Elections in Canada: Green Party Leader Annamie Paul loses her candidacy to become a Toronto Center MP | The Canadian News

Green Party leader Annamie Paul lost her candidacy in the 2021 federal election to become the next Member of Parliament to ride at the Toronto Center.

Global News projects that current liberal Marci Ien will win the race. With 33 out of 137 polls reported, Ien got 48.7 percent of the vote. Paul, for his part, had just eight percent of the vote and was a very distant fourth.

“Clearly, I am disappointed,” Paul said early Tuesday after his electoral defeat. “It is difficult to lose. No one likes to lose “.

Paul’s defeat is a significant blow to the Green Party, which has not had its leader in the House of Commons since party leader Elizabeth May stepped down from office several months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. .

May, who won her seat in the BC leadership of Saanich-Gulf Islands, said she had “never seen the party so poorly prepared for an election,” referring to the fact that the Green Party failed to present candidates in dozens of districts across the country. .

The Green Party has also grappled with internal turmoil and strife over the past year, with senior party executives challenging Paul’s leadership and orchestrating attempts to remove her from office.

Paul responded to these efforts by saying that the tactics and words used by some party members were “sexist” and “racist.”

Paul is the only woman to lead a major national political party in Canada. He is also the only black or Jewish person to lead a federal political party. Aside from May, it had been 18 years since another party leader participated in a televised leaders’ debate.

“I had to crawl over a lot of broken glass to get here,” Paul said during the English-speaking leaders debate on September 9.

In the final days of the election campaign, Paul said that she worked tirelessly to become the leader of the Green Party and that she has pushed forward progressive policies on climate change, gender equality, financial reform and housing.

The Green Party’s electoral climate platform had the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target of any major political party, aiming to cut emissions by 60% compared to 2005 levels by 2030. Here’s the level that many environmentalists say Canada must reach to do so. its “fair share” of limiting global temperature gains to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The leadership of the Toronto Center was first won by Ien in October 2020 during a by-election, which followed the resignation of former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau in August 2020.

In May 2021, federal ethics commissioner Mario Dion issued a decision saying Morneau violated the Conflict of Interest Act when he did not recuse himself from deliberations surrounding the government-planned COVID-19 student volunteer scholarship program.

Dion found that Morneau violated conflict of interest provisions in three specific respects and that those findings were tied to the fact that Morneau’s relationship with WE Charity co-founder Craig Kielberger meets the definition of “friend” under the rules. .

WE Charity received a federal contract to administer the student scholarship program worth approximately $ 900 million.