Why I’m voting Green whilst hoping Mark Carney wins as PM
Read the original article here | Robin Spano, 24 Apr, 2025 Article
Canada’s 2025 election is not typical.
Donald Trump is threatening our sovereignty. Our economy is squeezing nearly every household budget from the upper middle class on down. And the threat in the air is that it’s going to get a lot worse before the situation stabilizes.
Have we forgotten the environment in all this? Pretty much.
Climate change was a hot talking point back in the 2021 election. But the immediacy of these new concerns is consuming all the bandwidth in our daily anxiety meters. The climate isn’t suddenly fixing itself (the opposite, with Trump at the helm of the world’s second biggest polluter), but it’s a twenty-year concern. Sovereignty and keeping our homes are right now.
So what does this mean for our April 28 election?
It’s a climate of fear
Canadians are divided into two main camps:
Team Poilievre (Conservative) and Team Carney (Liberal)
For different reasons, these two are seen as the only people who can save us from economic ruin at the hands of Donald Trump. The Greens and NDP have been sidelined. Very few people are voting with long term hope in mind. We’re on the back foot, fighting for our homes and our sovereignty, and all other issues have to wait.
Or do they?
I believe that yes, Team Poilievre has some clever fiscal policies that can help the middle class. I love his idea to defer capital gains tax when someone reinvests that money in a Canadian business. I love that he will stop all federal funding to the fossil fuel industry (a position he shares with the Green Party). What I don’t love is that the environment and social policy will both backslide under his leadership. A temporary fix for the economy short term, but it will cost us more (both in dollars and in damage) when we inevitably have to transition away from fossil fuels in the not too distant future. A smarter fiscal move (I think) would be to build more clean tech infrastructure now.
The Liberals have given lots of lip service to the environment in the past, but they continue to support the dying fossil fuel industry with subsidies for new infrastructure. They’ve also (in the past 10 years) been soooo wasteful with our tax dollars, and have had enough corruption allegations that it makes Mulroney look like a saint. So I really understand why people want to run far away from the Liberal Party.
But this is a strange election. We have a climate of fear. (I feel it. Trump is dangerous. And he wants to be our king.) It’s time to forget about punishing parties for past wrongdoing (not like any of them have perfect records anyway), and select our wartime leader.
Enter Mark Carney
Sailing in on the Liberal yacht to save the day, he’s the unicorn of modern politicians — the man who can save our economy, keep us strong against Trump, and keep his eye on a sustainable future all at the same time.
Is he lipstick on a pig? Maybe. Under his leadership, his government has already donated $200 million public dollars toward new LNG (fracking) infrastructure. But he’s in a position I don’t envy — trying to leverage Canada’s resources to give us financial resilience against our American neighbors, while still keeping an eye on the long game of reducing emissions. (Meanwhile trying to win the confidence of Canadians so he can keep doing this for the next 4 years.)
And he has a skill set that I’d really like to see in action. He understands the math and science of climate change and costed budgets like no other leader I’ve seen since Elizabeth May of the Green Party. My mom wrote this post yesterday that dives deeper in to why we both think he’s the right choice.
I also love the way he’s been dealing with Trump. He brings a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, to the negotiating table.
I would really like to see what he can do at Canada’s helm for four years.
When the election was called, I was all set to vote Liberal.
That was before I met my local candidates.
Sea-to-Sky Options
I like Keith Roy (Conservative). We met at an all candidates meeting, and he warmly took on my daughter and her friend’s tough questions. (Like “Why do you support fracking when the carbon footprint might be worse than coal?”) He had some great answers (I disagree with the science, but he had well-backed reasoning that he seemed to sincerely believe) and he went on to explain his party’s fiscal policies in a lovely mix of simplicity that their 9-year-old brains could digest, and respect for their intelligence as people. If only his party would become more forward thinking about the environment and social issues, I’d love to have this guy rep us in Ottawa.
Patrick Weiler is our Liberal incumbent. I have friends who work hard for our environment in different capacities who know Patrick and like him a lot. Maybe he’s great, but I found him defensive with the tougher questions — both from other members of the audience, and from us. We asked him about the Liberal government’s support of LNG and fracking with public money. Rather than explaining his position from a place of confidence, he got defensive and danced around it, falling back on the fact that he’s an environmental lawyer, as if this should make him the expert and we should just trust him. He struck me as a seasoned politician who isn’t particularly interested in listening to or repping his constituents. (He seemed to find tough questions annoying or even offensive.) No big deal — I’m not trying to elect my next friend, and he is part of the party whose leader I’d like to see running the country. But my check mark beside his name became less of a sure thing.
The NDP candidate, Jager Rosenberg is a lovely 18-year-old with no shot of winning. He’s well-spoken and likeable. I think he’ll do great things one day. But not a serious contender this time around.
The local candidate who pops for me is Lauren Greenlaw, running for the Green Party. Lauren is an earth scientist and a Squamish city councillor. She has a zero bullshit way of speaking that cuts to the heart of every issue she speaks to, backed by a wealth of facts and comprehension about how to fix what’s broken in our culture. She’s already hard at work building a network of small businesses to strengthen our local economy up and down the Sea-to-Sky corridor. (That’s whether she’s elected or not — she just sees it as a way to promote economic resilience.) She has a less than 1% chance of winning this seat, but when I imagine an empty ballot, hers is the only name that makes me smile to think about checking the box beside it.
But don’t we have to be strategic?
Only if we’re too scared to let hope in.
Yes, I’d be strategic if a dictator was in the mix — if there was Trump or a Putin or a Hitler who looked poised to win unless we all teamed up to vote for the person who could beat them. I also might be strategic if the polls shift radically before election day — if it looks like Poilievre might be poised to win the prime minister’s job.
But when I see someone like Lauren, who represents my values down to their core, and three others who fail on some big level to nail it, I can’t vote for the second worst and still hope for the world to change for the better. The only way to move mountains is to vote for the people who are actually trying to move them. (Didn’t we learn this from the 2015 election, when Justin promised it would be the last first past the post election — until he realized it was strategic voting that got him elected in the first place?) Lauren is a mountain mover. She has brains, fire, and integrity. Even though my vote will probably not send her to Ottawa, I want my voice to count in her favor, to show how great I think she’d be at the job.
And if by some chance Lauren did beat the odds to win, her voice in Ottawa would be a Green voice — which is very aligned with Mark Carney’s commitment to the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Green Party values sustainability across the board — from fiscal to environmental to social justice. Her vote in parliament would support the causes I believe in, even better than Patrick Weiler’s whipped Liberal vote would do.
My sustainable step for the week is to vote FOR the world I want to see, not against the one I’m scared of.
If you’re on the fence about strategic voting — or even voting for the leader over voting for the local representative, then my suggestion is to try this strategy:
Vote late in the day
In British Columbia, we’re the last time zone in the country. By the time our polls close, we’ll have a good idea who our next prime minister will be. If you head to your poll around 7 p.m., you can likely cast your vote with confidence:
If it looks too close to call between Poilievre and Carney, vote Liberal.
If it looks like Carney has the job — be it a majority or a minority — vote for your favorite local candidate.
I think Liberal and Green votes are both a solid sustainable choice in this election.
Just vote with hope in your heart. It’s the only way we can move those mountains to reach the place we need to be.
