Adriane Carr

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Adriane Carr in 2005.

Adriane Carr (1952-) is a Canadian academic, activist and politician. She is currently leader of the Green Party of British Columbia but announced on September 24th, 2006 that she is stepping down and will vacate the office when a new leader is selected by members.

Carr was born in Vancouver and raised in the Lower Mainland and Kootenays. She earned a Master's degree in geography from UBC, and went on to a career as a geography instructor at Vancouver Community College.

1 Environmentalism
2 Politics
3 Election Results
- 3.1 Election Results
4 External links

[edit] Environmentalism

She began working professionally for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee in 1987, having co-founded the group in 1980 with her husband. In this capacity, she became a fixture of BC's environmental movement, building the small group into BC's largest environmental organization by 1990. From 1992 until 2000, WCWC was led by a four-person committee of paid employees comprising Carr, her husband, activist Joe Foy and the organization's chief financial officer.

Although consistently opposing civil disobedience as an organization, Carr's team was viewed as one of the most principled and least prone to compromise of the province's blue chip environmental organizations. Carr and George were strong in their condemnation of the BC Commission on Resources and Environment, set up by the Harcourt NDP government to seek a negotiated settlement amongst "stakeholders" in highly contentious areas of the province. WCWC led the forces urging an environmentalist boycott of the process, which gained in public credibility as the process moved forward and government manipulation of it became increasingly exposed.

But in the late 1990s, Carr altered the public image of WCWC by brokering, a landmark agreement amongst first nations groups, environmentalists and the MacMillan Bloedel corporation to resolve an extended conflict over logging in Clayoquot Sound.

[edit] Politics

Carr has been the BC Green Party leader on two separate occasions. She was recognized as the party's leader in the 1983 provincial election, held shortly after the party's founding. Carr ran in the riding of Vancouver-Point Grey, and finished last in a field of eight candidates with 1549 votes. She also ran as a Green candidate for the Vancouver School Board in 1984, but after this had little further involvement with the provincial Green Party until the late 1990s. Although she and her husband Paul George returned briefly to active involvement in the late 80s to block a plan by the party's Ecofeminist Caucus to radically restructure the organization.

The Green Party of British Columbia was led from 1993 to 2000 by Stuart Parker (whom Carr endorsed during both of his runs for the party leadership in 1993 and 1997) and its ideological direction was largely guided by former members of the New Democratic Party during this period. Carr emerged as a rival to Parker at the party's 1999 policy convention. The non-confidence motion against him that she sponsored at the party's annual convention six months later was defeated by a substantial margin. But he was defeated in another non-confidence motion in March 2000, thanks largely to the organizing abilities of Carr and her allies to recruit new party members supportive of her leadership bid. This recruitment ultimately paid off when, on September 23, 2000, Carr defeated Andy Shadrack and former municipal councilor Wally du Temple to become party leader for a second time.

After winning the leadership, Carr kept the promises to many of the environmentalists she had recruited for her leadership bid and focused the party more specifically on environmental matters while downplaying the social policy issues that had come to dominate the public statements of the party in Parker's last years. This half-year period before the 2001 general election also saw the party shift to the right, allowing the Greens to enter the election with a strong centrist appeal. (Parker and his supporters had resigned from the party July 31, 2000, accusing the WCWC of attempting to manipulate the party's direction. He later encouraged Green Party supporters to vote NDP in the 2001 provincial election.)

Carr ran in the 2001 election in the riding of Powell River-Sunshine Coast, against former Liberal leader and current NDP cabinet minister Gordon Wilson. She was included in the party leaders' debate along with Liberal leader Gordon Campbell and Premier Ujjal Dosanjh. As the NDP was greatly declining in popularity due to a series of the scandals and lacklustre campaign, the Greens were increasingly viewed as a progressive alternative for voters. Many believed Carr in turn had a chance to win the seat, and become the first Green Party candidate to sit in a Canadian legislature; instead, she finished third with 6316 votes (27%), against 6349 for Wilson (28%) and 9904 for victorious Liberal Harold Long. The Green Party received 12.4% of the provincial vote in this election, a significant increase from its 2% total in the 1996 election. But Carr's courting of a centrist vote paid off with some of the party's strongest results appearing not in NDP seats but in safe Liberal located in wealthy suburbs like West Vancouver and Delta. The party's largest number of votes was received in Saanich-Gulf Islands, one of only 17 constituencies that had been voting Liberal since 1991.

Seeking to maintain that breadth of support across the political spectrum, Carr has built alliances on both sides of BC's right-left divide, reportedly earning the respect of both the BC Nurses' Union and former Social Credit cabinet minister Rafe Mair for her work championing electoral reform since the 2001 election.

In 2004, Carr ran for the Greens in a by-election in Surrey-Panorama Ridge, held following the resignation of Liberal Gulzar Singh Cheema. She finished a distant third with 8.4% of the vote as the NDP recovered to win the riding. This result was a harbinger of the party's decline in popularity in the 2005 general election, where its share of the vote fell to 9%.

Carr was a vocal supporter of closed party list proportional representation, which would give party leaders unilateral control over who comprised their caucus. In 2002, she organized the Free Your Vote campaign which brought together a broad coalition of British Columbians and even included the official support of trade unions such as the BC Nurses' in a petition drive under the province's citizen initiative legislation ro institute this system. Despite having condemned this legislation as unworkable after failing to submit sufficient signatures for an anti-grizzly bear hunting initiative by WCWC, Carr threw the energies into this campaign which, although it failed to gather sufficient signatures in all but four ridings, created the largest voting reform organization in the province and increased awareness and support amongst Greens and non-Greens alike.

She felt so strongly about this that she effectively stood for the "No" side in the BC electoral reform referendum, 2005: "STV is even more adversarial than the system we have now. It's not truly proportional. It entrenches big vested parties. It's rock bottom in terms of getting women elected. And it still leaves too many voters frustrated by their votes not counting." - [1]. This was a very major frustration for the majority of GPBC supporters who sought any electoral reform whatsoever. Since the election, however, Carr has substantially moderated her views and now plans to support the next government-sponsored referendum on the STV model of proportional representation in the fall of 2008.

However, opposition to STV may have done Carr lasting damage within her party, given how close the referendum came to passing in 2005. Over the objections of her inner circle, the party's post-election convention reinstituted a number of Parker-era checks and balances on the leader. Instead of the indefinite term with no scheduled reviews that Carr has enjoyed since 2000, her term now expires in 2007, after which she must run again for the position.

In 2005, she was also included in the leaders debate, this time with Gordon Campbell and Carole James of the NDP. She was expected to be strong competition in her riding of Powell River-Sunshine Coast, but finished third again with 25% of the vote (a decline of 2%), 14% behind the victorious NDP candidate.

[edit] Election Results

Election	Type	Total votes	% of popular vote	Place
Vancouver-Point Grey 1983	Provincial General	1549	1.8%	8th
Vancouver School Board 1984	Municipal General	?	?	?
Powell River-Sunshine Coast 2001	Provincial General	6316	27.0%	3rd
Surrey-Panorama Ridge 2004	Provincial Byelection	1053	8.4%	3rd
Powell River-Sunshine Coast 2005	Provincial General	6585	25.8%	3rd