The Green Party of Canada held it’s founding conference at Carleton University in Ottawa in the summer of 1983. The GPC fielded 52 candidates in the federal election held in 1984 and fielded an increasing number of candidates in each election. The party intends to make history by fielding a full slate of 308 candidates in the election expected this year. Jim Harris is now the leader of the Party.

The Green Party of Canada is independent of other green parties in Canada around the world, yet remains philosophically aligned with them. The Green Party of Canada supports green economics, progressive social thinking, and begins with the basic premise that all life on the planet is interconnected and that humans have a responsibility to protect and preserve the natural world.

The party has been developing as an organization since that time, expanding its membership and improving its showing at the polls. The Greens now stand at 5% and are the fifth largest party in the country.

Although writers like Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold had long written on the importance of nature, the modern green movement started in Canada and around the world in the sixties with the hippies. The 60s counter culture movement was the first mass rejection of consumer culture. Three decades later the hippy values of peace, love and flower power become the founding Green Party values non-violence, social justice and ecological thinking.

The hippy phenomena ended quickly since it had no structure or economic base. The life-affirming values of the movement, however, didn't go away as much as underground. In the seventies the green movement re-emerged as isolated, small-scale enterprises; health food stores, women's and environmental groups, renewable energy stores, organic farms... This time the green movement, however disparate, had structure and an economic life, and became integral to communities rather than transient.

In the 80s, dissatisfied with the impotence of isolated activities, actions and opinions, people decided to further organize the green movement into coalitions. The 80s were a coalition-building decade which saw the founding of the Canada Environment Network, the Canadian Organic Growers, Canadian Peace Alliance, the Voice of Women, Solar Energy Society of Canada, and many others. The scale and organizational level of these coalitions took the green movement to a new level -- a pre-electoral level. The next step was to organize the green movement into a political party.

The first green party in the world, called the Values Party, was started in the early 1970s in New Zealand. The first green party in the western hemisphere was formed in the Maritimes, in the mid to late 70's, and was called the Small Party after E.F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful". In Britain the green party was called the Ecology party, before the name "Green" became common. But it wasn't till the West German Green Party, called die Groenen, crossed the vote threshold of 5% and entered the German legislature in the late 1970s, that the green political movement started in earnest, and since spread all over the world.

Presently there are over 100 Green Parties world-wide, and there are Green members elected in dozens of countries. At the moment the Green Party is participating in governing coalitions in Mexico, New Zealand, Italy, France, Germany, and Finland.

In Canada, as well as the federal green party there are green parties in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Canada, and Quebec, and organizer are planning Green Parties in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The Green Party of Canada was a founded in 1983 and fielded the following numbers of candidates in the successive provincial elections: 52 candidates in 1984, 60 candidates in 1988, 78 candidates in 1993, 79 candidates in 1997, 111 candidates in 2000. The GPC is now at 5% in the polls and will be running a full slate of 308 candidates in the 2004 federal election.