Today is the final day to vote in the Green Party of Canada leadership contest. For your vote to count, you must vote by 3:30 pm Pacific / 6:30 pm Eastern.  If you haven’t already, please vote and rank me as number one on your ballot. If you have already voted, thank you. It’s been a long campaign, with our great candidates’ teams making thousands of phone calls, sending thousands of texts, and all of us doing our best to reach out to 35,000 Greens. Tonight, when we find out the results of the election, let’s call on all Greens...

As I’ve been campaigning across BC in the past ten days, in public parks and on Zoom calls, I am hearing from Greens that our party needs a unique kind of leadership.  1. Unity: We need a leader who can pull together the other leadership candidates, build a team of rivals, and generate a positive, winning culture inside our party. I understand the sources of Green Party disunity, the internal obstacles to success, and the opportunities for our party to improve our performance in the next federal election, thanks to my experience as the only candidate to campaign who has worked...

Guest blog by Eric Sizer, Campaign Manager Hi, I’m Eric Sizer, David Merner’s campaign manager. The Green Party leadership contest has been a tremendous experience so far for everyone on David’s campaign team. Greens from all across the country and from all walks of life are joining David’s campaign because they can see he has what it takes to bring our party together and put our best foot forward at election time.  One of the important things we agreed on from the start was that we wanted to run a very Green leadership campaign. For example, to offset David’s travel...

This past weekend, I met with  Chief George Quocksister Jr., a hereditary chief of the Laichkwiltach Nation . We were masked, because of the pandemic, when we spoke on the steps of the BC legislature about the urgent need to protect BC salmon stocks, take industrial fish farms out of the water, and save our southern resident killer whales. As Greens build relationships with Indigenous communities, we need to take three steps:  We listen;  We work together on common causes, like protecting our wild salmon and decolonization; We take practical action together to protect the next seven generations.  To ensure that Indigenous...

I joined the Green Party because of its commitment to transparency, accountability, and ethics. Our commitment to evidence-based decision-making, participatory democracy, cooperation, and positive politics are hugely important. These values bind Greens together, in our leadership race, across Canada, and around the world. These values are especially important as the Ethics Commissioner launches another conflict of interest investigation in Ottawa. We will learn later this year whether the Prime Minister has broken the law by participating in a decision that essentially awarded a sole source $43.53 million contract to the We charity. Both the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister...

Thank you for volunteering!   Many of you have volunteered for years for the Green Party and other great causes. Thank you for your service to our communities, our country, and our planet!    I’ve been fortunate enough to volunteer on many federal, provincial, and municipal campaigns, for environmental organizations like The Land Conservancy of BC and Habitat Acquisition Trust, for community associations in Ontario and BC, as well as for a variety of justice system organizations. From personal experience, I can say that it’s good for the soul to help others and work on a common cause.  And with the Green Party,...

Human rights and Indigenous rights have been a big part of my professional career. For four years I led the development of human rights policy and operations at the BC Ministry of Attorney General.  There, my team transformed the delivery of human rights services in British Columbia and launched a new BC Human Rights Commission. We worked hard to end systemic racism in BC’s child apprehension system, which takes more indigenous children away from their parents now than during the residential school years.  We also enabled our government to protect transgender persons in British Columbia through the BC Human Rights...

During the listening part of my leadership campaign, I have heard a number of great ideas and interesting stories from Green Party members all across the country. One of those stories comes from the 2007 Ontario provincial election. I’ll let James O’Grady, the Director of Campaign Communications for the Green Party of Ontario in 2007, explain how their campaign team used Green Party values to guide their actions. I will be committed to ethical and just leadership when elected leader of the Green Party of Canada.   Guest blog by James O’Grady In our 2007 provincial campaign, the Green Party of...

Happy Canada Day! In Saanich BC, we will be spending Canada Day in quarantine.  My youngest daughter returned from a Rotary exchange in Finland last week, so we are all self-isolating at home. Many of us are facing the most unusual Canada Day in our life times, complete with self-isolating, social distancing, mask-wearing, and uncertainties about our future.  This is not the Canada Day we expected, but perhaps it’s the Canada Day we need. This is a time for reflection that goes beyond the celebrations, the flags, and the fireworks.   World events have called on us all to reconsider how we...