Adriane Carr

Adriane Carr (born 1952) is a Canadian academic, activist and retired green politician. She served on Vancouver City Council from 2011 until her resignation in 2025. Carr was a founding member of the Green Party of British Columbia (BC Green Party) and was the party's first leader, then known as "spokesperson", from 1983 to 1985. In 2000, she became the party's leader again. In the 2005 provincial election, she received over 25 percent of the vote in her home riding of Powell River-Sunshine Coast. In September 2006, she was appointed by federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May, to be one of her two deputy leaders.

After two losses as a federal candidate in the Vancouver Centre electoral district (2008 and 2011), Carr was elected to Vancouver City Council in November 2011. She was the sole candidate of the Green Party of Vancouver for one of 10 seats in the at-large election held in the 2011 municipal election. This was her first electoral success in eight attempts, and she was the first person elected under the Green Party banner to the council of a major Canadian city. She was re-elected in 2014, 2018, and 2022. She resigned in January 2025, citing disagreements with Mayor Ken Sim.

Early life

Carr was born in Vancouver and raised in the Lower Mainland and the Kootenays. She earned a master's degree in urban geography from the University of British Columbia in 1980 and taught at Langara College.

Environmentalism

Carr was a co-founder of the Green Party of British Columbia, the first Green Party in North America, and served as its unpaid spokesperson (leader) from 1983 to 1985. She left teaching at Langara College in 1989 to work full-time for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, having been a volunteer for WCWC from shortly after it was co-founded by her later-to-be husband, Paul George and Richard Krieger.

During her time working for WCWC, among other things, Carr led the organization's international campaigns and played a lead role in bringing together First Nations, environmental groups, logging companies and all levels of government in the successful campaign to establish a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Clayoquot Sound. From 1992 until 2000, WCWC (now called the Wilderness Committee) was led by a four-person committee of paid employees comprising Carr, Paul George, activist Joe Foy, and the organization's chief financial officer. Carr left the organization in 2000 to run for the leadership of the Green Party of British Columbia (BC Green Party).

Provincial and federal politics

Carr has been the BC Green Party leader on two separate occasions. She was the party's leader in the 1983 provincial election, held shortly after the party's founding. Carr ran in the two-member electoral district (called a '' riding'' in Canada) of Vancouver-Point Grey, and finished last in a field of eight candidates with 1549 votes. She also ran as a Green candidate for the Vancouver School Board in 1984, but after this, besides maintaining her membership, she had little further involvement with the provincial Green Party until the late 1990s.

The BC Green Party was led from 1993 to 2000 by Stuart Parker (whom Carr endorsed during both of his runs for the party leadership in 1993 and 1997) and its ideological direction was largely guided by former members of the New Democratic Party during this period. Carr emerged as a rival to Parker at the party's 1999 policy convention. Parker was defeated in a non-confidence motion at an annual general meeting held in Squamish in March 2000. Tom Hetherington was selected as interim leader by the new directors elected at that March meeting. A leadership contest was held, and on 23 September 2000, Carr defeated Andy Shadrack and Wally du Temple to become party leader for a second time.

Carr ran in the 2001 election in the riding of Powell River-Sunshine Coast, against former Liberal leader and then-NDP cabinet minister Gordon Wilson. She was included in the televised leaders' debate along with Liberal leader Gordon Campbell and NDP premier Ujjal Dosanjh. The Greens hoped to be viewed as a progressive alternative for voters. Carr finished third in her riding with 6316 votes (27%), against 6349 for Wilson (28%) and 9904 for victorious Liberal Harold Long. The Green Party received 12.4 percent of the provincial vote in this election, a significant increase from its 2 percent total in the 1996 BC election. The party's largest number of votes was received in Saanich-Gulf Islands, one of only 17 constituencies that had been voting Liberal since 1991.

In 2004, Carr ran for the Greens in a by-election in Surrey-Panorama Ridge, held following the resignation of Liberal Gulzar Singh Cheema. She finished a distant third with 8.4 percent of the vote as the NDP recovered to win the riding. This result was a harbinger of the party's decline in popularity in the 2005 general election, where its share of the vote fell to 9 percent.

Carr was a vocal supporter of a mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral system. In 2002 she became the proponent of an initiative under the ''Recall and Initiative Act'' to hold a referendum on whether or not to adopt MMP in BC, dubbed the Free Your Vote campaign. Having obtained nearly 100,000 signatures in support of the initiative, Free Your Vote became the largest voting reform organization in the province and increased awareness and support amongst Greens and non-Greens alike for electoral reform.

When the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform recommended a single-transferable vote system, Carr expressed strong opposition, favouring MMP. However, she supported a resolution at the subsequent BC Green convention that her party officially take a neutral stance letting candidates decide for themselves whether or not to support the Citizens' Assembly proposal. Almost all Green candidates actively campaigned for the electoral reform referendum in the 2005 election.

In the 2005 election, Carr was again included in the leaders' debate, this time with Premier Gordon Campbell and NDP leader Carole James. Carr was expected to be strong competition in her riding of Powell River-Sunshine Coast but finished third again with 25 percent of the vote (a decline of 2%), 14 percent behind the victorious NDP candidate. At the annual Green convention following the 2005 election, Carr received 85 percent approval in a confidence vote among party membership.

After successfully co-chairing a campaign to elect Elizabeth May as leader of the Green Party of Canada, Carr resigned her position of leader of the BC Green Party in September 2006 to become one of two deputy leaders of the federal Green Party.

In the 2008 federal election, Carr ran as the Green candidate in the Vancouver Centre riding against Liberal incumbent Hedy Fry. Fry was re-elected, while Carr garnered 18.3 percent of the vote. Carr had the Green Party's fourth highest percentage of votes in the nation. Carr ran once more against Hedy Fry in the 2011 federal election, receiving 15.4 percent of the vote and placing fourth.

Municipal politics

Carr ran for city council in the 2011 municipal election as the lone Green Party of Vancouver candidate. She received 48,648 votes, putting her in 10th place, 91 votes ahead of the next candidate below her, but securing her election as a city councillor. She was the first Green councillor ever elected in a major Canadian city.

In the 2014 municipal election, Carr received the highest number of votes of any council candidate with 74,077 votes – 5,658 votes ahead of her closest competitor – and helped to create the largest team of elected Greens in Canadian history.

In the 2018 municipal election, Carr was again elected with the highest number of votes and was joined by fellow Green Party members Pete Fry and Michael Wiebe on council. The Greens also elected three candidates each to the Vancouver School Board and Vancouver Park Board.

Carr was re-elected to city council in the 2022 Vancouver election after declining to run for mayor. She placed eighth with 41,831 votes, the highest vote share for a non-ABC Vancouver candidate, though the Greens' popular vote declined along with most other centre-left parties, while the centre-right ABC councillors formed a new council majority.

Election results

Notes

References

External links

Green Party of Canada – Vancouver Centre Electoral District Association

{{DEFAULTSORT:Carr, Adriane
1952 births
Canadian environmentalists
Canadian women environmentalists
Leaders of the Green Party of British Columbia
Living people
Female Canadian political party leaders
British Columbia political party leaders
Green Party of British Columbia candidates in British Columbia provincial elections
Green Party of Canada candidates in the 2008 Canadian federal election
Green Party of Canada candidates in the 2011 Canadian federal election
People from Gibsons, British Columbia
Green Party of Vancouver councillors
Women municipal councillors in British Columbia
University of British Columbia Faculty of Arts alumni
21st-century Canadian women politicians
21st-century Canadian municipal councillors