Mark Leiren-Young is an author, playwright, filmmaker, and podcast host who in 2019 stepped well out of his lane, becoming the Green Party of Canada’s campaign manager in a very promising riding. But political promises often disappoint. In his new book ”Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics” the Leacock Medal winner for humour looks back at what he thinks has gone wrong, in 2019 and beyond, with the party.
It seems a bit cruel to be writing about the toxic sludge of Canadian ecopolitics in early 2025, just after Canadians returned to the polls and decided that the New Democrats are finished and only a handful of Green candidates earned more than a few hundred votes. So before I make the case that the Greens are so far past their best-before date that the green you’re seeing is mould, let’s hand the microphone to the party’s heart, soul, and supreme leader for life.
In 2024, when Americans were deciding between electing a felon or a prosecutor, Greens worldwide pleaded with U.S. Green leader and Russian bot-turned-real-live human Jill Stein to drop out of the race so that people who loved the planet could cast ballots for Kamala Harris and help defeat Donald Trump. One of those worldwide Greens was Elizabeth May.
“We know you hate Democrats — we know that — but this is a planetary concern … What happens to climate if Trump gets another term? What happens to democracy if Trump gets another term? What happens to women’s rights if Trump gets another term?”
I asked a once high-powered Green, forgive the oxymoron, how that argument didn’t apply to Elizabeth, who was pulling support from the NDP and Liberal candidates who stood between Canadians and a Conservative government hell-bent on composting anything resembling an environmental policy. I got a shrug. That person was convinced neither Elizabeth nor her “cult” of Canadian Greens could spot a contradiction.
And you’d think that the Jill Stein comparison might have particular resonance with Green voters since Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre wanted to run on their favourite ballot issue. Pierre Pollution couldn’t stop talking about climate policy and carbon taxes. He was determined to replace sunny ways with smoggy ones. Meanwhile, the Liberals, who had an actual chance to defeat the Poilievre Conservatives, were running a guy (albeit a banker) who wrote a book on green energy. So, if your top issue was the environment, you’d think that’d be a pretty straightforward equation. You line up behind the party with the best shot at defeating the guy saying drill, baby, drill. But it turns out the Greens, who are supposed to be on the side of the angels, are just on the side of the Greens.
Many books you read come with the proviso that all persons are fictional and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. My disclaimer is that the Green Party of Canada is purely fictional.
This became clear when Elizabeth took her first walk in the snow in 2019, announced her resignation, and neither of her party’s two sitting MPs stepped forward to replace her. That sure seemed like a vote of non-confidence in Team Green. Inexplicably, the party also took deputy leader Jo-Anne Roberts out of the running by declaring her interim leader. Next came an exhausting eight-ballot leadership race that vaguely resembled a high school environmental club’s version of “The Hunger Games.” The winner, Annamie Paul, imploded within weeks, losing a byelection in Toronto Centre and leaving the Greens as the only federal party without its leader in Parliament.
A new leadership race was announced in 2022. Once again, there was a young Green MP serving in the House of Commons whom one might think the party would anoint. Or at least shine a spotlight to remind Canadians the Greens have a present, never mind a future. But when opportunity knocked, the Greens reacted like the door was broken. I could have offered a free slice of Pizza Pizza to anyone who could name the MP and rest assured no one who wasn’t in his riding, or picking up a paycheque from the Green Party, would be able to collect. I’ll give you a clue … he’s in Ontario … a place where real federal parties try to get elected.
For the 2022 leadership race, almost no one threw their hat in the tailings pond. During that contest, party president and long-time Indigenous affairs critic Lorraine Rekmans resigned, declaring, “The dream is dead.” Her scathing three-page exit letter said: “It seems to me there is no vision for a better future … but only an effort to look back and settle old scores, while the planet burns.”
So, with the planet burning, Queen Elizabeth returned after her brief interregnum, sporting a lovely black beard, who would bolster her diversity credentials and avoid the party getting another shot at choosing her successor. Thirty-something bilingual, mixed-race, queer, human rights activist/journalist Jonathan Pedneault ran as Elizabeth’s co-leader. But since the party constitution didn’t allow co-leaders, Elizabeth was officially running solo and she won. While Jonathan finished third, he looked and sounded very much like the leader of tomorrow. Spoiler alert: after Elizabeth was re-elected, tomorrow never came.
The party was so busy with, um … I got nothin’ … that it never got around to approving co-leadership. So as the federal government was falling in late 2024, Jonathan decided to return to the relative sanity of working in war zones to make the obvious clear: the Greens were Elizabeth May.
Then, just before the 2025 election, the party magically rewrote its rule book, deciding it needed a co-leader, after all. Its sole Ontario MP, Mike Morrice, was appointed. The hope was that co-leadership status would gain Mike some national coverage and help him hold his riding and perhaps boost the party’s chances of a breakthrough in Canada’s biggest province. Just kidding. The party finally installed Jonathan Pedneault as co-leader. He arrived just in time to not represent the party on the federal debate stage — the Greens were deemed irrelevant and not invited to participate. Jonathan resigned his co-leadership after finishing fifth in an unwinnable riding in Montreal. Losing that riding was inevitable, but placing fifth out of five candidates, with fewer than 10 per cent of the votes, proved the “bump” one gets from being Green leader is barely a belch.
While I was learning how the vegan sausage was made, there were at least two true believers I was convinced would take a bullet for Elizabeth. Not a metaphorical bullet. I’m talking straight up U.S.-Secret-Service-style, jump-in-front-of-a-machine-gun-to-save-the-leader levels of loyalty. Michael Sturmberger was May’s riding campaign manager and one of the most decent humans I crossed paths with in the 2019 campaign.
He left in 2020, citing lack of accountability by party brass: “Members don’t have a lot of visibility into the decisions that are made. More and more, our federal council, our governing board is operating in-camera and obviously not reporting what happens. So that’s a pattern.”
Then there was Jonathan Dickie, Elizabeth’s loyal right hand, former national campaign manager, and former executive director. For nine years, he gave everything to the party but his vital organs. If asked, I’m sure he would have given Elizabeth a kidney or half his liver. The first time I saw Jonathan after the 2019 campaign, he was at a rural fair in Elizabeth’s riding, volunteering at the booth for the federal Liberals. You could have knocked me over with a campaign brochure.
Just over a week before voting day in the 2025 federal election, after watching a campaign where the Greens seemed determined to prove their irrelevance and incompetence, I published a piece on Substack where I outed myself as having left the cult and explained why I couldn’t bring myself to cast another vote for Elizabeth May. Yes, I live in her riding.
I am pretty sure this came as a surprise to the Greens who’d just asked me to take a paid job as the Victoria campaign manager and the ones who’d asked me to consider running for the party in Esquimalt. As Greens and mainstream media outlets like The Tyee and The Globe and Mail shared my story on social media, I braced for impact. Other than a couple of angry emails and social media snipes from Elizabeth fans, and a polite dressing down on Facebook by Elizabeth’s husband, who reminded me I was at their wedding, I received private and public thanks from high profile Greens and heard from a half-dozen of the most successful campaign managers in the history of the party. They thanked me for cracking the cone of silence.
That confirmed to me that I needed to share my misadventures as a Green insider. I had the material. I’d taken notes, downloaded emails, texts, and memos, and, in honour of Jody Wilson-Raybould, the greatest leader the Green Party of Canada never had,™ recorded a few calls. Then, to make sure I was as accurate and fair as possible, I interviewed former party insiders who not only were insistent that the Greens were a cult, but that it was far more dysfunctional than I’d ever imagined.
Excerpted from “Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics” by Mark Leiren-Young. Copyright © 2025 Mark Leiren-Young. Published by Sutherland House Books. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
