Canada’s Green Party: All About The Environment…And Israel

[Globe and Mail] Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is affirming her support for an Ottawa-area Green Party candidate accused of “Israel bashing,” just one day after citing anti-Semitism as grounds for rejecting one of her B.C. candidates.

Qais Ghanem, a Yemeni-born physician with a strong interest in the Middle East, has stirred debate among his fellow Greens on the party’s online discussion forum. The Greens’ Ottawa-South candidate has aligned himself with three other Green candidates to form what they call the “Ottawa Group of Four.” They are pushing the party to approve a resolution called “Palestine” that “calls upon Israel to end its forty-year occupation of all Arab lands without preconditions.”

Finagle A Seat, Win A Soapbox

[CTV] The Green Party now has its first MP in Parliament, and he is an ex-Liberal who had resigned from that party’s caucus over accusations of election financing irregularities.

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The Greens, a relatively young federal party in Canada, have not yet elected an MP in either a byelection or general election. As a result, its leaders have not been invited to participate in televised leaders’ debates during the campaign. However, it did capture 4.5 per cent of the popular vote in the Jan. 23, 2006 election, which entitles it to public financing.

May noted in the release that with “a Green MP sitting in the House of Commons, it will now be impossible to exclude the Green Party from the televised leaders’ debates in the next election.”