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The party formed shortly before the 1983 election and ran 4 candidates in that election. The party went through many growing pains in the next 9 years and almost came to a complete end in 1992. In 1993 the party gained a new leader, Stuart Parker, who managed through personal perserverance to take the party to running close to a full slate in the 1996 election but was only able to garner less than 2% support province-wide. The direction of the party under Mr. Parker was set by many disgruntled ex-NDP members, and the policies of the party under Parker were notably progressive. An attempt by Adriane Carr and Colleen McCrory, two stars of the B.C. environment movement to take over the party was rejected by members at a bitterly fought convention held in Abbotsford in 1999. The following years, however, Ms. Carr and Ms. McCrory's supporters won over Parker's followers.
The party received over 12% of the vote in the May 2001 provincial election, but it elected no members to the provincial legislature because of the first-past-the-post system used in BC elections.
The Greens' main competitor for members and votes is the BC New Democratic Party, which often accuses it of ' splitting the vote' to the benefit of the BC Liberal Party. Under BC's first past the post electoral system, the three-way split may have reduced the BC New Democrats below the minimum number of seats (four) required for official party status and access to funds for staff and research. Some argue that the corporate media promoted the Green Party during the campaign in order to undermine the NDP. Although Premier Gordon Campbell could have granted the NDP MLAs this official party status, he chose not to do so, leaving British Columbia with no official opposition.
The Greens have growing strength in Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the Kootenanies and on the Sunshine Coast, where leader Adriane Carr received 27% of the vote in the 2001 election. As with the Green Party of the United States, the BC Greens receives support from middle-class professionals and students, environmental activists, and voters from lower-income brackets, but has had difficulty appealing to organized labour. In a Surrey by-election held in October, 2004, Ms. Carr ran as a parachute candidate and came a distant third, with less than 9 % of the vote -- and many believe that the Green Party may have peaked.
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