The inside story of the federal Green Party remains untold. It must have its share of intrigue and score-settling. What little that has been said touches on apocalyptic themes. Annamie Paul, the Party’s only Black Jewish leader, likened her tenure to crawling over broken glass. “It has been extremely painful,” she told reporters in 2021. “It has been the worst period of my life.”
The Party was first registered in 1984. Once fresh and new, it has faded with time and now has the persona of the Raging Grannies, a 1980s troupe that appeared on the periphery of street protests wearing CBC buttons and foretelling doom over Cruise Missile tests.
The bookshelf of Green Party literature remains thin. David Chernushenko, former deputy leader, once self-published a science fiction novel Burning Souls. It predicted by 2025 Canadian civilization would be reduced to Cascadia, an armed colony in southern British Columbia besieged by four million Latin American famine refugees: “Could Cascadia possibly hold off such a torrent? Or would something else kill those wretched folks first? Pity anyone on the open road.”
Now it is Jo-Ann Roberts’ turn. The former CBC Radio host was one of four women to lead the Party in three years. “Readers don’t have to agree with everything in this book,” she writes.
Storm The Ballot Box is part memoir. Roberts is the daughter of a United Church minister from York County, New Brunswick, where political division was sharply drawn. “There was a time when deciding how to vote was as simple as knowing one’s family preference for the Liberals or the Conservatives,” she writes.
Roberts’ people were Liberals. She recalls at age 12 being taken by her father to a Pierre Trudeau campaign rally in Charlottetown. “The very sexy Trudeau shook my hand,” she recalls. “The rest of the world may have had the Rolling Stones or the Beatles but the Stones didn’t come to sleepy little Charlottetown. Pierre Elliot Trudeau was my rock star. Politics was exciting.”
Storm The Ballot Box tries to account for the Party’s 40 years of futility. In all that time it elected four Members of Parliament. “Why aren’t there more Greens in the House of Commons and in our provincial legislatures?” asks Roberts. “The answer seemed simple. Our electoral system was created for a two-party system and that needs to change. My next question for myself was, so why doesn’t it change?”
Here is the point of Roberts’ work, a lively summary of Green Party reforms to the electoral system. Not every suggestion is sound or even constitutional, but Roberts is passionate. “I am writing this book for my grandchildren,” she explains. “I want them to know that democracy is worth fighting for and I want my experience to have some value.”
Proposals include federal regulation of pollsters and news media – “We have a very uneven playing field right now,” says Roberts – lowering the voting age to 16, granting Elections Canada new powers to prohibit “untrue, deceptive or destructive campaign narratives” and restoring the $1.75 per vote subsidy abolished by Parliament in 2015.
Roberts proposes mandatory civics education in public schools, “a tax credit for voting” and mandatory runoffs that would require any successful candidate to obtain a minimum 50 percent of the popular vote. Louisiana has elected its legislature this way since 1975. “At the very least this would give political parties a vested interest in increasing voter turnout,” writes Roberts.
Yet apocalypse is never far off. Storm The Ballot Box predicts the implosion of democracy itself if Canadians fail to embrace Green policies. “We must find a way to get people out to the polls again before voter turnout drops to a point where the results are not longer legitimate and our democracy becomes vulnerable to authoritarian forms of government,” writes Roberts.
It is the drumbeat of cataclysm that runs through the Green Party. Storm The Ballot is Cascadia, non-fiction.
By Holly Doan
Storm The Ballot Box: An Insider’s Guide to A Voting Revolution by Jo-Ann Roberts; Nimbus Publishing; 232 pages; ISBN 9781-7747-14355; $21.95
