Green leadership candidate Meryam Haddad says she will appeal after the party expelled her from the race to succeed Elizabeth May, days before online voting was due to begin.
Haddad, a Montreal lawyer who was running as a socialist and pushed the idea of a green new deal, said the party informed her Tuesday that she had been kicked out of the leadership race.
"This is an attack on democracy, youth, progress and ideas that threaten the status quo," she said in a statement.
Mail-in voting in the leadership race began earlier this month, and online voting will begin on Sept. 26. The winner will be announced Oct. 3.
May, the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, stepped down as leader after the last federal election. In that vote, the Greens picked up three seats in Parliament, their best result ever. (May will retain her seat and remains the party’s parliamentary leader.)
In an email, Haddad's campaign said she had been booted from the race for "not explicitly endorsing" the B.C. Green Party in that province's snap election, announced this week. In a tweet Tuesday, Haddad she would only endorse the B.C. Greens if their platform included plans for a green new deal, defunding police and "land back policies," a term usually used to talk about Indigenous sovereignty.
"We do not believe that we have brought the Green Party of Canada into disrepute for staying true to our principles," campaign volunteer Kolby Zinger-Harris said in an email.
Haddad has 48 hours to file an appeal.
In an email, federal Green Party spokesperson Rosie Emery declined to comment.
Another candidate, Dylan Perceval-Maxwell, was ejected from the race in June after he proposed that police should “give $20 to every person of colour they stop.” At the time, the party said the comments were "inappropriate” and “not aligned with the party’s core values, in particular respect for diversity.”
Seven candidates remain on the ballot.
Emma McIntosh / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada's Naitonal Observer
Comments
I may be treading into a political minefield here, but…
While one may quibble with Haddad's specific conditions, expelling her from the federal leadership campaign because she failed to uncritically and automatically endorse a provincial Green party seems over the top. Unless there is a pertinent clause in the federal Green constitution, the move seems arbitrary and unjust.
AB NDP Premier let no end of insults fly against federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh over his opposition to Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, etc., without repercussions. (It was Notley who abandoned NDP values, not Singh. It was Notley who stood on the wrong side of science and history.)
We should praise politicians for independence of thought. Surely we have enough trained seals.
(Not a Green Party member, though I do vote Green in AB.)
To answer my own question:
"Unlike some other federal parties, the Green Party has no formal connection to any provincial party and does not require its members to support affiliated parties at the provincial level. In the last federal election, the Green Party leader at the time, Elizabeth May, supported independent candidate Jody Wilson-Raybould over a candidate from her own party in the riding of Vancouver Granville."
https://ricochet.media/en/3297/theyre-going-to-lose-the-youth-vote-gree…
I agree with Geoffrey. Do not mix fed & prov Green politics. Reinstate Haddad.
I agree. If some other candidate wants to point out her not supporting a fellow Green party and make an issue of it, the membership can decide. I don't think it's something the party bureaucracy should be taking on themselves, and I find myself wondering if this isn't mostly an excuse because some backroom types don't want to deal with "radicals" in the party that they don't think are "electable".
Even that other guy I'm not sure about turfing--he's a total jerk, but it would say something interesting about the Green party membership and their beliefs if a total jerk could be successful in their leadership race. So again, it should perhaps have been up to the membership to decide if they wanted to be creepy.
Then again, "independence of thought" was what Notley exhibited ...
In a way. Independent of the NDP establishment, certainly. Not so independent of the Alberta oil patch, though. For that matter, probably more of speech than of thought--what are the chances she actually believed any of the pro-oil stuff she was saying?
If switching sides, kowtowing to Big Oil, capitulating to the oil industry's expansionist agenda, and trying to outconservative the conservatives on pipelines represents "independence of thought". Notley did not invent neoliberalism. She merely adopted it.
Notley famously did not encourage independence of thought within her own caucus. It was her way or the highway.
"A Calgary MLA says she will refuse to sit in the legislature to protest what she calls "a culture of fear and intimidation" within the NDP government that prevents members from properly representing their constituents.
"Calgary-East MLA Robyn Luff said Albertans are poorly served by a system that requires MLAs to vote party lines in all cases, where questions are pre-written by ministries, and even statements and questions in committee meetings are scripted."
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ndp-alberta-mla-robyn-luff-legi…
"Luff said stifling MLAs 'leads to hyper partisan rhetoric, and to no actual debate on bills.'
“'Everything that happens in the house is predetermined, rendering everything that happens there to nothing more than a vehicle for scoring partisan points. It makes a mockery of the proceedings. This is a mockery of representation and a tragedy of democracy.'"
• https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/ndp-mla-robyn-luff-alleges-bu…
"Robyn Luff fires back at Alberta NDP after they kick her out of caucus"
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/robyn-luff-fires-back-at-albe…
Luff's main complaint was that anti-democratic concentration of power in the Premier's office prevented her (and other MLAs) from doing her job: representing her constituents.
When Luff sought to serve her constituents, she was bullied into silence. Backbench MLAs are treated like children to be seen and not heard, instead of competent adults.
Here's hoping the AB NDP returns to its democratic roots and traditional NDP values under new leadership — sooner rather than later.