womenscampaignschool.org

Co-chair 2009 Women’s Campaign School

Adriane Carr is one of Canada’s most successful and best known Green politicians. In 1983 she co-founded the Green Party of British Columbia, North America’s first Green Party. Elected as its leader from 2000 to 2006, she became the first Green leader in North America to be included in televised leaders’ debates. Her performance in the 2001 debates helped the Greens garner an unprecedented 12.4% of the province-wide popular vote. In that election, Carr won 27% of the vote in a three-way race in her own riding—the highest ever achieved by a Green candidate in BC’s history.

Carr has dedicated her life to working for a healthy, sustainable and just society. Born in 1952 in Vancouver and raised in BC’s Kootenays and Lower Mainland, Carr gained a love of nature camping, hiking and fishing with her family. She was greatly influenced as a young teen by travelling the world with a BC youth choir, visiting countries in Asia, the mid-East and Europe. The trip opened her eyes to disparity, poverty and environmental degradation, the likes of which she had not seen in Canada.

Carr graduated as a top student from Burnaby North high school and earned a Master’s degree in urban geography from UBC. She taught for 12 years (1977-1989) at Vancouver Community College (Langara), including courses in Economic Development. She developed and ran the first geography field school offered at a BC college. During her time as chair of Langara’s Department of Interdisciplinary Studies she reinstated the Womens’ Studies Program and helped launch BC’s first college-based environmental studies program. As an elected Langara Faculty Association board member she helped create a solution to provincial budget cuts that prevented lay-offs and cuts to classes.

In 1989 Carr left her teaching position at Langara to work full time for Western Canada Wilderness Committee, a group founded in 1980 by her husband Paul George, that for years operated out of their home. Carr and George worked 70-hour weeks to help grow the society into one of Canada’s largest membership-based environment groups, with a multi-million-dollar budget and over 100,000 supporters across Canada. They worked closely with First Nations and smaller local environment groups to win protection for dozens of wilderness areas including Gwaii Haanas (South Moresby), the Stein and Carmanah Valley.

As a member of the Wilderness Committee’s executive team, Carr took on responsibility for staff management, strategic planning and fundraising. She also co-authored and edited over 120 of the Wilderness Committee’s educational newspapers, calendars and other publications. The Wilderness Committee’s work was recognized by both the Canadian and British Columbian governments with “Outstanding Group of the Year” awards.

Carr campaigned not just on local but on global issues as well. In 1990 she co-founded the Wilderness Committee’s international WILD campaign, launching it at a conference she co-organized with a Hawaiian indigenous group that brought together scientists and activists working to protect wilderness in 26 different countries. During the 1990s Carr sat on Canada’s Biodiversity Convention Implementation Committee and CIDA’s Environment and Development Support Programme advisory board. She worked with individuals such as David Suzuki, Wade Davis and Robert Kennedy Jr. on efforts to stop mega-dam projects in the Amazon, save a homeland for the indigenous Penan people in Malaysia, and protect Clayoquot Sound.

It was the Clayoquot Sound campaign that established Carr as a leader in Canada’s environment movement. Asked by First Nations to work with them to bring adversaries together in a common vision for Clayoquot, she played a central role in helping establish a truce in the “war in the woods”. Carr made dozens of trips to Ottawa to successfully garner federal government support for the designation of Clayoquot Sound as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. In the fall of 2000, upon being elected the leader of the BC Green Party, Carr left her work at the Wilderness Committee to re-enter politics.

From 2000 to 2006, Carr led the BC Green Party through two elections and to its best ever results. In between elections she regularly toured BC and championed solutions to a wide range of public policy issues: the crises in public health care and education, the pine beetle epidemic, threats to small-scale agriculture and wild salmon, global warming. In 2002 she launched a citizen’s Initiative Petition for proportional representation, gathering 98,165 signatures in 90 days with the help of 4,002 canvassers in the effort to reform BC’s voting system. In 2003 she was the only high profile politician to raise concerns about the costs associated with hosting the 2010 Olympics. In 2004 she was the first major politician to question the wisdom of the multi-billion-dollar Gateway Program of new highways and bridges in Metro Vancouver. On every issue, Carr always presented feasible alternative solutions. She is credited with helping establish the Green Party as a mainstream force in BC politics.