Leadership crisis is taking Greens into uncharted waters
Annamie Paul is under siege, no matter where she sits in hazy hierarchy of the party
It’s one thing to try to depose a leader — Canada’s political parties have a rich tradition in such drama.
But to oust a leader from a party altogether? The Green Party of Canada is in all-new territory here.
The assault on Annamie Paul’s leadership is now taking place on three fronts: confidence, cash and, unbelievably, membership in the party itself. The party held a meeting last week — without Paul — to review her membership status.
This comes on the heels of the news that the Greens are considering cutting $250,000 from Paul’s campaign to win a seat in Toronto Centre in the next election — and as a confidence vote on Paul’s leadership looms in less than a week.
Any one of these developments would rattle even the most stable leaderships, but all three together threaten to make the Greens the reigning champions of party dysfunction in recent Canadian history.
The federal Liberal party has a fine old tradition of trying to replace leaders through all kinds of skulduggery, but in my memory, no attempts were made to deny beleaguered leaders cash for their campaigns or actual membership in their parties. Confidence, yes — John Turner and Jean Chrétien saw their share of leadership-shaking dissent, but nothing like what is happening within the troubled Green regime.
Stockwell Day, during his stormy time as Canadian Alliance leader in the early 2000s, confronted a situation somewhat opposite to what Paul is facing today. No one tried to kick Day out of the party in 2001 — the party left him instead, with high-profile MPs splitting away to become a separate “Democratic Representative Caucus.” Day was eventually worn down by the dissent and stepped down in 2002.
The closest parallel to the current Green party dysfunction might be the 2018 ouster of Patrick Brown as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives when stories emerged of his alleged sexual misconduct. Brown resigned preemptively to clear his name and would later write a book called “Takedown: The Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown.”
Then, as now with the Greens, political observers were shocked that a party would hurl itself into leadership turmoil with an election looming. But the Progressive Conservatives had months, not weeks, to get their act together — which they did, installing Doug Ford as a quick successor to Brown and vaulting themselves into power at Queen’s Park later that year.
It doesn’t seem like any happy ending like that is looming for the Greens. How Paul turns this around and gets the party into election-fighting shape within a month or two is a feat that seems beyond even the most seasoned leaders — and she hasn’t been on the job for even a year yet.
Paul has said that she is the victim of racism and misogyny, and it is unfortunately true that Canada doesn’t have many bases of comparison to test whether a Black man or even another woman leader would be similarly undermined on so many fronts.
When federal Conservatives turned on Kim Campbell in 1993, they really turned, whispering their frustration to the media about how another leader — a male one — would have yielded them more than two seats.
The leaks from the Green party’s backrooms, however, are far more ferocious. Journalists love leaked reports of meetings, but a leaky party is a troubled party. Trust is in short supply. Imagine what’s happening around the table at those Green council meetings at the moment, with all participants eyeing each other, trying to figure out who is going to make the proceedings public when the session ends.
The Green party is unlike any other; its leaders notoriously have a looser rein over the membership than those of Canada’s more traditional parties. Former leader Elizabeth May, who has been conspicuously silent the past few weeks (recovery from surgery is the explanation) did not always get her way with the Greens’ membership.
They say that this is because they are a democratic, “grassroots” party. Maybe that’s why Paul’s position is being challenged from top to bottom — from confidence in her leadership, to her viability as a candidate, to her ordinary membership in the party. No matter where this leader sits in the hazy hierarchy of the Greens, she is under siege.
You can say this: it’s a different way of doing politics. When it comes to ousting leaders, the Greens are writing a whole new how-to manual in the annals of Canadian political history.