Who are the Justice Greens?
Written by: Lahari Nanda
The Justice Greens want the Green Party to elect one of three socialist candidates as their new leader in the upcoming election.
There are three socialist candidates in the running for leader of the Green Party of Canada (GPC). They are Meryam Haddad, Dimitri Lascaris and Amita Kuttner. Electing an eco-socialist leader is the Justice Greens’ first step towards “getting more progressive politics into our [the Green] party,” according to John Connor Kelly, a member of the Justice Greens responsible for the social media and graphics of the group.
Who are the Justice Greens?
They are a subgroup of the GPC which is involved in communications and audience engagement for the party. They are focused on bringing in an eco-socialist leader to remain true to the purpose of the Greens, tackle the climate emergency effectively and focus on ecological justice.
The group was named ‘Justice Greens’ inspired by the Justice Democrats in the United States, according to Kelly.
“There’s more to solving climate change than just like renewable energy, there’s a justice component to it because there is a very particular group of people who are responsible for climate change happening,” he said. “There has to be some kind of justice for what they’ve done to everybody on the planet. The only just thing to do is to take what they’ve essentially hoarded from everybody else.”
The group’s target demographic is “usually young people and activists,” but also “working class” and marginalized people. Kelly told The Canada Files (TCF) that their long term objective of bringing in an eco-socialist leader is to create sustainable policies and provide ecological justice for communities of colour, Indigenous and low-income communities.
A challenge arises for the Justice Greens, now that the implementation of free youth memberships for the Greens has come to a standstill. Kelly said that this “does not play a big role” because becoming a member costs $10 and the rescission of this simple rule shows that the current leaders of the Greens are unaccountable.
“They’ve already taken away something they promised,” he added.
For the Justice Greens, this is a step forward in pushing transparent policies through Lascaris, Haddad and Kuttner.
What do they want?
The Justice Greens want to show Canadians that “significant change” is possible in environmental, economic and social policy through “very little effort,” Kelly said.
This effort refers to the registration cost for the Greens. For many, however, that cost is also an investment into uncertainty because the initial response to the Greens’ socialist candidates and Justice Green’s community outreach programs via Twitter and Reddit were skeptic. These outreach programs were directed towards “online leftist communities, with /r/canadaleft being our [Justice Greens’] largest source [of voters].”
For Indigenous communities, Haddad wants to focus on climate justice, the epicentre of which is currently on the provision of clean water to all communities across Canada. A problem that has long persisted in the Canadian social ecosystem, the nation’s negligence towards Indigenous communities is something all the eco-socialist candidates want to eliminate.
“No party has really done any of them [Indigenous communities] right significantly,” he said.
In the current scenario of political movements to uproot systemic structures that maintain racial inequalities, electing a candidate who represents the interests and values of not only a party but also the voting members of the party will be essential. For the Greens, this means creating active policies that uplift Indigenous and low-income communities as well as people of colour.
According to Kelly, “All these issues have the same root cause which is the economic system that we live in.” He said that the capitalistic system is designed to exploit these communities and keep the economy static at its social justice front, and that is at a position of injustice.
For this purpose, the Justice Greens created an endorsement poll, the basis of which was a questionnaire answered by the three socialist candidates. This poll endorsed and ranked the socialist candidates.
Dimitri Lascaris was ranked first, Meryam Haddad second and Amita Kuttner third. Haddad and Lascaris both want to reallocate funding for the police towards social support for marginalized communities in Canada.
Lascaris was ranked first because “his platform is more developed than Haddad’s,” Kelly said.
According to him, the odds of the Greens electing an eco-socialist leader “are looking fairly good.”
But the Justice Greens are not without criticism. They have been told by Elizabeth May that what they are doing is “anti-democratic,” according to Kelly, specifically in a tweet which was later deleted. “It’s a bit of a bad faith criticism,” he added. The tweet demonstrates an internal difference in opinions between the Greens, wherein May questioned the agenda of the Justice Greens, saying that “the group has no connection with the GPC.”
Kelly said that despite this, the present moment is “a bit of a watershed moment in history” and a better, more secure future is in the hands of voters.
Voter registration for the Green Party election is open until September 3 at 11:59 p.m.
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