How a Zoomer Became Leader of the BC Green Party

“This campaign was electrifying,” Emily Lowan told supporters after bounding to the stage at a Victoria hotel.

“It was a lightning rod of hope. We brought in thousands of new members to this party, many of whom were completely disillusioned with politics.”

The climate activist and organizer scored a decisive win last week just days after turning 25, making her the first zoomer to lead an official party in Canada.

Her victory is a sign that the climate movement still has the energy to capture voters. Lowan boasted of signing up “thousands of new members,” including “nearly a tenfold increase of youth membership under the age of 30.” Lowan received 3,189 votes out of the 5,259 votes cast, beating Jonathan Kerr, a Comox municipal councillor and doctor, and Adam Bremner-Akins, a student and party official.

So how did she do it?

Lowan’s campaign staked itself on appealing to disillusioned progressives dissatisfied with the status quo.

To excite new voters, Lowan’s team crafted bold policies like reinstating vacancy control for rental housing, implementing a land value tax on undeveloped land in urban and residential areas, and aggressively expanding unionization — especially in precarious industries such as food service and gig work. This was in stark contrast to former leaders like Andrew Weaver, who sank card-check unionization, and Sonia Furstenau, whose 2024 platform did not mention the word “union” once.

Lowan’s messaging also linked fossil fuel projects like the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line with Donald Trump donors; promised grocery price caps; and adopted the slogan “Fight the oligarchs, fund our future.”

Much like the prospective members they aimed to recruit, neither campaign manager George Radner nor deputy campaign manager Lindsey Asis were immersed in electoral politics.

Aside from a short stint as assistant campaign manager for Anjali Appadurai’s 2022 BC NDP leadership bid, Radner worked as the executive director for the educational non-profit Be the Change Earth Alliance. Asis cut her teeth in a campaign to ban fracking in her hometown of Denton, Texas, and worked in various non-profits before moving to Victoria.

Both remember 2019 well. The year was a watershed for environmentalism worldwide, with youth climate strikes bringing tens of thousands of young people into the streets. As the new year dawned and the Wetʼsuwetʼen campaign against Coastal GasLink picked up steam, ties between First Nations and climate activists deepened.

But then, Radner recalled, the COVID-19 pandemic “knocked the wind out of our sails.”

The BC Green Party had also gone through a tumultuous period. With just three MLAs, B.C.’s Greens had held an influential position of power after the 2017 provincial election, lending support to the BC NDP to make it possible for the party to operate as a minority government. At that time, the Greens were led by then-MLA Weaver, but Weaver would leave the party in early 2020 and sit as an Independent after a falling-out with MLAs Sonia Furstenau and Adam Olsen. Furstenau then replaced Weaver as leader in 2020.

In the fall of 2020, a snap election gave the BC NDP a clean majority — meaning the Greens no longer held the same kind of influence over the governing party.

In 2022, the environmental movement had hopes for Appadurai’s run against David Eby to lead the BC NDP after John Horgan stepped down. But Appadurai’s campaign was disqualified by the party executive, making Eby the presumptive premier by default.

Both the federal Liberals and the BC NDP backtracked on the carbon tax under a wave of voter backlash, and both governments have doubled down on fossil fuel projects as a way to kick-start Canada’s economy in the face of tariff threats from the Trump administration.

The BC Greens suffered another blow in the 2024 provincial election when Furstenau lost her seat and subsequently stepped down as leader.

The party came out of the 2024 election still holding two seats in the legislature — West Vancouver-Sea to Sky MLA Jeremy Valeriote, and Rob Botterell, who represents Saanich North and the Islands. By the end of 2024, the Greens seemed to be on the back foot culturally, electorally and politically.

It was in that vacuum that the party came to Lowan.

“I thought about it, talked to different people, even tried to convince lots of different friends and organizers to run,” she said. “But I ended up with a lot of fingers pointed back at me.”

Lowan herself was skeptical, in no small part due to her history with political parties. In 2017, her voter registration drive among fellow students led her to the BC Greens, who were campaigning to lower the voting age to 16. Her first paid political job was as volunteer co-ordinator on the unsuccessful 2019 campaign to elect David Merner, a well-known lawyer and one-time federal Liberal, as a Green MP.

While the BC Greens were the “open door” that brought her into climate activism, Lowan said she felt unrepresented under Weaver’s leadership as a young working-class person and drifted away from party politics. But the campaign skills she had acquired set her on a path to become the director of campaigns and community relations at the University of Victoria’s student union, where she successfully divested more than $80 million away from fossil fuel investments.

After university, she worked at the Climate Action Network, strategizing with Indigenous activists up north on how to resist the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line.

As she mulled over the idea of running for BC Green leader in late spring, she grew fixated on the idea. The open leadership was a tempting platform from which she could “work with movements that change the terrain and political calculus” on a whole new level. Following months of deliberation with confidants, she took the plunge with a flashy announcement video, produced by social media director Thomas Reimer.

She was in.

Within the first 10 minutes of its posting, Lowan knew she was already breaking new ground.

“It was an overwhelming flood of comments and shares that extended far beyond the circle of activists,” she said. But would anybody actually show up to the launch?

That was the question that hung on the mind of Prym Goodacre. A friend of Lowan’s since her days at UVic (and later the campaign’s Victoria canvassing lead), she had been brought on to organize their first in-person campaign event.

“I remember showing up the day of, and we’d planned to put out 50 chairs — enough for extra people, but not too much that there’d be lots of empty seats.” Minutes after the doors opened, she realized, “Oh God, we’re going to need more chairs.”

By the time the event had wrapped up and they did the math, the total attendance came in at 150, three times their original expectations.

Fresh off a successful launch, the campaign’s aesthetics began to come into focus as well. For Reimer, the visuals and messaging of the campaign were intertwined. Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic candidate for New York mayor with a mastery of social media, was a huge inspiration.

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A post shared by Emily Lowan (@emilylowan)

“His bold, colourful, simple tactile branding was really attractive for communicating easily digestible and attractive formats,” said Reimer.

Asis took notes on Mamdani’s campaign as well.

“[We] never dumbed things down or patronized [voters], but offered them real solutions that gave them a sense of agency and empowerment,” Asis said.

Goodacre and Hassan Merali, among others on the campaign’s policy team, worked overtime to churn out policies and break new ground in the province’s politics.

Both Goodacre and Lowan had spent time in Victoria’s DIY arts and music scene, and the campaign drew lots of inspiration from it. What emerged was a retro scrapbook style that resembled a yearbook collage from the 2000s, featuring bold, punchy slogans in the font Fraunces Black. The vaguely nostalgic aesthetic was an intentional choice by the campaign, bridging the gap between the party stalwarts and the groundswell of new activists.

The campaign’s statement on Palestine, calling for “immediate action to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza” and divesting public pensions from “companies complicit in genocide,” was a turning point. Combined with her promises to hike taxes on corporations and the richest one per cent to fund initiatives such as eliminating post-secondary tuition for all domestic students, and making transit fare-free provincewide by 2035, it was proof that she would be a firmly left-wing Green leader.

“It identified her as someone outside the traditional sphere of influence,” Reimer recalled.

For many of her generation who are interested in politics and social justice issues, but aren’t attached to a particular party, it was a sign that she was going to do things differently.

Rather than the traditional top-down approach, the campaign was very decentralized. Radner describes it as trying “to give people lots of ownership over the work they do.”

With Lowan generating energy at the grassroots level, they were able to bring in volunteers by sharing their strategy and “letting them lead the work in a way they’re excited about.”

But there was lots of traditional campaigning as well. Lowan’s get-out-the-vote phone-banking operation was successful because of the high number of volunteers involved, according to campaign insiders. Phone-banking co-ordinator AK Saini said the campaign held virtual volunteer training sessions “twice a day, every day, for four weeks straight.”

Her victory comes amid a strange milieu — the federal Liberals have thrown climate change to the wayside in the midst of a global turning away from environmental consciousness. Yet left-wing forces are gaining traction as well: Zohran Mamdani appears on track to take the mayoralty of the Big Apple; socialist Sean Orr topped the polls in April’s Vancouver city council byelection; and Zack Polanski just won the leadership of the U.K. Green Party. All are proof that grassroots movements can revitalize brands that look past their prime.

When Furstenau resigned the leadership, the BC Greens were in an identity crisis. Furstenau had put out some of the most detailed left-wing policies of any party in Canada, and yet their campaign chair, Adam Olsen, insisted they were centrists. As the progressive third party, the Greens got trampled by duelling waves of strategic voting and fury towards the status quo during the 2024 provincial election. The federal election in 2025 would see a similar dynamic, with the NDP decimated as a result. Now, Lowan’s victory shows that the BC Greens think the path back to power is on the left.

There is a wide gap on the left side of the spectrum that Lowan can fill. The provincial Conservatives are in disarray after a messy leadership review. The BC NDP has embraced resource projects such as Ksi Lisims LNG and Prince Rupert Gas Transmission in pursuit of revenue, and have so far rejected calls to implement stricter rent control.

With her leadership secured, Lowan will now have to aim beyond the traditional divide between progressives and free enterprise in hopes of reaching some of the 1.5 million people who didn’t even bother voting last year.

Winning a seat in either a byelection or a general election will now be the next challenge for Lowan — one that will test whether she can win over voters and not just Green Party members.

“I think my campaign really met that deep hunger of this new generation, with the fire to fight for B.C. and a livable future,” she told media following her win.