My theory of the Green Party

I have voted for the Green Party of Canada before. Not because I wanted them to govern, or even because I wanted the local candidate elected. Their fervent opposition to nuclear power is reason enough not to put them in charge of environmental policy. I voted because I felt obligated to vote but could not bring myself to support any of the major parties.

I suspect this is one of the Green Party’s core constituencies: fringe, politically obsessed weirdos who feel they have to vote but don’t want to give that vote to a mainstream party (I say this as one of said fringe weirdos).

Their “Membership Approved Policy Book” (linked from their governance page and last updated in 2023) is a weird grab bag of causes that would probably surprise the average person who thinks of the Greens as a vaguely left-wing party of tree huggers:

• Ban water fluoridation
• Mandatory equal parenting after divorce with few exceptions
• Prefer fibre over Wi-Fi and 5G because of radiation concerns
• Commission a federal study into potential health effects of wind turbines
• Cap the highest salary in an organization at ten times the lowest
• Tax wealth and inheritances above an unspecified cap at 100 per cent
• Move regulation of non-criminal firearms activity out of the Criminal Code (right before a proposal to tighten gun control)
• Re-education for people who interfere with breastfeeding women

The causes amount to a tour of the ideological spectrum, with stops all along it. Some, like fluoridation and wireless radiation, were much less identifiably far-right when they first gained traction than they are now. Some are just weird. Taken together, they look less like a serious programme for government than an archive of individual crusades that happened to crowd into the same political party. The document more or less admits to this at the top:

It will appear clear to the reader that there are a number of outdated, redundant and/or contradictory policies. It will be essential to amend our policies at the upcoming VGM to streamline the below document.

Elizabeth May, who seems cursed to lead the Green Party forever, has had her own brushes with weird causes. In 2011, she waged war against Wi-Fi in schools and wireless smart meters. In 2014, she voluntarily presented a petition from 9/11 truthers calling for a parliamentary review of the attacks. She stated that while she did not agree with the petition, she believed the petitioners deserved to have their concerns aired in Parliament. This defence is revealing: May seemed to understand her role, and perhaps the role of her party more broadly, as giving political outsiders a hearing. That would help explain both the Greens’ eclectic policies and the candidates drawn to the party.

But the causes are not entirely random. Green politics has often been much more interested in scaling down energy demand than scaling up clean energy production. The Greens’ policy book calls for a Canadian economy that becomes “better not bigger”. This localist, anti-growth and technology-skeptical tendency has long been one of the Green Party’s defining currents. But this strain of environmentalism also attracted people who were suspicious of modernity and technological society itself.

The Green protest vote was never uniformly left-wing. The founding of Maxime Bernier’s right-populist People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in 2018 gave some anti-establishment voters somewhere else to go. Following the 2021 election, Global News reported that internal Conservative polling indicated that as many as 25 per cent of likely PPC voters had voted Green in the previous election in 2019.

The movement from Green to PPC looks crazy if you view politics as a single axis running from left to right. It makes much more sense if you see both parties as appealing, in different ways, to politically homeless people who feel alienated from the mainstream parties and institutions on the issues they care about.

That is more or less why I voted Green. The party gave me somewhere to deposit my vote when I did not want to give it to any of the major parties. The PPC appears to have done the same for some very different people.