Green Party of British Columbia - The Carr Years

The Carr Years

The party’s increased poll standing, new position on collaboration with its longtime rivals and impending electoral success attracted the attention of a number of prominent environmentalists, led by Adriane Carr, who began a campaign in 1999 to remove the party’s then leadership. The group conducted a bitter year-long public campaign that included an unsuccessful lawsuit against the party and later-disproven allegations against the party’s leader and board of directors including fraud, vote-rigging and even theft. Although the group was defeated at the party’s 1999 convention, it triumphed in 2000. Shortly thereafter, the party elected Carr as its new leader; since 2001, the party leader has ceased to be subject to annual review votes, the process by which Parker was removed. Following the 2000 convention, all of the party’s elected municipal representatives and some other members resigned.

With the high-profile changes at the top, the party was able to improve on its 9% poll standing at the beginning of 2000 and reached 12% of the popular vote in the May 2001 provincial election. In spite of that significant support, it won no seats in the provincial legislature - a fact which has been cited as an argument against the first-past-the-post system used in BC elections.

Although she had sponsored a series of resolutions at the party's 2000 convention condemning what many saw as the party's distraction with social and governance policy at the expense of work on environmental issues, electoral reform moved to the top of Carr's agenda as leader. Disagreeing with Fair Voting BC's decision to devote the movement's energies to backing the new BC Liberal government's plan to move forward with the Citizens' Assembly process it had developed in 1997, Carr founded a rival electoral reform organization called Free Your Vote to utilize the province's citizen initiative legislation (which technically allows citizens to force referendums on legislation if they gather a sufficient number of signatures).

Despite facing public condemnation from FVBC's Loenen, Free Your Vote recruited hundreds of volunteers for the province-wide effort, building a far larger citizen organization than either ECCO or FVBC. It also gained the support of many leftists, including the official endorsement of the BC Nurses' and other unions. The campaign also faced its share of difficulties, such as leaked internal memos from the party's organizing chair explaining that organizers knew the petition drive would fail, but were simply using it to build the party's organizational base. Although the campaign only submitted enough signatures in four of the province's 79 ridings, Free Your Vote was successful in mobilizing new support for reform. But it also appears to have hardened the party's support for a single model of proportional representation (mixed-member, closed-list) and public condemnation of others.

When the Citizen's Assembly process produced its recommendation that a referendum be held on the Single Transferable Vote system Carr condemned it. She put out a press release saying she was going to ask the upcoming Green Party AGM to endorse an "emergency" call to the voters of BC to reject BC-STV. Support for STV and recognition that it was a proportional voting system was substantial enough among BC Greens that Carr was forced to change her position to one that had her declare that although she opposed STV personally, Greens would be free to vote however they chose. (Odd, this in a party supposedly not "top-down" like the other parties). An example of how adamantly opposed Carr was to any proportional voting system other than the one she had been promoting was shown when a former Speaker of the BC Greens from 1990, David Lewis, arrived at the AGM only to find his name had been removed from the membership list. He had written Carr saying he thought she was going to destroy Green electoral chances for a generation informing her he was going to become active in the party again to try to stop her. Carr's Provincial Council met and rescinded his party membership. "I am the party...." said Carr on Global TV, which illustrated to some analysts how she viewed internal party debates such as the one over BC-STV.

The BC-STV referendum failed. Had 1.2% of the votes been different, the electoral system in British Columbia would now be BC-STV. Many Greens see Carr as responsible for its defeat.

Carr often claimed that BC-STV was a system that would create difficulties for women seeking to be elected. Canadian feminists, to the extent they participated in debate on BC-STV, were split. Dr. Lisa Young, who had appeared before the Citizen's Assembly to discuss the barriers to women in various electoral systems, did not support Carr's analysis: "She presented evidence that there was no clear solution in the electoral system for increasing women's representation. Her evidence suggested that the problem lay in the nomination processes and cultures of political parties.". The idea that BC-STV would not have allowed the Greens to elect MLAs for the first time is unsupportable. Turning a chance to get a system like this down, because BC-STV was perceived by some feminists to be not as good as some other proportional electoral system led some to believe Carr's perception of how to advance the feminist cause had caused her to lose sight of what the Green Party exists to do.

Four years later, as Greens came to understand what STV was, they were far more unified in supporting the second referendum held for it. But by then it had become clear to many in other parties that given historical voting patterns in the province, BC-STV would tend to produce perpetual coalition government with Greens holding the balance of power. Liberal and NDP memories of unfair voting results for their respective parties in previous elections, fresh during the first BC-STV campaign, had faded. The second referendum on BC-STV was soundly defeated.

Following the failure of her preferred Free Your Vote, and her "success" in defeating BC STV, Carr focused her energy on a lively province-wide campaign opposing the 2010 Winter Olympic Games bid. But once the games were awarded to BC, the party was unable to find province-wide issues that resonated strongly with voters. Between 2003 and 2005, the party's presence was notably low key as Carr returned to the constant touring mode that had characterized Parker's first term.

In the 2005 provincial election, the GPBC's vote declined to 9% province-wide from 12% four years previously. Despite being rated highly for her debate performance by media commentators, Carr's performance was poorly rated by the public and her own vote share declined to 25% in her home constituency of Powell River-Sunshine Coast, 17% behind the victorious NDP candidate. Only in the constituencies of Vancouver-Burrard, West Vancouver-Garibaldi and Kelowna-Mission did the party's popularity increase.

These measures, it seems, were insufficient to quiet increasing internal dissatisfaction with her leadership. Prior to the first annual convention following the reinstitution of the practice requiring that leaders step down and run to succeed themselves each electoral cycle (this, along with annual confidence votes had been repealed in 2001), Carr announced her resignation on September 24, 2006. As predicted by those familiar with Carr's long-standing relationship with the newly-elected Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May, Carr accepted the paid position of Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Canada and is a federal candidate in the riding of Vancouver Centre.