Green parties have become a significant political force in many Western nations and sub-national jurisdictions. While “Green”-branded platforms vary from one part of the world to the next, they all typically draw in heterodox left-of-centre political figures who trumpet ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, and social justice through non-violent means. In some nations, such as Finland, Germany, Ireland, and Austria, Greens have gained cabinet representation and membership in ruling coalitions. In Latvia, Green politicians have even served as prime minister and head of state.

One might think that Canada, a country whose progressive ranks have long exhibited strong environmentalist tendencies, would feature prominently in the Green movement. But that’s not the case, in large part because Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it difficult for small parties to gain parliamentary representation unless they focus their appeal along narrow regional lines (as the Bloc Québécois has done in French-speaking Quebec since the early 1990s). Out of 338 Members of Parliament, Canada’s Greens have never had more than three MPs. They currently have two. And, for reasons described below, that number may soon be zero.

Another problem for the Greens has been leadership. From 2006 to 2019, the Green Party of Canada was led by a former environmental lawyer and Sierra Club Canada director named Elizabeth May—an affable but occasionally bumbling figure who’s made a number of front-page gaffes. In 2011, she promoted pseudo-scientific theories to the effect that WiFi internet signals might give people cancer and kill “pollinating insects.” The party has been home to anti-fluoridation activists, as well as proponents of crackpot Russian theories about “abiogenic oil.” A 2013 draft version of the party’s platform called for government-subsidized homeopathy. Two years after that, an apparently drunken May stood up at Ottawa’s annual Press Gallery dinner and delivered a bizarre homage to a returning Guantanamo prisoner named Omar Khadr, whom she said had “more class” than the national government’s “whole fucking cabinet.” In the 2019 federal election, May played to Range Rover environmentalists with sanctimonious boasts about how she always used a reusable coffee cup, metal straw, and “my own bamboo utensils” as a means to avoid using disposable products—but then blamed her staff when it was discovered that a photo of her holding a single-use cup had been edited to make it look as if she were holding the reusable variety.