Alex Tyrrell: It’s Not Easy Being Ecosocialist in the Green Party | Op-Ed
Alex Tyrrell launches his campaign for a new mandate as leader of the Green Party of Quebec on September 11, 2020 in Montréal. Credit: Courtesy of the Green Party of Quebec.
Written by: Alex Tyrrell
As we have seen in the Green Party of Canada leadership race, the federal Green Party establishment is hellbent on suppressing ecosocialsim within their ranks. We saw this when they expelled and then readmitted the only two ecosocialist candidates to their leadership race. To some, this came as a surprise. Others, including myself had seen this coming for years.
In 2013, at age 25, I was elected to the leadership of the Green Party of Quebec. I was a first-year environmental science student at Concordia University and had been actively involved in the 2012 Quebec student uprisings as well as other social movements like Idle No More, Occupy and the movement against fracking. After running as a local candidate in the 2012 election that had been triggered by the student uprising in which I had been illegally arrested, I decided to put my name forward in the Green Party of Quebec’s 2013 leadership race. I campaigned on a platform to unite the Green Party of Quebec around bold change and progressive ideas. Shortly after I won the race, the party quickly adopted an ecosocialist platform. We stood up to right wing identity politics, spoke out against racism and discrimination and presented Quebeckers with a strong ecosocialist alternative to the status quo.
While most people would think that the Green Party of Canada would be happy to have a strong youth lead party in Quebec, one of the most progressive provinces in the country, the reality was the polar opposite. The Green Party of Canada and Elizabeth May’s entourage broke ties with our party almost immediately. They discouraged their members in Quebec from being involved with the provincial party and essentially built a wall between the two organizations.
For years, Elizabeth May went out of her way to marginalize the Green Party of Quebec. She refused to meet with me for the first three years of my leadership. In 2016, when we finally sat down for our first and only 30 minute meeting, she was dismissive of our ecosocialist orientation and her chief of staff made it clear that they treat provincial parties differently depending on how closely they toe the federal party line.
Later that year, the party had a policy convention in which members were asked to vote on BDS. Elizabeth May, who had always emphasised that Greens were the most democratic party on the map, had made it clear that she opposed the motion. Nevertheless, it passed through the democratic process and was adopted by the membership. She then threatened to resign if the party did not hold another emergency convention to have it overturned. Despite all this, I continued speaking favourably of BDS and wrote an op-ed in which I criticized her position. Shortly after this op-ed was published, she began ordering her deputy leader and others to boycott the Green Party of Quebec. She emailed these orders to some people who supported BDS and they in turn leaked them to the media.
Once they were published, Ms. May refused to apologize for what she said and even cut off contact with the news outlet that published them. She also expelled three members of her shadow cabinet including Dimitri Lascaris for supporting BDS in an open letter which I co signed with them. All of this runs counter to her public statements about the Green Party of Canada having a member driven policy process as well as her insistance that the party does not whip votes or impose party lines. If a young progressive and principled Green Party leader from Quebec can not speak up for Palistinan human rights without being reprimanded, how can the party claim to be free of party discipline or whipped votes?
In the 2018 election campaign I recruited 97 people to run for office under the Green Party of Quebec banner; this was the second-largest number of candidates our party had fielded in 35 years of history. It was also the youngest and most diverse team of Green Party candidates in Canadian history. The average age was 34 years old and 58 per cent of our candidates were women. We did it all without help from the feds. In that election, we presented our most comprehensive platform ever, which called for massive structural change, eco socialism, public ownership, anti-racism eradicating poverty and much more. Despite all this, Elizabeth May refused to endorse our party. It was a struggle just to get her to sign on to an open letter calling for our inclusion in the leader’s debates. Despite all the obstruction and lack of cooperation, we managed to achieve our objectives in that campaign by trippeling our share of the popular vote and by extension more than tripling our public funding.
Fast forward to the spring of 2019 when Elizabeth May unveiled part of her election platform titled “Mission Possible”. This plan included keeping the Alberta tar sands open until 2050 for fossil fuels and indefinitely for petrochemicals. It called for a ban on the import of fossil fuels but not for a ban on exports. It called for investments of public funds to build refineries in western Canada and it called for Eastern Canada to use oil produced in the tar sands.
People who follow Quebec politics and the environmental movement know how unpopular the tar sands are in Quebec. I had fought for years against the arrival of tar sands oil here. I had protested the pipelines, the oil ports and had written “Block the tar sands” on my election signs in several elections. Despite all this, Elizabeth May was determined to press forward on a pro tar sands platform.
Environmental groups began criticizing the party. For example, the spokesperson for Greenpeace in Quebec asked “if the Green Party had fallen on its head”. At that point I was faced with what some would consider a difficult decision; be complacent with the party’s support of the tar sands or publicly denounce this incoherent and anti-environmental proposal. It was not a difficult decision for me. I knew that I would not be able to live with myself if I had not spoken out. It was the right thing to do, so I did just that.
Within a few hours I wrote up a Facebook post explaining that in good conscience I could not, as leader of the Green Party of Quebec, support this pro tar sands policy. I also declared that I would be visiting the Tar sands in person that summer and that I would not accept this federal policy. Less than thirty minutes later my phone began to ring; it was the national media, they had already been critical of her position and jumped on the opportunity to write more about it.
Over the next few weeks all of the national media in both English and French covered my criticisms and the growing divide within the party with respect to the tar sands. Instead of defending her policy, Elizabeth May and her deputy leader in Quebec, Daniel Green lashed out at me. They attempted to discredit me by saying things like “he has not read the platform”, “he is not a part of our party” and many similar comments. They chose to respond with personal attacks rather than substance. The media was not satisfied with their answers so they asked May over and over again about her position on the tar sands. She dug herself into a deeper and deeper hole while I gained support from Greens around the country and beyond for a petition that I had launched calling on her to take a strong position against the Alberta Tar Sands. I had also been critical of her ambiguous policy towards reproductive rights and her condemnation of Extinction Rebellion.
When the final platform was released at the end of the summer it called for a total tar sands shutdown by 2035, there was no mention of banning oil imports or building refineries. This was a major victory but it did not come easy. Myself and people who supported the petition that I had launched from my podium overlooking the tar sands were subjected to tremendous pressure to abandon our efforts and get in check with the party line. Some people gave in while others stood our ground. In the end we accomplished what we set out to do.
In November of that year, Elizabeth May stepped down as leader and the national media immediately turned to me as a logical successor. I was young, 31 years old but had six years of leadership experience, had completed my degree in environmental science and was perfectly bilingual and had established a national profile. In the many interviews I gave I insisted on the need for the Green Party of Canada to take a sharp left turn and adopt an ecosocialist platform as we had done in Quebec under my leadership.
In response to my campaign, Elizabeth May and her entourage mounted strong opposition. Rank and file members were discouraged from even being seen at my events. They defined the rules so that an anonymous vetting committee could refuse candidates without providing a reason, which they did twice. When Elizabeth May resigned from the leadership, several journalists asked her if she was resigning due to my criticisms and if she would remain neutral in the race to which she replied that she would. Nevertheless as time passed it became clearer and clearer that she was intent on rigging the process against candidates that she did not appreciate.
She got her husband to assemble and lead a slate of candidates for the federal council elections in order to consolidate power. She tweeted in support of some candidates, liked negative tweets directed at myself and other eco-socialist candidates and people from the establishment made it very clear that they would do everything in their power to oppose my candidacy and to undermine my leadership in the event that I would win the race.
Three days after my name circulated in the national replacement as a potential successor to Elizabeth May, her supporters in Quebec, including the vise president of her federal council launched a petition calling for a vote of confidence on my leadership at the provincial level. Instead of sticking to legitimate criticisms they attempted character assassination by making unfounded and defamatory allegations about my management of the provincial party’s finances while hiding behind an anonymous facebook page. All this despite the fact that I worked for five years, from 2013 to 2018 for an average salary of just $800 per month. I made ends meet by cutting my expenses, living in affordable housing with roommates, pushing back visits to the dentist and by cutting in my grocery budget. I also worked with my hands in another job and completed my studies while working full time for the party with very limited resources.
Now that the federal leadership race is over, Elizabeth May and the federal party establishment are trying to circumvent the Green Party of Quebec’s internal democracy by attempting to force me to resign from my position without the holding of a confidence vote. The federal establishment has pressured people into opposing my leadership and they are doing everything in their power to cancel the vote of confidence towards my leadership since they know that I have strong support, have worked very hard and will prevail in this democratic process if it goes forward.
While what is written here may discourage some ecosocialists from being involved with party politics or with the Green Party, I strongly disagree. In my view, the reason that the left is continually marginalized in party politics is that activists and progressives have neglected party politics for far too long. We need to join together and advocate for ecosocilism within party politics. The timing with the unfolding health and economic crisis makes this work even more important. The base of the Green Party of Canada is far more progressive than the establishment and the old guard. Dimitri Lascaris’s success in coming within a few percentage points of winning the federal leadership and my success in transforming the Green Party of Quebec into an ecosocialist party despite all this opposition of the federal establishment shows that it can be done.
Alex Tyrrell is the leader of the Green Party of Quebec, he is an activist, and ecosocialist and holds a degree in Environmental Science from Concordia University. He is currently seeking a new mandate as leader of the Green Party of Quebec.
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