Will the BC Greens’ ‘Experiment’ Pay Off?

The BC Greens are hoping dissatisfaction with David Eby’s NDP government among left-wing voters will lead to seat gains, including for new leader Emily Lowan.

After becoming leader of the Greens in September 2025, Lowan has moved to differentiate her party from the NDP. In February she ended the co-operation agreement with the NDP. In the leaders’ debate last week Lowan said during that if the Greens hold the “balance of responsibility” in a minority government, their support would depend on a commitment to reform the voting system to make it more proportional.

Despite the short runway to prepare for the snap election called by NDP Leader David Eby on Sept. 22, Lowan’s party is fielding 74 candidates across the province, five more than the party had in the last election in 2024. Four different polls are showing support for the Greens at between eight and 11 per cent. In 2024, the Greens received 8.2 per cent of the vote.

“Emily has always called this movement an experiment,” said Prym Goodacre, the party’s press secretary.

The provincial party is hoping for a boost from a historic win in Vancouver Saturday when Green candidate Pete Fry was voted in as mayor along with a progressive coalition that included four other Green councillors, the best showing the Green Party of Vancouver has ever had.

“Vancouver made history last night. [Pete Fry] is now the first Green mayor of a major Canadian city!” Lowan cheered in an Instagram post on election night.

She then laid out the case for the Greens in provincial politics.

“Pete ran on making Vancouver a city people can actually afford and putting affordability first in every decision,” she wrote. “That’s the same fight BC Greens are bringing across the province. Green politics aren’t just popular, they’re winning. Now it’s B.C.’s turn.”

The day after the civic election, Eby appealed to voters who are thinking about voting Green, warning them to choose the NDP instead to avoid splitting the left-wing vote and delivering a victory to the Conservatives.

Since Lowan won the leadership, the Green Party has promoted a social media-forward, populist message tied to grassroots organizing. In early 2026, Lowan spearheaded a campaign to pressure the B.C. company that owns Save-On-Foods to stop its sale of a Virginia property to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in the midst of a brutal immigration crackdown in the United States.

Lowan then launched a viral campaign exposing American billionaires buying up farmland in the northern community of Dunster and anti-AI data centre activism in Vancouver, targeting issues that are resonating with younger voters.

Lowan is 26 and, with her focus on these issues, has stayed engaged with the political organizing and climate activism milieu she came out of. Those grassroots networks helped the party recruit candidates.

Under Lowan’s leadership, the Greens have also undergone a radical brand refresh. The party’s aesthetics have swerved towards DIY grunge posters and direct-to-camera clips common on TikTok and Instagram Reels. The Greens now even have a mascot, Provy the Province — a cartoon green anthromorph of British Columbia. All this is to “bring a feeling of joy, that [politics] doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom,” Goodacre said.

Since 2017, parties need two MLAs to receive official party status, which brings additional funding and staff. The Greens held two ridings, Saanich North and the Islands and West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, before the election call.

Lowan is running in Saanich North and the Islands, a riding that was held by Green MLA Rob Botterell, who is not running again. Federal Green Leader Elizabeth May has represented overlapping turf for the last 15 years, making it some of the Greenest pastures in the whole country. But the Greens won the provincial riding by only four percentage points in 2024.

Incumbent MLA Jeremy Valeriote faces more of a fight in West Vancouver-Sea to Sky. Lowan’s proposed wealth tax would impact affluent West Vancouver residents and he will need to consolidate the progressive vote in Squamish and Whistler to make up ground.

Aiding both him and Lowan are the NDP’s relatively low-profile candidates. In West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, in 2024, B.C. Conservative candidate Yuri Fulmer came second with the NDP candidate in third place. In Saanich North and the Island, Lowan is running against first-time BC NDP candidate Kala Bryson. In 2024, the BC NDP candidate who ran against Botterell lost by 1,350 votes.

In both ridings, the Greens could cast themselves as the leading option to block the Conservatives.

The party is also running a high-profile candidate in Saanich South. Lisa Lapointe is a former chief coroner for B.C. and is known for advocating for harm reduction approaches such as safe supply in the midst of the province’s deadly opioid overdose crisis. She has also spoken out against a political backlash to harm reduction approaches like decriminalization, safe supply and overdose prevention sites.

Saanich South was won by Lana Popham in 2024 with a vote share of 50 per cent. The Conservative candidate came in second with 32 per cent of the vote, while the Green candidate placed third with 17 per cent.

Popham is not running. Richard Zussman, a well-known former political journalist, is running in the riding for the NDP this time around.

For much of the past year Lowan has been focused on wooing the NDP’s left flank. In her first weeks as leader, she made appearances at the BC General Employees’ Union picket line during a 2025 government workers’ strike. Her courtship of labour is a change from former Green leader Andrew Weaver, who forced the NDP to kill card check unionization in 2019 when the parties were in coalition together.

Carolyn Howe, president of her union local in the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association, is a recent convert to the Greens. Howe began teaching in 2005, and found herself out of the classroom and on a wildcat strike against the BC Liberals within six weeks on the job. She took out an NDP membership soon after and volunteered for the party, but her enthusiasm has cooled over the last nine years of the BC NDP in power and left her “completely disillusioned.”

“Families are at the breaking point,” Howe said, “And teachers feel like schools are the last social service standing for so many families who are really desperate for support.”

Her younger colleagues saw this too, and urged her to run, Howe said. She initially brushed them off, but a chance encounter with Lowan at a Labour Day picnic last month made her start seriously considering running with the party. Her decision stands in contrast to the leaders of major unions in the province, who remain supportive of the New Democrats.

Howe was on the ballot a month later as the candidate in Victoria-Swan Lake. She’s fighting for priorities similar to the NDP’s, such as more money for learning support services and better ventilation and cooling for classrooms.

Looking beyond labour, the BC NDP is also on shaky ground with Indigenous leaders over Eby’s failed attempts to amend the Declaration of Indigenous Peoples Act, which he later backtracked on. Stewart Phillip, the Grand Chief of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, has endorsed Lowan as a candidate in Saanich North and the Islands, but has endorsed Eby as premier.

Eby has also disappointed non-profit housing organizations and municipal leaders by pausing the $3.3 billion Community Housing Fund, a decision that has led to a projected loss of 3,500 future affordable housing units.

Vancouver-Strathcona is one of the safest BC NDP seats in the province. The Green candidate there, Tanya Webking, has deep roots in the riding.

“I’ve been working in that neighbourhood for 30 years,” she says. “People know me from all sorts of community work, from being a grassroots support worker and building community connections down there.”

Beyond her personal connections, Webking credits rising Green support in the riding to “people who tried to believe in the BC NDP and realize now that they’ve lost their way.” She chose to run for the Greens this election after running for Vancouver city council in 2022 with COPE.

The NDP has been in power for nine years, Webking said. “If they were going to do something for the working class and for affordability, they would have already done it.”

With files from Andrew MacLeod