Adriane Carr, Green Champion, Leaves Vancouver’s City Hall

Adriane Carr, a champion of Green politics and the longest-serving politician on Vancouver’s city council, has resigned from her seat.

Carr mulled over the possibility during the winter holiday and made the announcement at city hall on Jan. 15.

She cited her frustrations with the governing style of the ABC Vancouver party, which holds a council majority with seven out of 10 seats, plus Mayor Ken Sim at the helm. In addition to council, voters elected enough ABC politicians in 2022 to hand them majorities on the school and park boards.

“This supermajority ABC council has convinced me it’s better for democracy to have a mix of parties and councillors who are prepared to collaborate and co-ordinate with a goal of putting public interests first,” said Carr during her announcement.

As a Green politician in a landscape of bigger parties, she’s used to being the underdog. But working with ABC in power proved especially trying.

Some recent controversies include ABC’s attempts to suspend the work of the city’s integrity commissioner and to reverse a ban on natural gas after revelations about meeting with lobbyists from the sector.

Carr was particularly upset when the ABC majority removed opposition councillors from special appointments last year. Carr was stripped of her seats on the Metro Vancouver board and the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre.

ABC’s governing style has also led to discord within the party, with decisions such as a move to abolish the park board. As a result, some of its own elected officials, such as park board chair Laura Christensen and school board chair Victoria Jung, ditched the party and have chosen to sit as independents.

“I have lost trust and confidence in the mayor,” said Carr. “In my opinion, some of his actions do not genuinely mesh with his mantra that we are all one team.”

Byelection battle

Carr is a stalwart of Green Party politics in all three levels of government.

While she wasn’t elected to office in a number of early runs, she had breakthroughs that helped raise her own profile and that of the Greens. As part of her run in the 2001 provincial election, she was invited to participate in party leader debates alongside Gordon Campbell of the BC Liberals and Ujjal Dosanjh of the BC NDP.

In 2011, Carr made history as the first Green councillor to be elected in Vancouver, kicking off the first of four consecutive terms. In her 2014 and 2018 runs, she garnered the most votes out of any council candidate. *

Leaving now in the middle of her fourth term doesn’t mean she’ll disappear from public life entirely.

“I was finding it hard to know how I can make progress on a range of issues that I care passionately about, especially the climate mitigation and adaption work that we need to do to keep this city and its people safe,” Carr told The Tyee. “So that’s when I was seriously saying to myself, maybe there’s more work I could do in civil society.”

A byelection had already been triggered when OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle was elected to legislature with the BC NDP last fall. This gave Carr a push to consider her decision so that Vancouverites can select two new councillors at once.

The byelection for the seats will take place on April 5. There are advance voting dates and citizens can also cast mail-in ballots.

In a co-ordinated attempt to preserve the progressive vote, the Greens, OneCity and the Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE, will be running one candidate each.

As for Carr, she plans to spend more time with her children and grandchildren and her husband, Paul George, co-founder of the Wilderness Committee.

George was also a founder of the Green Party of BC, and the two intend to write a book about Green politics. And Carr is musing about helping municipalities sue Big Oil, after her motion to do so in Vancouver was scrapped when ABC was elected to office.

The Tyee spoke with Carr about her departure, her time in office and what it means to be Green. The conversation has been edited and condensed for brevity.

The Tyee: In your resignation, you talked about the benefits of a council with a “mix of parties and councillors.” That was the makeup of the 2018 to 2022 minority council with Mayor Kennedy Stewart, but it had a reputation for holding long meetings and more meetings than usual. Do you think this is better for the public than a majority?

Adriane Carr: Absolutely. I do believe it was better in terms of real democracy. Real democracy is not, in my mind, an easy or fast process. It can be if everybody’s on the same page around goals and the way to achieve them, but oftentimes, the kinds of conversations to work out differences of opinion or different ways to approach a solution take time.

Democracy is not just about voting every time there is an election. I really relish the fact that we have a very robust public input process at the city, whether it be public hearings, standing committees or advisory committees, that compromise of people from the public. From this come reports that are tabled at council; we debate it and vote on it. To me, that is probably the best process of democracy that anyone could expect.

You mention the pitfalls of majorities and losing trust with the ABC majority. In your first two terms, you served under a majority held by the Vision Vancouver party. What was different about your experiences?

I was the single Green on my first two terms under Vision. There was an uphill learning curve to understanding what the role of council was. Honestly, that takes about a year to really understand the cycle that you go through at the council table, including the budget cycle and the cycle for all the various departments reporting on their top agenda items and policy changes.

We also get tons of invitations, dozens every week from organizations. Given that I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities at the council table, other than learning the ropes, I just accepted all the invitations I could possibly schedule. I thought that was the best possible way that I could have been grounded in public opinion and the issues that people are concerned about, visions of how they wanted the city to develop their hopes and aspirations. I just loved those years because I felt like I became so knowledgeable talking to people and going to every neighbourhood in the city.

Council did rotate the deputy mayor and acting mayor roles through the councillors. But there was one point that Vision did stop the process. Andrea Reimer became the deputy mayor and Raymond Louie acting mayor. They were very specific people who were very close to Mayor Gregor Robertson. But it wasn’t like they were only excluding non-Vision people; there were Vision people who were excluded too.

I have no idea how other people in the Vision caucus felt about that, but that’s what happened under ABC. I feel like there’d be some criticism of Mayor Ken Sim and the ABC caucus for moves, including things like the park board [dissolution]. It felt to me there was a retribution going on, the exclusion of people who, certainly by all appearances, weren’t part of the team.

It was incredibly disappointing. From the very beginning of this term, we had talked about being all one team. A move like that is so counter to the words.

Whether as the lone Green voice or part of a Green minority, what’s the secret to getting things done?

Listening. Being honest. Getting good information and sharing it.

I think democracy only works well if you follow those three things. That’s what happened during my third term when we did have a plethora of parties, no party of the majority, that required elected councillors to actually listen to each other, to understand points of view, so that you could come up with some direction that people could agree on. That took time, and that’s why I think that term was the most democratic.

Maybe it was COVID that prompted that too, the requirement to really work as a team, to power through, to keep the city running through very difficult circumstances, supporting our staff who did so much overtime work.

Honest to goodness, I don’t think it helped when the former mayor [Kennedy Stewart] actually said that he thought the council was dysfunctional. Not helpful.

I’m proud of that work. It was long and arduous, yes, and meetings got a bit frustrating because of their length. I think I chaired some issues that lasted for five days; if I remember correctly, it was Jean Swanson’s defund the police motion. I did learn from that particular progress, listening to people who council was obliged to hear out because they were registered speakers. We had hundreds of speakers to a number of controversial issues or important issues, like the Vancouver Plan and the Broadway Plan, and had several years of public involvement.

What those long meetings meant was the involvement of citizens, people who can express their hopes, their desires, their fears and concerns to decision-makers.

You came in first in the vote during your second term in 2014 and your third term in 2018. Do you see this as you and the Green brand doing well? Or do you see this as voters of big parties wanting you to help hold the majority to account?

All of the above. I did have some public recognition, which helped, although I just squeaked in in my first term. It was by 91 votes. Oh my God, that night was so stressful. There was such jubilation at the end of it. So part of it was me, part of it was just increasing recognition that the Green Party has a very valuable play in the spectrum of politics.

Greens have been surging in countries around the world, almost all of which have proportional representation. Greens do well under that, and in many cases form partnerships with other parties in coalition governments. Greens are founded in very clear principles based in values like social equity, sustainability and real democracy. I think people see that in the way Green politicians act and present themselves during election campaigns.

What were some of the big hurdles over the years trying to get voters familiar with Green politics?

You have to get out there. So you need the money to get out there. We never had the money to put on big ad campaigns. We by far focused on grassroots electioneering. We certainly have people to go door to door. It might have been the 2014 election that we had this real opportunity to stuff our newspaper all about the Greens into the Georgia Straight — it was the “Best of Vancouver” issue and everybody was picking it up. Our biggest media spot other than the Georgia Straight was putting ads in elevators in highrise apartments in the West End. We stood on corners. We did a lot of street canvassing. Thank goodness the media was open to interviewing myself and subsequently other Greens that got elected.

And then of course getting Elizabeth May elected federally, the Greens provincially forming a coalition government [in 2017]. It’s been slower under first-past-the-post, but I think the public is understanding that the Greens have a particular set of goals that are good for people, for the economy, for our planet, and they want us to be part of the decision-making process.

OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle left municipal politics to become an MLA with the BC NDP, but she also cited the same frustrations you did about being part of the opposition. What were your conversations like about calling it quits?

I had let her know that I was seriously considering it. [Later,] the two of us agreed that it would be best if our parties collaborated and didn’t compete with each other in the byelection. If you remember when Hector Bremner won, the voter turnout was terrible. All sorts of parties were running candidates. The left split and the right sailed through.

[Editor’s note: Hector Bremner was a city councillor from the pro-business NPA party who won the 2017 byelection.]

I don’t think of the Greens as left, but that’s what people were saying. I think of the Greens as progressive. As I often say about the Greens: we are neither left nor right, but ahead.

I realized that it would be far better to pose to the public the wisdom of electing a Green to replace an outgoing Green and electing a OneCity member to replace an outgoing OneCity member. There’s a niceness to that, as well as logic.

Currently, your fellow Green Pete Fry is the only councillor left who’s not a part of ABC. Do you have any words for him?

He and I formed not only a strong partnership on council, conferring with each other and supporting each other in terms of initiatives that are good for the city, but we’ve become really good friends. That was also true with Christine Boyle. In the first part of this term, the three of us became good buddies and really did learn from each other, share information and collaborate on issues. You might remember that the three of us put on the town hall, for example, around the park board motion that the mayor had put forward.

It can be lonely. I was the sole Green in my first two terms. I remember vividly in one council meeting being just piled on and berated. I can’t even remember what the issue was. But the Vision councillors were just jumping on me. I can’t say they were yelling at me, but it was strong language.

I was sitting next to [NPA Coun.] Elizabeth Ball. It was so helpful to have somebody sit next to you that wasn’t Vision. And she patted me on the knee and she said, “Just take a deep breath.”

It’s that kind of camaraderie and mutual support that you do need, because it can be tough at the council table. You need colleagues you can talk with, share ideas with and that you can move them forward with — you actually do need a seconder to move forward. The vast majority of my motions were seconded by either Mayor Gregor Robertson or Andrea Reimer, which was helpful.

What are some accomplishments you’re proudest of?

On [the] Metro Vancouver [board], I loved that position.

When ABC approached me at the beginning of this past term and asked if I wanted certain appointments, I said I would love to get your support and be on the Climate Action Committee and be appointed chair again. I got halfway through the Climate 2050 plan. It has 10 different road maps and we only got half of them done in that term. [Mayor Sim granted the appointment] but it was taken away when he gave his latest recommendations to council.

In terms of my work on council, my first motion in the 2018 term was to embark on the Vancouver Plan, a citywide plan. I heard people’s excitement about this, the whole idea of a more livable city, neighbourhoods where you could meet all of your needs simply on a walk or taking a bike.

There was the motion to reduce food waste in the city, the motion to create more permanent neighbourhood gardens, the motion to increase the tree canopy. I established a motion to dedicate $5 million in the budget to retrofitting buildings, that included the retrofitting of our public libraries so that every branch can be a safe place of retreat with cooling in a potential heat dome. Vancouver was the first city in the world to actually implement UNDRIP [United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples]. I was so proud of that. Collaboration with Vancouver’s three Host Nations has been one of the highlights of my time in office.

My very last motion was supported unanimously at the council table. There was real excitement in the mayor’s office. It was something I’d worked on for a number of terms, and that was trying to find some way to raise funds to speed up the retrofit of housing in the city, especially below-market housing. It was to explore an offer for people who fly through the Vancouver airport a chance to voluntarily offer an offset, a carbon offset donation, with that money going into the retrofitting of affordable housing units.

[Editor’s note: This is to be timed with the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Vancouver.]

You’ve been on council since 2011. After you announced your resignation, you’ve still been keeping busy, helping the Greens select a candidate to replace you in the byelection. Have you had some personal time too?

I’ve spent time with family on the Sunshine Coast. Just taking daily walks with my daughter and my youngest grandson — and the snuggling! It feels good. The ability to spend some time nurturing those little new ones, it warms my heart.

* Story updated on Feb. 4 at 2:01 p.m. to correct that Carr was the first Green councillor in Vancouver, not in a Canadian municipality. A Green councillor was elected in Victoria before Carr.