Green Party of Canada facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Green Party of Canada Parti vert du Canada
Leader	Elizabeth May
Deputy Leader	Jonathan Pedneault
President	Ian Soutar
Founded	1983; 42 years ago (1983)
Headquarters	116 Albert Street Suite 812 Ottawa, Ontario
Youth wing	Young Greens of Canada
Membership (2022)	22,000
Ideology	Green politics
Continental affiliation	Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas
International affiliation	Global Greens
Colours	Green
Senate	0 / 105
House of Commons	2 / 338
Political parties

The Green Party of Canada (French: Parti vert du Canada) is a federal political party in Canada, founded in 1983 with a focus on green politics.

The Green Party is currently the fifth largest party in the House of Commons by seat count. It elected its first member of Parliament (MP), leader Elizabeth May, in the 2011 election, winning in the Saanich—Gulf Islands. In the 2019 election, the party expanded its caucus to three. In the 2021 election, the party fell to two seats.

Elizabeth May has served as the party leader since 19 November 2022. She previously served as party leader from 2006 to 2019. The deputy leader is Jonathan Pedneault.

The Green Party is founded on six principles, including ecological wisdom, non-violence, social justice, sustainability, participatory democracy, and respect for diversity.

History

About two months before the 1980 federal election, eleven candidates, mostly from ridings in the Atlantic provinces, issued a joint press release declaring that they were running on a common platform. It called for a transition to a non-nuclear, conserver society. Although they ran as independents, they unofficially used the name "Small Party" as part of their declaration of unity, a reference to the "small is beautiful" philosophy of E. F. Schumacher. This was the most substantial early attempt to answer the call for an ecologically oriented Canadian political party. A key organizer (and one of the candidates) was Elizabeth May, who later became leader of the Greens in 2006.

The Green Party of Canada was founded at a conference held at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1983. Under its first leader, Trevor Hancock, the party ran 60 candidates in the 1984 Canadian federal election.

The Quebec wing hosted the 1990 Canadian Greens conference in Montreal. Soon after, Canada's constitutional problems interfered; as a result, many Quebec candidates abandoned the Greens in favour of a Quebec sovereigntist party, the Bloc Québécois. There were only six Green candidates from Quebec in the 1993 election. In the spring of 1996, although the hopes of electing a representative to the BC legislature proved premature, Andy Shadrack in the interior of the province received over 11% of the vote. Overall, the party's proportion of the popular vote surged to a new high. Shadrack was also the most popular Green candidate in the 1997 federal election, scoring over 6% of the popular vote in West Kootenay—Okanagan.

On November 19, 2022, Elizabeth May was elected leader of the party. May ran with Pedneault in the leadership race, and Pedneault currently serves as the deputy leader of the party.

Political position

The Green Party officially rejects the traditional left–right political spectrum, describing it as "something of an anachronism". Instead, the Green Party believes that "voters in modern democracies [are] divided on lines … more to do with 'insiders' and 'outsiders.'" According to co-founder and former leader Trevor Hancock, "the perennial left vs. right squabbling about who gets to control and benefit from the ever-expanding pie is to completely miss the point; the pie cannot continue to expand, indeed it must contract … the struggle for social justice is deeply rooted in the fact that the limits to growth requires a radical global and societal redistribution of the Earth’s limited resources." In 2019, the Green Party under Elizabeth May ran on a campaign slogan of "Not Left. Not Right. Forward Together."

The party is noted as having a wide range of internal factions; the 2020 leadership election saw both self-described moderate and eco-socialist candidates. Writing in Maclean's, Anne Kingston described the party as an "ideological hybrid", combining left-leaning views on social issues and welfare with a right-leaning embrace of market solutions and tax shifting; in another article, Matt Gurney concurred with that description, but also said that "in practice" the Greens are "simply another centre-left party". Other political commentators, such as Andrew Coyne, Chantal Hébert and Heather Mallick, identify the party as being on the left.

Principles

The Green Party of Canada is founded on six key principles that were adopted at the 2002 convention of the Global Greens. These principles are:

• Ecological wisdom
• Non-violence
• Social justice
• Sustainability
• Participatory democracy
• Respect for diversity

Leadership

Party leaders

Party parliamentary leaders

The position of parliamentary leader was created on 4 November 2019, when then-leader Elizabeth May announced that she was resigning as leader of the party, but would remain leader of the parliamentary caucus. The position ceased to exist after May re-assumed the party leadership in 2022.

• Elizabeth May (2019–2022)

Images for kids

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  Jim Harris, leader of the party from 2003 to 2006

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  Elizabeth May, July 2014

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  Party Leader Annamie Paul (2020–2021)

See also

In Spanish: Partido Verde de Canadá para niños