Emily Lowan on Electoral Reform, Resource Extraction and More

Asked what she would do if the B.C. Conservatives promised to change the voting system in exchange for Green support in forming government after a close election, BC Green Leader Emily Lowan paused for a long time.

She was sitting in the shade outside the Fickle Fig Farm Market near the Victoria airport some 16 hours after debating NDP Leader David Eby and Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson in the campaign’s only televised contest between the three.

“The BC Greens, we have core values and hard lines,” Lowan said eventually. “We have a high bar and terms and conditions to partnership. I think those conversations will need to happen after the election.”

During the debate Lowan had set out one goal. “If the Greens held the balance of power, it would be my top priority to advocate for a better voting system, a voting system where we’re not caught between lesser evils, where we’re choosing between broken promises or service cuts, and I think we can find that system in proportional representation.”

The Greens have long advocated for adopting a voting system that better reflects the intent of the province’s voters. In three referendums held since 2005, however, voters have never given the idea enough support to make the change.

Lowan has previously said her preference would be to go ahead and change the system, then ask for voter approval after it has been used a couple of times and people are more familiar with it.

Eby has consistently refused to make the change, saying B.C. voters have clearly rejected it. He bears the scars from the last referendum having overseen the process as attorney general in former premier John Horgan’s government.

The Conservatives, however, would be unlikely partners for the Greens. “I would certainly have concerns about what that might look like,” Lowan allowed. And yet, “I don’t think we can rule anything out at this point.”

Aside from electoral reform, she added, introducing a wealth tax on people who are ultra rich and addressing the cost-of-living crisis are also key Green priorities.

Lowan, who recently turned 26, brought her experience as a climate activist and student politician at the University of Victoria to the BC Green Party leadership race she won last year. She ran on the slogan “Fight the Oligarchs, Fund Our Future” and a promise to hold the NDP government to account.

Under her leadership an agreement that included a commitment for the Greens to support the NDP on confidence measures in the legislature in exchange for movement on some Green priorities was not renewed.

Going into the election, the BC Green Party held two seats. Lowan is running in one of them, Saanich North and the Islands where MLA Rob Botterell chose not to run again. Another Green, Adam Olsen, represented the constituency from 2017 to 2024.

The other is West Vancouver-Sea to Sky where Jeremy Valeriote won in 2024 by a narrow margin of 676 votes.

In the past the Greens have done well on southern Vancouver Island and have hoped to break through in other parts of the province, but polling at around 10 per cent the party will be doing well to hold the seats it has.

NDP warns vote-splitting could elect Conservatives

That dynamic led Eby to make direct appeals in the campaign’s final days to people considering voting for Green candidates.

“I am asking Green voters to think very carefully about who could be around the cabinet table in relation to a government that’s going to form and what kind of government they want for British Columbia,” he said at an announcement Monday in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.

“I think the values of people who are thinking about voting Green and Green candidates and the Green leader are very consistent with the values of New Democrats,” Eby said, adding they want strong public services, public health care, affordable childcare everywhere in the province and a sustainable economy.

“It’s also very, very clear, that although I do respect Miss Lowan very much, she will not be the premier next week,” he said, warning that there are constituencies like North Island where the vote split between NDP and Green candidates allows Conservatives to win. “It is between the Conservatives and the NDP.”

The NDP government and his leadership has not been perfect, he has said several times, but he will always stand up for the province and the country in a way that the Conservatives with their questionable and controversial candidates and party officials will not.

In a statement Lowan accused Eby of “trying to scare British Columbians into voting for him” after calling the election two years early.

“He says the differences between us are small,” she said. “Tell that to the families waiting on the $10-a-day child care he froze, the seniors waiting on the seven long-term care homes he delayed and the renters still waiting for housing they can actually afford. Tell it to the nurses I stood with on the picket line this summer, to the First Nations who watched him try to suspend parts of DRIPA, and to everyone still waiting for the climate action he ran away from.”

She noted endorsements she’s received from NDP stalwarts Svend Robinson, a longtime Member of Parliament for the party, and Harold Steves, a former Richmond councillor who served in Dave Barrett’s NDP government in the 1970s.

“Premier Eby says he hasn’t been perfect,” she said. “British Columbians aren’t asking for perfect. They’re asking for a government that keeps its word, makes life affordable and makes sure care is there when they need it.”

Greens push for proportional representation

Lowan had given a similar answer in the debate to a question about the potential for vote splitting. “It is clear that British Columbians want to believe in better,” she said after plugging proportional representation. “We don’t want to be stuck between two lesser evils.”

Minority governments are often the best ones and the parties should do the hard work of inspiring voters instead of fearmongering, she said. “We are inspiring thousands of new people into our party under the promise that we can deliver a life you can afford and care you can count on.”

Talking with The Tyee, Lowan said she felt she had succeeded at presenting the core of the Green Party’s vision despite the challenges of the debate format and limits on speaking times.

“There was so much I felt I didn’t say, but I felt like I was really able to make the best of the time that I had and hold both parties to account,” she said.

In particular, Lowan said, she was surprised there wasn’t a deeper conversation about resource extraction, a topic that would have made the contrast between the Greens and the other two parties sharper.

“Maybe that was strategic on their part,” she said, “because there really isn’t much daylight between the BC NDP and the Conservatives on resource extraction. We have seen a continuation of the same rip it and ship it extraction model under the BC NDP that is primarily benefiting foreign shareholders.”

The Conservatives talk about removing red tape to speed development while the NDP already seems to be moving at full speed on it, she continued. “I think we’ve seen the BC NDP grant Christy Clark’s entire wish list on LNG. I frankly do not know how they could do more to speed up these projects and shovel more public money out the door for foreign corporations.”

Climate change missing from TV debate

Lowan said she was also surprised that the debate didn’t include a single question about climate and carbon emissions.

“This is an area where we really diverge,” she said. “We’re seeing the BC NDP build large-scale projects, large-scale clean energy, to power dirty fossil fuels.” The government is building the North Coast Transmission Line to electrify projects that will increase fracking for natural gas that’s mainly for export, she said.

The Greens would instead develop clean energy for local use, Lowan said. “We want to actually be supporting focusing our government resources on communities who want to build utility-scale solar, who want to look at geothermal, who want to have community owned energy.”

During the campaign the NDP has also “rolled out some golden oldies on protecting old growth that they have never lived up to,” she said. “Why should voters believe them after nine years of a failing record on climate and the environment?”

On forestry in general the NDP has failed to advance the kind of systemic change that’s needed. “They’re slapping Band-Aids on a bullet wound,” she said, adding that instead of “ripping and shipping jobs, profits and forests overseas” the Greens would work to keep as much as possible of the value from logging in the province.

What then does she make of the charge that the Greens are splitting the progressive vote?

“Parties change and this BC NDP has changed,” she said, adding that it’s very different from the party that formed government with Green support in 2017. “It’s now a right leaning party…. The BC Greens are the only party that represents progressive politics today.”

It’s lazy for the BC NDP to rely on fearmongering about vote splitting to maintain power, she said. “I think I would have more respect for them if they did anything with their power.”

Lowan has also suggested that many working people, including union members, feel abandoned by the government.

“Too many people who voted NDP their whole lives are watching rents climb, being sent to the picket lines and are wondering who is still fighting for them,” she said, adding that both main parties are captured by corporate interests.

One union leader who has moved from the NDP to the Greens is Carolyn Howe, the BC Green Party candidate in Victoria-Swan Lake.

Howe is the president of the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association, the union that represents teachers in the capital. She met Lowan on Labour Day and only agreed to be the party’s candidate on the Sunday before Eby called the election.

Like many teachers, Howe said, she became frustrated with the lack of support and investment in public education and disappointed in the NDP’s failure to fulfill its past promises.

“I was a [NDP] party member,” she said. “I voted for David Eby in the leadership race, so it’s a significant thing and I would definitely say I actually had hoped that David Eby would take the party in a better direction than it had been going.”

The NDP has backed off on its efforts to address the toxic drug crisis and been a disappointment on multiple fronts, not just education, she said. Most of the province’s union leadership is supporting the NDP and clearly doesn’t want a Conservative government, she added, but they may not have the membership with them.

“The rank and file are struggling with the cost of living,” she said. “The rank and file have been hurt by the policies of the NDP.”

For her, she said, it was an easy decision to leave the NDP.

“On the one hand I see this tired party that seems to be completely out of ideas, really entrenched in conservative ways of thinking,” she said.

“At the same time I see this dynamic, super intelligent young party leader coming out and talking about the kind of world and the kind of province that people believe is possible and how we can take real concrete steps to get there.”

Advance polls have been open this week and the final voting day is Saturday.