurisdictions with no party system.)
The party’s increased poll standing, new position on collaboration with its longtime rivals and impending electoral success attracted the attention of a number of prominent environmentalists, led by Adriane Carr, who began a campaign in 1999 to remove the party’s then leadership. The group conducted a bitter year-long public campaign that included an unsuccessful lawsuit against the party and later-disproven allegations against the party’s leader and board of directors including fraud, vote-rigging and even theft. Although the group was defeated at the party’s 1999 convention, it triumphed in 2000. Shortly thereafter, the party elected Carr as its new leader; since 2001, the party leader has ceased to be subject to annual review votes, the process by which Parker was removed. Following the 2000 convention, all of the party’s elected municipal representatives and some other members resigned.
With the high-profile changes at the top, the party was able to improve on its 9% poll standing at the beginning of 2000 and reached 12% of the popular vote in the May 2001 provincial election. In spite of that significant support, it won no seats in the provincial legislature - a fact which has been cited as an argument against the first-past-the-post system used in BC elections. But in the fall of 2002, in the province's municipal elections, although it was unable to recapture the municipal seats on Victoria City Council and Vancouver Parks Board that it lost to defections, it was able to win a seat on the Vancouver School Board.
The Greens maintain they receive support from all over the political spectrum. In the federal election of 2004, former Social Credit Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and media personality Rafe Mair confounded many by openly supporting the Green Party, and has actively supported the BC Green Party since. The Greens have often been labelled as openly right wing at the same time as being labelled openly left wing by opponents. Leader Adriane Carr has openly supported striking hospital employees and British Columbia Ferry workers, and has been highly critical of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The Greens' strength is concentrated on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, the West Kootenays, Sunshine Coast-Howe Sound region and in high density areas of Vancouver. In 1996, the party's strongest showing was 11% in Nelson-Creston and in 2001 and 2005, in Carr's riding of Powell River-Sunshine Coast where she received 27% and 25% respectively. Since pollsters began analyzing Green support in 1997, the Greens' support patterns have demographically clustered in the 18-34 age bracket, a group with, unfortunately for the Greens, very low voter turnout. While the party's activists tend to be overwhelmingly middle class, there is insufficient data to determine if this is the case with the party's voters on average as low-income voters appear more likely to vote for the party. Retirees and trade union members appear consistently more predisposed to vote against the Greens.
This demographic profile may help to explain the party's loss of momentum just prior to the 2005 election after Carr ran as a parachute candidate in the highly suburban, low-density, high-income Surrey-Panorama Ridge riding, where she came a distant third, with less than 9% of the vote, approximately the same vote share the party had received in the constituency in the general election.
In the general election, the GPBC's vote declined to 9% provice-wide from 12% four years previously. Despite being rated highly for her debate performance by media commentators, Carr's performance was poorly rated by the public and her own vote share declined to 25% in her home constituency of Powell River-Sunshine Coast, 17% behind the victorious NDP candidate. Only in the constituencies of Vancouver-Burrard, West Vancouver-Garibaldi and Kelowna-Mission did the party's popularity increase.
The 2005 effort can be attributed to several serious strategic mistakes. Andrew Lewis, the candidate who received the largest number of votes in 2001, was one of a number of prominent members who abandoned the party due to disagreements with Carr's highly centralized leadership style in the runup to the campaign. The party also decided to concentrate their resources in the Powell River-Sunshine Coast constituency, but at the same time, put a lot of effort into recruiting candidates for all 79 constituencies. Running a a candidate in Delta South, where the party had no organizational strength, may have caused the defeat of Vicki Huntington, a green-leaning city councillor running as an independent. And the most expensive media event of the campaign was on election night, after the ballot boxes were closed.
Another factor was the party's inability to counter the polarized environment and vote-splitting rhetoric, a staple of BC politics, that had temporarily lost credibility during the 2001 campaign but returned with new force in 2005. Carr's initial seizure of power based around opposition to Parker-era NDP coalitions left the party with little room to manoeuvre.
Another possible factor in the party’s loss of support in 2005 was its decision not to support the “yes” side in the referendum on proportional representation that ran concurrently with the election. Despite having supported the Single Transferable Vote system at the municipal level in 2004, the party’s leader and its then-only elected official, Vancouver School Trustee Andrea Reimer vehemently opposed the model provincially. Many Green candidates nevertheless supported a “yes” vote as did the the party's former leader, Mair and prominent environmentalist David Suzuki.
In the November 2005 municipal elections, the party was able to recapture a seat on Victoria City Council, after a three year absence but lost Reimer's Vancouver School Board seat.
See also
External link
- [http://www.greenparty.bc.ca/ The BC Green Party