On February 18, the Green Party of Canada unveiled its first new logo in twenty-five years: a solid green circle. It symbolized both a healthy planet and the call to action of a traffic light. As the party’s website says, “Go Green.”
Don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice. Neither did anyone else.
That’s not because of the logo, or the fact that the party dropped its new look the day after a plane flipped upside down at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. There’s a more fundamental problem, which the rebrand tried to remedy but wound up reinforcing instead: the Green Party of Canada has become invisible.
They’ve all but vanished from the news. We rarely hear where the party stands on any given issue, or even how they’re polling. In the past few months of incessant horse-race updates, the Greens have barely been mentioned, their prospects apparently too miserable to note. They’re languishing between 2 and 4 percent of popular voting intentions—lower than the first time they ran a national slate, in 2004.
How can a party devoted to ecological protection fade to obscurity now,at the height of the ecological crisis? Climate disasters are hammering Canada from coast to coast to coast; our forests and fresh water are grimly depleted; biodiversity is plummeting. Meanwhile, the Greens are withering.
It’s possible the party never outgrew its greatest strength: Elizabeth May, whose name has become synonymous with the party she’s led for two decades.
May, the founding director of environmental group Sierra Club Canada, was already a national figure when she became leader of the federal Greens in 2006. The party’s membership doubled within a year, according to Maclean’s. In the 2008 election, the Greens won almost a million votes, nearly 300,000 more than in 2006. They still didn’t get a seat in Parliament, but May fixed that in 2011, when she won the riding of Saanich–Gulf Islands in British Columbia (the seat she still holds today) to become the first Canadian Green MP ever.
The 2010s were the Greens’ best decade—a period of rising momentum when it seemed they might become more than a single-issue fringe party. All across the country, provincial Greens caught the same wave: the BC Greens picked up their first legislative seat in 2013, and two more in 2017, enough to give them the balance of power; the Green Party of Ontario won their first provincial seat in 2018; the next year, in Prince Edward Island, Greens won eight seats and formed PEI’s opposition. Later that year, May gained two more Green MPs to sit with in the House of Commons. As she frequently argues, they’d likely have more if it weren’t for strategic voting (thanks to our first-past-the-post electoral system, many environmentally concerned Canadians vote Liberal just to keep Conservatives at bay).
May’s tireless leadership played an outsized, if unquantifiable, role in all this. Named “Parliamentarian of the Year” by her fellow MPs in 2012, “Hardest Working MP” in 2013, and “Best Orator” in 2014, she became a fixture on news shows and cultural events throughout the country. She spoke with affable authority on matters well beyond the environment, combining sharp critiques of foreign and domestic policies with an unfailing respect (at least in public) for her political opponents. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the 2010s were also marked by devastating wildfires and floods, along with high-profile climate negotiations, like the Paris Agreement. What was bad for the environment was good for the Greens.
That was true until it wasn’t. When May stepped down as party leader at the end of 2019, the Greens imploded. Her successor, Annamie Paul, a lawyer with a history of human rights advocacy, was kneecapped by vicious, highly publicized party infighting. “What I didn’t realize at the time,” Paul, who is Black, later said, “is that I was breaking a glass ceiling that was going to fall on my head.”
The next federal election, in 2021, was a disaster: the Greens won just 2.3 percent of the vote and lost a seat in Parliament. Paul resigned, but the bickering continued. In 2022, the Greens’ first Indigenous party president, Lorraine Rekmans, quit in frustration, blaming a familiar pattern of back stabbing by other leadership candidates. “It seems to me there is no vision for a better future,” Rekmans wrote in a public resignation letter, “but only an effort to look back and settle old scores, while the planet burns.”
These are tough calamities to overcome. But greater forces are in play than the Greens’ own goals. Crises like the pandemic, Russian aggression, inflation, and now a second Donald Trump administration in the United States have pushed environmental concerns to the political background. Green parties are in retreat all over the world as a result. The US’s Green Party has become a joke under Jill Stein’s erratic leadership and was polling around 1 percent last year. In Europe, their greatest stronghold, Greens just lost a quarter of their seats in the European Union’s 2024 parliamentary election.
There are over a hundred Green parties around the world, but the only country in which they’ve ever held actual power is Germany. The West German Greens were the first to enter a national parliament in 1983, and after the country’s unification, they’ve formed coalition governments since 1998. Germany’s Greens had their second-best performance in this year’s election, and despite falling out of the governing coalition, they remain a political force in opposition. But Germany’s Green party has always been a global exception. Greens rose to prominence there off the back of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Once in office, the party was seen as serious: it attracted talented, ambitious candidates, who knew it could be a vehicle to the country’s highest offices.
Compare that to Canada. Let’s say you’re a climate activist, with people skills and a knack for organizing, who wants to shape environmental policy from the inside. Which party do you join? That isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s the one Steven Guilbeault asked himself when he entered politics in 2019. Guilbeault, who was arrested in 2001 for scaling the CN Tower to hang a banner that read “Canada and Bush Climate Killers,” seemed like the ultimate Green candidate. But he went with the Liberals instead and, in 2022, became minister of environment and climate change.
In a way, that’s a more devastating blow to the Green dream than any leadership review. It tells the next generation of politically minded environmentalists where to place their chips.
But Guilbeault’s success can also be read as a bittersweet victory for Greens, one that transcends their partisan demise. It shows that Green values have been absorbed by mainstream politics. Many of former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s pronouncements over his decade in power (if not his policies) have sounded like the statements of a Green Party leader. The EU adopted a Green Deal without the Greens ever winning an election there. The Joe Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was the world’s single-most comprehensive climate policy. And in Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, the Liberal Party now has a leader whose signature career move has been to make the world’s bankers take climate change seriously.
Even the most aggressive environmental policies of the Liberals and Democrats fall painfully short of Green demands like ending bitumen production by 2030 or implementing a Charter of Rights for Nature. But like it or not, after fourteen years in Parliament, the Greens are no longer fighting for nature so much as their own survival.
The danger extends to May herself, who returned to co-lead the party in 2022. Today, with both Liberals and Conservatives surging in her riding, recent projections show the “Queen of Green” tied in a three-way dead heat and facing a real prospect of defeat.
To describe the party’s task as monumental feels like an understatement. Still, it’s never wise to write the Greens off entirely. We’re living in a time when vast political fortunes can turn on a dime, and this party has a long history of premature death certificates. In a 2007 profile of May for Maclean’s, a former organizer observed that the Greens were at a “make-or-break juncture.” Soon after, in the 2008 election, the party had their best performance ever and still failed to win a single seat. The best was yet to come.
