politics/op-ed by Dan Donovan
Op-ed
The Green Party of Canada
slides into irrelevance with antisemitic and racist behaviour
I
have always been fascinated by the amount of coverage the Green Party receives in the national media given that they have never lived up to their billing in terms of electoral votes or seats for more than three decades.
The Green Party has failed to take hold with mainstream voters in Canada because they have never matured politically. This is mainly because they have some nutbars in the party whose positions and antics deter many mainstream voters from supporting them.
Former Green Party leader Elizabeth May failed to bring the party success Having principles and coming from with seats in the House of Commons a place of doing the right thing is despite trying for over 13 years and five an admirable quality in any political separate election cycles. In the 2019 election, the Greens garnered only 6.4 per cent of the popular vote nationally. Annamie Paul by any standard Not quite fringe numbers but certainly not respectable in terms of being a real is a serious and very credible person player. Despite the unearned media and her treatment by many of hype, they ended the campaign with a grand total of three seats. Yes, that is the party members is embarrassing three seats in the House of Commons and shameful. including May’s in British Columbia. In 2020, May stepped down as leader and was replaced by Annamie Paul. She is the first Black Canadian and first Jewish woman to become the leader of a major political party in Canada. Paul had electoral experience having run for the Green Party in Toronto Centre against former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, in 2019. She lost but had the second-best Green result in the Greater Toronto Area, nearly tripling their vote in the riding. 30 OTTAWALIFE SUMMER 2021
party, but there is a fine line between being principled and being strident and stubborn, or worse, stupid. Sadly, the current prickly people from the Birkenstock sector who run the Green party are now in full meltdown mode and are trying to oust their new leader, Annamie Paul, with a breathtakingly ignorant, antisemitic, and racist narrative that is quickly suffocating any remaining credibility the Greens have with voters.
To be clear, Annamie Paul by any standard is a serious and very credible person and her treatment by many of the party members is embarrassing and shameful. It proves the point that ‘the left’ in Canada have elements in it that are as racist and ignorant as the people on the right of the spectrum who they are often quick to accuse of being prejudiced and who they smugly attack when their views do not align with Green ideological positions. As party leader, Annamie Paul represented the first real chance to bring the Greens into the mainstream of Canada’s politics. She is a first generation Canadian—the daughter of immigrants who moved to Canada from the Caribbean in the 1960s. Her mother took a job as a live-in domestic before regaining her profession as an elementary teacher where she would teach for more than 30 years in Toronto schools. Annamie’s was enrolled in a French immersion program in Toronto and was among the first group of students to graduate from the program in the late 1980s. She had an interest in politics at a young age and became a Page in the Ontario Legislature when she was only 12. She would go on to earn a Master of Public Affairs at Princeton University,
