Leadership applications will be accepted mid-February through to the end of May with voting taking place in September.
After four years as the leader of B.C.’s scrappy third party, Sonia Furstenau announced Tuesday she will be handing the reins of the Greens over to her colleague Jeremy Valeriote on an interim basis.
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Leadership applications will be accepted mid-February through to the end of May with voting taking place in September.
Furstenau, who has led the party since 2020 and represented Cowichan Valley from 2017 to 2024 in the legislature, made the decision to resign as leader after losing the election in the riding of Victoria-Beacon Hill to NDP cabinet minister Grace Lore.
Before she could think about her exit, however, the party had to work out negotiations with the NDP on a co-operation agreement that would give the Greens some leverage over the NDP, which saw their majority reduced to one seat following the election.
Those discussions wrapped up in December, with Furstenau and her colleagues, Valeriote and Rob Botterell, getting the NDP to agree to pursue several of their party’s priorities, including exploring protections for the Fairy Creek watershed, building more community health centres and reviewing the B.C. climate plan a year early.
That agreement is set to run for the full four years until the next election but will be reviewed annually to ensure its terms are being met.
A teacher by profession, Furstenau got her start in politics as an activist in Lake Cowichan, where she was a leader of a protest movement against the dumping of contaminated soil at a nearby quarry by Cobble Hill Holdings Limited.
In 2017, Furstenau parlayed her activism into a run at provincial politics, winning her seat in Cowichan Valley for the Greens by six points over NDP candidate Lori Lynn Iannidinardo.
“She ran because of the situation with the drinking watershed, and Shawnigan Lake being threatened,” said Jillian Oliver, who served as the Green’s press secretary from 2017 to 2019 and ran Furstenau’s leadership campaign in 2020. “When she was elected in 2017, she got reforms passed to professional reliance, which was sort of the system that had led to improper permits being issued in that case.”
In that election, the Greens won a record three seats in the legislature and put them in position to determine whether the B.C. Liberals under Christy Clark would remain in power after a 16-year run as government or whether the NDP under John Horgan would be given a chance.
Ultimately, it was Furstenau’s distaste for the B.C. Liberals that led to the Greens reaching a confidence-and-supply agreement with the NDP. She and her colleagues, Adam Olsen and then party leader Andrew Weaver, propped up Horgan’s minority government for the next three years.
Despite some successes, such as the creation of B.C.’s climate plan and the $10-a-day childcare program, Horgan blindsided the Greens with an early election call in late 2020, just weeks after Furstenau took over as party leader. Furstenau and Olsen were both able to keep their seats despite a significant pressure campaign by the NDP in their ridings.
Oliver said that despite no longer having any direct power over the government, with the NDP having a commanding majority, Furstenau was still able to make a difference over the last four years.
“The Greens weren’t in a governing partnership but she was on the forefront of pushing for changes to increase family doctors and access to primary care,” said Oliver.
“I think she’s really shown how a third party can still get tangible wins in the legislature and it’s big shoes to fill for whoever comes next.”