It's Not Easy Being Green

Mmm, soggy.

Yesterday, Hamilton and much of southern Ontario was drenched by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl. Ol’Beryl there began forming back on June 25 and, by the time it really picked up speed, had become the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane ever. And it was only the second named storm this season. Fun fact: the season’s third named storm was actually Chris, and it died out as a puny little tropical depression on July 1 - my birthday. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

At this point, atmospheric scientists are predicting a wildly active and destructive storm season. The lovely nerds over at Colorado State University actually updated their predictions on Tuesday, saying we’ll now see around 43 major storms from now until November, which is higher than their estimates just a few weeks ago. Yikes.

Of course, Beryl’s intensity and the overall threat of a more active hurricane season than we’ve ever seen is directly tied to our changing climate. As a researcher from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the BBC: “Although it is uncertain to what extent climate change contributed to the early formation of Hurricane Beryl, our climate models suggest that the mean intensity of hurricanes will increase in the future due to enhanced global warming.”1 

Hurricanes need water above 27°C to form and the Caribbean waters along Beryl’s path were closer to 30°C. The water is heating up because the climate is changing because of rampant fossil fuel use.

And, let’s be clear: this isn’t a topic of debate. The research has been done. Hell, even research on that research backs up the idea that the evidence all points to human activity causing this. This isn’t some question still out for debate, no matter how many times conservatives try to gaslight us by saying “it isn’t really that hot, maybe you’re just being a sensitive little snowflake.”

So, you would assume it’s about time that people start thinking seriously about how we might address climate change through policy, right? That means that Green parties around the world should be pretty popular, right? Right!?

Globe goes Green

Well, not quite, but kinda. It has been a weird time on the Green side of the political spectrum.

There have been ups and downs for Greens around the world in the past few years. While the Portuguese Greens (LIVRE) gained three seats in that country’s March elections, the Belgian Greens (Ecolo and Groen) both shed considerable support in their June vote. Green support at a Europe-wide level has fluctuated as well; While Green parties lost support in Germany and France during the June EU Parliament elections, they gained in Italy, the Netherlands, and Croatia.

Then, on July 4, the UK Greens earned 1.8 million votes and expanded their caucus from 1 member to 4, including in rural areas where Green candidates beat Conservatives. As the UK Labour Party moderated itself into another dull centrist party, the Greens earned the votes of people who wanted a compassionate, evidence-based, progressive representative in Parliament. As Carla Denyer, one of the Green’s co-leaders and the new MP for Bristol Central told The Guardian, “Our policies and our politics offer positive solutions, offer change and offer hope. And that’s clearly gone down well with the electorate.”2 And, as of today, they’ve become one of the UK’s strongest voices in favour of real electoral reform.

The success of UK-based Greens was quickly followed by the strong showing of le Nouveau Front populaire, the French left-wing coalition which included their Green party, Les Écologistes. While they lost support in the EU elections last month, this election saw them increase their representation.

That global mixed bag applies to Canada as well. The Greens are the de facto third party in much of Atlantic Canada, supplanting the NDP in New Brunswick and on Prince Edward Island. But, in British Columbia, the once-strong party is getting left in the dust as the progressive vote rallies around the NDP due to the threat caused by the extreme right-wing British Columbia Conservatives - a party that is on the fringes of the right and that only seems to be doing well in the polls because they share a name with the popular federal party.

Here in Ontario, the provincial Greens are still riding high after their by-election win in Kitchener Centre. Next week, they’re hosting a panel discussion focused on rural issues with four municipal politicians from the Bruce and Grey regions where, with a little organizing and gumption, the party could easily pick up a seat. The fact they’re working with municipal councillors on rural issues well before an election shows they’re taking this very seriously.

And then, there’s the Green Party of Canada.

Eco-drama

This week, the Deputy Leader of the federal Greens, Jonathan Pedneault, stepped down rather dramatically, refusing to elaborate on his reasoning. Pedneault, a Montreal-based filmmaker, ran on a “joint ticket” with the party’s former leader, Elizabeth May in 2022. The pair’s platform called for the federal Greens to move to a co-leader model like the UK Greens or Québec solidaire has, meaning two people (usually one male-identified and one female-identified) share the leadership of a party.

The party’s 2022 leadership race came after the complicated 407-day-long leadership of Annamie Paul. Paul’s time at the helm of the federal Greens began with accusations that she would do little to change the party’s centrist direction, and only got worse from there. Paul was unable to win the Toronto Centre by-election in October of 2020, falling well behind Liberal Marci Ien. Shortly after, her senior advisor, Noah Zatzman, openly called then-Green MP Jenica Atwin anti-Semitic and called for her to be defeated due to the latter’s comments about heightened tensions between Israel and Palestine. When Paul refused to condemn Zatzman’s statement, Atwin crossed the floor to the Liberals. Angry party members then tried to launch a review of Paul’s leadership, which she dismissed as “so racist, [and] so sexist”. That September’s federal election was a disaster for the party, which was only able to field 252 candidates across Canada’s 338 ridings and lost nearly twice as many votes as they earned. Paul, who lost Toronto Centre for the third time, dragged out her resignation, further damaging the party. An internal report on the state of the federal Greens that came out a few months later revealed it lost nearly 20% of its membership, over 1,700 monthly donors, and came close to selling their offices to raise the money needed to stay afloat.

The party’s 2022 leadership election was supposed to be a re-set. But problems continued when the party’s president, Lorraine Rekmans, resigned mid-leadership race. The story is complicated, but it boils down to this: one of the leadership candidates, Sarah Gabrielle Baron, accused Rekmans of being “uninformed” after an incident during which the party’s interim leader, Amita Kuttner, was mis-gendered on a Zoom call. Rekmans, the party’s first Indigenous leader, apologized, but was not responsible (which Kuttner, May, and Pedneault acknowledged). Despite this, allegations of discrimination and workplace harm went flying. The whole incident made the party look even worse, and Rekmans resigned to focus her energy elsewhere, dramatically telling members “for me, the dream is dead….I am exhausted and my optimism has died…To me, this signals an end to the (Green Party of Canada).”3

Pedneault’s candidacy was supposed to signal a change in the party. His personal story is beyond impressive: born to a mixed-race, devout Catholic Francophone family on the south shore of Montreal, he quickly realized that his identity and his sexuality (Pedneault is openly gay) could impact how he saw the world and how, in turn, he could present the world to others. At just 17 years old, he went to Sudan’s Darfur region with Alexandre Trudeau, the brother of the current PM, to shoot a documentary. After work with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and time spent in Ukraine at the beginning of the Russian invasion, he realized it was time to transfer his skills to politics. To him, the Greens seemed like the natural choice.4

He originally planned to run solo, but eventually came to be May’s “running mate”, even though the party had no official mechanisms in place to create a co-leader position.

May’s candidacy itself was pretty controversial. May had given up the leadership of the party in 2019 after leading the party since 2006 and overseeing some incredible success for the movement. But May’s leadership was always punctuated by less-than ideal events. She compared Stephen Harper’s climate policy to “Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis.” She introduced 9/11 conspiracy theory petitions to Parliament, spread her own conspiracies about WiFi being a carcinogen, defended Jian Ghomeshi, and said she’d allow anti-choice Green MPs to introduce bills that attempt to reopen the abortion debate. And, of course, there’s the 2015 Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner…

May’s comeback attempt was greeted with a mix of skepticism and frustration. Why come back when the party was in the process of redefining itself (no matter how bad that redefinition was)? Even David Suzuki told The Tyee that May’s return “would be a mistake from the standpoint of the future of the Greens.”5

Despite all this, May returned and won 58% of the vote in the 2022 leadership race, all with the promise that the Greens would soon move to a co-leader model. But, after the pair won, even Pedneault acknowledged the difficulty in changing the way the party was structured, admitting “The odds do appear to be against us.”6

The party moved slowly to adopt the co-leadership model, leaving Pedneault as the “Deputy Leader” and putting him in the backseat as May re-established control over the party. But Pedneault was not going to sit still. He contested the by-election in the riding of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount when Marc Garneau resigned, and placed a respectable fourth. The second, third, and fourth place candidates were all clumped together meaning that, despite coming in fourth, he was just 79 votes behind the second place candidate from the NDP. It was a good showing for a Green candidate in Quebec and could have easily been built upon, especially with the flagging fortunes of the Liberals.

As time dragged on, the co-leadership issue was not being addressed with any speed. But the need for clarity became more pressing when, last summer, May was hospitalized for what was initially called “overwork, fatigue, and stress”.7 Shortly after, it was revealed that May had actually suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. Making matters worse, May, like all too many Canadians, does not have a family doctor, meaning it took her a few visits to an emergency room to figure this out.

Yet, the party kept putting off the decision about co-leadership. An attempt to have the matter settled at the party’s February Annual General Meeting was pushed to June 23. This delay frustrated Pedneault, who told the party’s membership that a failure to discuss the co-leadership model at the AGM was “a confidence vote on my involvement.”8

Citing the Toronto—St. Paul's by-election (where the party shed over half its support and earned just over 1,000 votes), the party decided to postpone the June 23 vote (which would have been a day before the by-election) on a co-leader model for another 60 days. A few days later, Pedneault resigned.9

May gave a long interview to the Toronto Star following the announcement. Speaking with Althia Raj, May said that, if a vote on co-leadership is held (she said it would not occur until at least after the October 28 Saskatchewan election) and the members do indeed vote to move to a co-leadership model, she will pick her own co-leader and “possibly have the membership approve her choice.”10

She followed this interview with a press conference. When pressed on whether she would resign, she rejected the notion, saying she needed to plow forward and lead the party into the next election. May, who turned 70 a month ago, told the assembled journalists: “Baby boomers have f—ked this planet and we can’t walk away and leave it for our kids to fix it.”11

A reason to be green

This will certainly make some of my more dedicated leftist friends cringe, but I actually like the Green Party. I think there is absolutely space in a modern, functioning democracy for a party that maintains a strong focus on the climate crisis and that can offer any progressive government policies or healthy critiques regarding sustainability and a path forward when it comes to the environment. I would always prefer that party unequivocally situate itself on the left of the political spectrum, as almost every European Green party does, and not try to do the “post-partisan” thing the Canadian Greens do, but whatever. Regardless, in a fair system, we would have proportional representation and a chance for a Green movement to participate actively in a real, progressive government.

But Canada’s Greens are stuck at the moment. There isn’t any room to discuss policy because the drama surrounding the party’s leadership has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Sure, you need an effective leader to rally people around the party so they can help craft policy and support candidates who have a chance of being elected and putting that policy into action. But when the focus is only on the leader, their health, their comments, and their inability to pass the baton (oh no, Joe) then it is clear there needs to be a change. A leader can sometimes hold a party back more than they can advance it.

When May announced her political comeback, Aaron Wherry wrote on the CBC that any second May leadership should be “used to better prepare the party for a post-May future.”12

With Pedneault’s departure and May’s speculation that a possible future co-leader will be hand-picked by her, it is clear that is still a ways off. Talent needs to be chosen in a way that respects the membership, reflects the changing dynamics of politics on the ground, and come from the grassroots. While a leader can foster new talent, they can’t hand pick it.

The UK Greens realized that in the lead-up to their most recent election. The party’s two co-leaders stepped down in 2021 to make way for two new faces - both successful local councillors - who were elected by the party’s membership.

The Green Party of Canada is an important institution. As the climate changes and people grow increasingly disaffected by convention politics, they could play an important role in shifting the conversation and providing a real alternative. But, if this past week is any indication, they have some work to do before becoming that alternative.

The opposition caucus

Earlier this week, Hamilton city council voted on a compromise motion from Ward 3 councillor Nrinder Nann which tasks staff with reporting back sometime next month on how to deal with encampments in parks that are undergoing construction.

Last month, the ever-controversial strip of land once slated to be an expressway - the unnamed Strachan Street green space - was exempted from the city’s encampment protocol because of pending redevelopment. This very specific instance was because Strachan was originally in limbo because it was supposed to be the site for HATS until tensions around that project got so hot that everyone backed off for the safety of those who might be involved with the project.

That subtlety wasn’t something council’s right-wing considered, opting to view the exemption as a greenlight for them to begin a park-by-park encampment ban in their own wards. Tom Jackson, John-Paul Danko, and Matt Francis all quickly brought forward motions (Esther Pauls threatened to do so as well) to exempt a handful of parks from the encampment protocol under the auspices that they might have some redevelopment coming at some point.

Nann’s motion “defuses” some of the tension at city hall by punting the decision down the road. This is useful for two reasons. One, it gives staff time to put together a plan that brings some coherence and stability to the construction/encampment debate. Two, it creates a buffer during which council’s conservative caucus might sit down, cool off, and think about how awful they’re being.

One of the parks that would have come up in Jackson’s motion was Mountain Drive Park at the end of Upper Gage. The Spec recently spoke with a person who has been living in the park since April. The person had been renovicted from one apartment and lived in fear in another, enduring a combination of bedbugs and a threatening landlord. Through the interview, she stressed that she was living in fear, unhappy that she was forced to live in a tent and unable to find affordable accommodation anywhere in Hamilton.

Jackson and Danko are both quoted in the same article, with the former saying he’d like to ban encampments across Ward 6 and the latter choosing to focus on horror stories of drugs, violence, and poop, saying: “Everyday taxpayers, residents, they’re at the end of their rope. They’ve had it.”13

It was the person living in Mountain Drive Park who asked the real question: “where I am supposed to go?”

And there’s the heart of it.

There is so much energy being spent on keeping people out. On excluding members of the community. On demonizing and othering and marginalizing people because of their circumstances. Because they don’t have enough for rent or because they do drugs or because they have mental illnesses.

And our system is structured in such a way to incentivize that open hostility. In the name of respecting “everyday taxpayers”, Danko is enthusiastically saying he refuses to represent a segment of the population in need and, in fact, would prefer they not be in his community.

In trying to ban all encampments from Ward 6, Jackson is saying he doesn’t want his constituents to see the cracks in the system. Doesn’t want them to have to look at the very real outcome of a cascade of policy failures - many of which are the direct responsibility of the man who has represented them for 36 years and has been given opportunity after opportunity to do something meaningful with his office.

In saying he can find come up with justifications to not “allow encampments in ‘every single one of my parks’,” Francis is saying he will do his homework and find any possible way to keep people away from his parks but wouldn’t dream of doing the same work to actually find housing for those in need. My fiefdom shall be free from those we do not like! So it is spoken, so shall it be done!

What a catastrophic misuse of human talent and energy this whole shameful exercise has been. What an absolute travesty of the democratic process. What a colossal waste of the power of the state, employing it for nothing more ambitious than to keep people away and divide us further and further and further.

If even a fraction of the energy put into weaponizing this crisis and using people experiencing homelessness - people with illnesses, people in need of help, people who are suffering as a result of state failures - was put into finding a real solution, we would have addressed this problem by now.

But we don’t have a council united in an effort to fix this problem. We have a council of entrenched factions, battling it out toward different aims.

Council’s progressives do the hard work of trying to govern. Love them or hate them, you cannot deny that they’ve been putting the effort in to address the issues we face. Motions keep hitting the floor of council from the identifiable few who realize that there is power in government and that power should be used to help as many people as possible.

On the other side, we have the opposition caucus. This is the chorus of conservative cynics who are content to sit back and chirp while progressives stick their necks out and try, try, try to make some minor progress. This opposition caucus has failed to present one single, coherent, actionable, worthwhile, meaningful solution to this crisis. The closest they came was with Francis’s spiteful Facebook-comment-turned-policy idea to create some Bleeding Hearts List of people willing to house those experiencing homelessness in their yards. But, for the most part, they’ve figured out that you can ride a wave of directionless anger into power and sit pretty for a couple of years while you wait for the time to be right to throw your hat in the next federal Liberal or provincial Progressive Conservative nomination race.

Hamiltonians - housed and unhoused - deserve better than this. We need real, tangible, lasting solutions. We don’t need a caucus of ward-heeling little princes telling people they don’t belong in their communities. We need a Hamilton for everybody.

Cool facts for cool people

• Council’s General Issues Committee voted down Cameron Kroestch’s motion to ask staff about the possibility of adding an Indigenous seat on council. Much of the opposition stemmed from the notion that the seat might have been appointed, rather than elected. Councillor Tom Jackson told the GIC meeting that it would be “the supreme, ultimate honour” for an Indigenous person to run and win in an existing council seat, completely ignoring how challenging it is for people from diverse backgrounds to run for office. But, then again, maybe that’s a challenge? Maybe a talented Indigenous community member could be convinced to run in Ward 6?

• Brantford’s mayor, Kevin Davis, is resigning at the end of this month to join the Ontario Licence Appeal Tribunal. But this new career opportunity isn’t the only reason. He told the Brantford Expositor that the decline in political civility has also impacted his decision, noting that “as an elected official, you become the target of a lot of harassment and abuse and I really worry about the future.” Not great that so many politicians are being pushed out by harassment. Critique is one thing, but harassing politicians is just…so gross. It is hard to tell what will happen, but a by-election is a distinct possibility. That would be the third major mayoral by-election in Ontario since 2022. That has to be some kind of record…