BC Greens Need a New Leader. Who Wants the Job?

If there’s one thing the BC Greens can agree on, it’s that the political climate has changed.

Last October’s provincial election was a mixed bag for the party. Sonia Furstenau, a popular leader who had demonstrated she could connect with voters, was left without a seat when she lost the riding of Victoria-Beacon Hill.

The Green Party was squeezed to its worst showing since 2013 by a polarized electorate as the BC NDP battled the renewed Conservative Party of BC.

Although the Greens continue to hold two seats in the legislature, the party has been left without a leader since Furstenau resigned in January.

Now the Greens are seeking a new leader from outside the legislature, as the two elected MLAs have said they won’t seek the leadership. People who sign up as party members by Aug. 10 will be able to vote for a leader from Sept. 13 to Sept. 23, with a winner to be announced Sept. 24.

Despite the party’s tough ride in the election, four-time Green candidate Françoise Raunet, who joined the party in 2011, is optimistic.

“When I first joined the Greens, the entire budget for the year was $100,000,” said Raunet. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, she said, the party hauled in more than $210,000 in donations.

Back then, “the party was more idealistic,” she said, “like a policy incubator, to generate good ideas and to come up with good policies.”

The party’s focus has broadened as well.

Interim leader Jeremy Valeriote, who was elected MLA for West Vancouver-Sea to Sky in the 2024 election, said the party’s focus has “shifted more towards affordability and the cost of living.”

The party also took a turn to the left under Furstenau, compared with the party’s direction under previous leader Andrew Weaver.

“Seven, 10 years ago, it was hard to convince people that climate change was going to cost us,” Valeriote said. Now weather events like the 2021 heat dome and atmospheric rivers have made “the economics of climate action and of staying with the status quo” clear, he said.

Here’s how the leadership field is shaping up.

The Vancouver Island doctor

A Belleville, Ontario, native and one-time president of the Ontario College of Family Physicians, Jonathan Kerr fell in love with the Comox Valley after a vacation on Vancouver Island in 2014. The doctor moved with his family and medical practice within the year. He would soon become a linchpin of Green organizing in the area.

Kerr is an experienced Green campaigner and was elected to Comox city council in 2022.

“I’ve been involved in around 12 Green campaigns in the last 11 years,” he said. Only two were for his own candidacy. Kerr got his start on the Courtenay-Comox riding association, which taught him how to “organize a team, be relevant and stay active between election cycles.”

In 2021, together with established players like then-city councillor Nicole Minions, Kerr founded the Comox Greens. With name recognition from conservation organizing and his medical practice, and organizational support, the political newcomer triumphed in a council byelection that same year.

In the 2022 municipal election, Kerr topped the ballot and Minions was elected mayor, with fellow Green newcomer Jenn Meilleur securing a seat on the six-member town council with a second-place finish.

Kerr credits their breakthrough to not lecturing, but listening. Long before election season, the doctor was already stationed outside a local grocery store with a board listing issues and pins for passersby to indicate their priorities. Top of the list? Health care.

After getting elected for the first time, Kerr put together a task force to recruit more family doctors to the valley. His efforts have paid off — 44 new physicians have settled there with more on the way this fall.

As vice-chair of the Comox Valley Regional District, Kerr established a housing authority to tackle the shortage of below-market rentals. When the local South Asian community asked for a cricket pitch to replace the slapdash setup on a baseball court, Kerr and his son stepped up and went to bat for them.

Kerr believes the Greens can build beyond environmentalism. “If you’re an environmental-focused voter, the Greens will always be your home,” he said. “[Premier David] Eby has turned his back on those with a climate conscience, and what he’s doing [with the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project] is a betrayal of progressive voters.”

Thanks to his organizing, the Courtenay-Comox Greens landed a star candidate in former Comox Valley Regional District Area B director Arzeena Hamir and were one of only two ridings provincewide to improve on their 2020 performance. (The other riding was Furstenau’s adopted home of Victoria-Beacon Hill.)

With endorsers ranging from disillusioned ex-New Democrats like Hamir to dyed-in-the-wool Greens like former leader Jane Sterk, Kerr hopes to assemble a coalition just as broad to take the Greens to the next level.

The climate activist aiming to energize the Greens

Emily Lowan wants to make the Greens “a force of damn nature.” Her campaign seeks to capitalize on her youth and energy to sign up 5,000 new members before Aug. 10. How? Well, in her own words, “I’m an organizer.”

She credits her political awakening to a train ride to Ottawa in November 2016, where she and her classmates got the news that Donald Trump been elected president. After returning to Saanich, Lowan recalls, she marched into the principal’s office and made the case to mount a voter registration drive in her high school. It was that campaign that drew her to the Greens, the only party advocating to lower the voting age to 16.

A chance encounter with Divest UVic would result in her election as director of campaigns and community relations. During her tenure, she successfully pressured the administration to remove $80 million worth of fossil fuel investments from its portfolio. Further advocacy would eventually lead her to the Climate Action Network as its fossil fuel supply campaigns lead.

There, she found her cause in “stopping the MAGA-backed PRGT pipeline.” The Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline would carry natural gas from northeast B.C. to an LNG plant on the coast.

Lowan has endorsements from land defenders in the province’s northwest like Tara Marsden and is connected with alumni of Anjali Appadurai’s ill-fated BC NDP leadership bid. Lowan said she seeks to lead not alone, but together with “a strong circle of endorsers and advisers.”

Seeking advice on winning from the left, she recently met with Vancouver Coun. Sean Orr, a socialist who successfully won a council seat in a recent byelection.

Her campaign slogan, “Fight the Oligarchs, Fund Our Future,” is a call towards the long demobilized left. Armed with Zohran Mamdani-inspired communications, she’ll be hoping to pull off a similar upset.

From waiter to candidate

Rounding out the pack is Adam Bremner-Akins, the only candidate from the Lower Mainland.

“Politics is my background,” he said, pointing to his time on the teachers’ picket line with his parents in 2014.

Raised in Port Coquitlam, Bremner-Akins came of age politically in the climate strikes of the late 2010s. His experience with activism spurred him to challenge a former NDP MP in the provincial riding of Coquitlam-Burke Mountain while still a first-year political science student at Simon Fraser University.

Following the unsuccessful campaign, he juggled a job as a restaurant server with BC Green Party duties as its secretary, getting to know the party organization inside out.

“I’ve learned about what people look for in MLA candidates, what’s working for them and what isn’t,” he said.

Now, with two runs for office and four years on the party executive under his belt, Bremner-Akins believes he’s ready to lead and has plenty of ideas on how.

Most encouraging for him? “I’ve never had a policy disagreement with anybody who I talked to at the doors,” he said.

To make the party more welcoming, the SFU student wants to transform the riding associations from “paperwork-centred organizations” into people-centred ones. He also wants the party to sharpen its message, especially towards younger audiences.

“I want to be bold. I want to go out and say [to the NDP and the Conservatives] that you’ve made my life harder.”