Chad Hipolito

Landowner advocate Joe Anglin broke open the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) spying scandal in 2007. Now he’s the Alberta Greens’ interim leader

A power struggle for the leadership of the Green Party of Alberta has ended, but the months-long political drama has split the membership of the fledgling political organization.

“There is a rift in the party,” acknowledges Joe Anglin, a former Green candidate who is now the party’s interim leader. “But the fact is our membership here has now grown and we’re quite pleased.” After a bizarre party annual general meeting (AGM) in September, Anglin and Calgary resident George Read each described themselves as the party’s leader. In December, Read, who’s led the party since 2003, chose to back down. “It’s the politically intelligent thing to do,” he says. “What was going on wasn’t moving the Green agenda forward, and that’s really what it’s all about.”

While Read and Anglin have made peace, their supporters are still divided. “At this point, I consider the formal organization that has been the provincial Green Party to be a writeoff,” says Grant Neufeld, a Calgary activist and former Green candidate who supported Read. “It’s done…. I think it’s very clear that the people who have now taken control of the party were in the wrong.”

The September AGM in question turned into two meetings. In the parking lot of the Morningside, Alta., community hall, Read and other members of the party executive decided to postpone the meeting because they felt Anglin was stacking it with his supporters. Inside the hall, meanwhile, the AGM continued. “What bothered them and what scared them was that they didn’t realize we have huge Green Party support right here,” says Anglin. “We had over 100 members show up to a party that’s not used to having any more than 15 or 20 members coming to an AGM.”

At the meeting inside the hall, Read was voted out as leader and Anglin was elected as interim leader. “When they fled the meeting the way they did, that sunk them,” Anglin says. (Anglin, a landowner advocate who broke open the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) spying scandal in 2007, was considered a star candidate for the Greens in the March 2008 election. In his riding of Lacombe-Ponoka, he collected more popular vote — 23 per cent — than any other Green in the province.)

In the months following the meeting, Read’s and Anglin’s supporters argued over which was the legitimate meeting. Anglin eventually took the issue to court, but the two sides reached an agreement days before the scheduled hearing. “Right now, there are still some factions that are disgruntled,” says Anglin. “I have to worry more about the larger faction who wants to move ahead.”

Anglin says the party is expanding beyond the “kitchen-table meetings of the Calgary Green Party” into rural Alberta, where the party has more opportunity. “This is where our core strength is, and this is where the majority of our membership now lies,” he says. The party has another meeting scheduled for January 21 in Hoadley, Alta., where a new constitution and bylaws will be discussed.

The time and place of the meeting — it’s on a weeknight, almost a three-hour drive from Calgary one way — doesn’t sit well with some city party members. “That meeting is at a location that is hard to get to unless you happen to live in the area,” says Neufeld. “It’s clearly set up to discourage participation by anyone but [Anglin] supporters.” Anglin acknowledges the time and place were chosen intentionally. “But it’s not intentional to be difficult on them, it’s intentional to be accommodating to the support here,” he says. “These people have been neglected for years by the Alberta Greens.”

Edwin Erickson, one of the party’s two deputy leaders, agrees the party’s future lies in rural Alberta. “Those who cling very hard to the left will leave us, I’m certain, under this leadership,” says Erickson, who ran for the party in the Drayton Valley-Calmar riding in the last two elections. “But you know what? That’s not where the action is in Alberta.” Erickson collected 18.6 per cent of the popular vote in the last election — significantly more than any Calgary or Edmonton candidate. “The reality of the situation is that we have a better opportunity in rural Alberta.”

Anglin says that since September, the party’s membership has roughly doubled to about 400. He’s hoping to double that number to 800 by March. “We want to be that alternative to the PC party,” Anglin says.

Anglin also wants the membership to vote each year on whether or not to have a leadership review. Read, meanwhile, isn’t sure if he’d apply for the job again. “I haven’t made that decision,” he says.