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Now this might seem hard to believe, but there was a time when the Green Party of Canada was riding high. If just a few things went their way, they were on track to becoming a mean Green winning machine and supplant the NDP as the progressive party of choice.

But since then, the party has been a cavalcade of absurdities too long to document here. But for me, the lowest point might have come at the end of last year.

That’s when Elizabeth May, after consulting with Prime Minister Mark Carney, voted in support of his budget. And then not too long after, he went and signed an MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith committing to more pipelines for the oil sands.

For Mark Lerien-Young, none of the rolling disaster that is the Green Party of Canada has come as a surprise. After all, he was watching from the inside as much of it went down.

Mark is a longtime writer, journalist, humorist, science podcaster, environmental activist and former Green Party of Canada employee and campaign manager. And he’s just written a book about what it was like to try to navigate the egos and incompetence of the Greens. The book is called Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics, and in it, he gives and insider account of the cult of Elizabeth May.

And some of the details make working in that party sound like living in a house of mirrors. Mark says that at a certain point he came to realize that many people in the Green Party didn’t actually want to elect more MPs because that would mean more work for them.

He writes that “Many books you read come with the proviso that all persons are fictional and any resemblance anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. My disclaimer is that the Green Party of Canada is purely fictional.”

In our conversation, Mark was brutally honest about the frankly absurd way that a party that more than a million Canadians voted for in 2019 does business. And why despite their abysmal recent performances, Elizabeth May is here to stay.

Featured in this episode: Mark Leiren-Young

To Learn More

Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics by Mark Leiren-Young