History of The Green Party of Canada - 1980s

1980s

The Green Party of Canada contested its first federal election in September 1984. Approximately 27,000 Canadians voted Green (0.2% of the votes cast). But ongoing discussions about the party's modus operandi became so exhausting that, at one point in the mid-1980s, there was a near collapse of the party. It survived — though not particularly active — for almost a decade under the stewardship of the BC Greens.

In the 1988 federal election, Greens concentrated on Quebec, where le Parti Vert (not the same as the current Parti Vert du Québec) ran 29 candidates, up from just 4 in the previous election. Les Verts received higher results than Green candidates anywhere else in Canada, polling an average of 2.4% of the vote. The Quebec wing hosted the 1990 Canadian Greens conference in Montreal. But soon after that, Canada's constitutional problems interfered, and many Quebec candidates abandoned the Greens in favour of a Quebec sovereigntist party, the Bloc Québécois. There were only six Green candidates from Quebec in the 1993 election.

In the summer of 1988, the BC Greens, under the de facto leadership of electoral-reform activist Steve Kisby, tried to get the Green Party of Canada onto its feet by hosting a conference — the first federal gathering since the founding meeting in 1983. The main accomplishment of that conference was the acceptance, after five years as a registered party, of a constitution. The party continued to field candidates at the federal level, and provincial parties were organized in a few other provinces, led by consistently strong efforts in British Columbia.

In 1988, however, despite minimal on-the-ground organization, Quebec produced the lion's share of Green candidates and votes thanks to the efforts of Quebec organizer and candidate Rolf Bramann. A year later, the provincial Greens in Quebec scored 2% of the popular vote, averaging 5% in the constituencies in which they ran under the leadership of Jean Ouimet. Montreal's municipal Ecology Party also scored very well in elections in this period under the leadership of publisher Dimitrios Roussopoulos.

Ouimet, a strong sovereigntist, maintained a party wholly independent of the federal Greens during his leadership; as a result Bramann created an organization called the Green Party of Canada in Quebec, a predominantly Anglophone entity that nominated federal candidates only. There was open antipathy between Ouimet and Bramann. Neither was affiliated with Écologie-Montreal.

At the same time as the Parti Vert began to collapse due to Ouimet's defection to the PQ in 1992, Bramann was removed from his position in the federal party due to anti-Semitic comments he and some of his candidates had made. This led to a precipitous decline in all Green Party organizations in Quebec despite a very promising start a mere four years previous.

From 1988 onwards, a pattern developed whereby the federal party tended to function alternately as an appendage of the BC and Ontario provincial parties. Lacking sufficient funding and an administrative base of its own, control of the federal Greens was sometimes a prize (when the provincial affiliate and its leader wanted to demonstrate its success), and at others, a burden (when the provincial affiliate was forced to invest significant volunteer energy or money for its maintenance) for the Greens in BC and Ontario. Successful candidates for the positions of Leader and Chief Financial Officer were typically personal associates of either the BC or Ontario party's de facto or de jure leader, for whom the leader publicly mobilized and delivered votes.