The second in a series of candidate visits sponsored by the Cortes Island Climate Action Committee

Green Party candidate Jessica Wegg came to Gorge Hall, on Wednesday, April 16th, 2025. She won’t be the next Member of Parliament for North Island Powell River (NIPR).

“We commissioned a poll at our riding level. I think they made the phone calls March 20th to 24th, and it matched what 338Canada is saying. The Conservatives will likely win and the progressive vote will be split pretty evenly by the NDP and the Liberals. As long as the NDP and the Liberals are both running, neither party will get in,” she explained.

“My numbers were less than 10%. If you added me to either one, it wasn’t going to cross the threshold of the number of votes the Conservatives were expected to get. We are actually saying this is a great time to feel like you can vote Green because it’s not a wasted vote.  We need 2% nationally to maintain official party status, which means we get resources in Ottawa, we get to participate in the question period, we get to be on committees, that kind of thing. Without that 2% national level, we lose official party status and we lose the ability to really participate in government in an effective way.  It really, really matters to us and if you want to be able to have a Green party in the future, when we do get proportional representation, we need to keep as many votes as possible.” 

Cortes Currents: How important is it to have a Green presence in the election? 

Jessica Wegg: “So, so important.  Shakespeare said, ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’ (A Midsummer’s Nights Dream, Act 3, scene 2). Greens are little, but we use that little power that we have to come up with big, wild ideas that the big parties aren’t going to have.”

“They don’t want to make people think they’re thinking too far outside the box. People are happy with the status quo, generally speaking. They don’t want to waiver. That’s how the big parties feed, is ‘how do I keep the people who we already have in this box.’ But we are thinking of big ideas that nobody else is thinking of and we bring them to the table, we bring them to the big parties that have the power in parliament and we say,’ have you even thought about doing something like this?’ Or, ‘where is that in your planning?’”  

“We do what we can to hold them to account. All of  the Green candidates across the country  are showing up and they’re showing that there are people who care. There are people who acknowledge the climate crisis that we’re in and we’re going to keep showing up.” 

“I think it’s also important because  Canada  is getting awfully close right now to  a two party system, which is not healthy for a democracy. It’s dangerous to have just two parties and we’re all falling into one camp or the other. We cannot let that happen. We need to keep showing up as these small parties. We need to keep fighting for presence so that we can have these creative big ideas that nobody else is going to say out loud because they don’t want to step on anybody’s toes or make anybody uncomfortable with the idea of something new or different or big. We cannot progress as a country without doing new and different and big things. So we need the Green party to show up and keep bringing our creative ideas across the country.”

These were not the first things Jessica Wegg said of course. She began with a quick introduction.

Jessica Wegg: “ I live in Comox. I have two kids, eight and 12, two Huskies.  My husband and I are both lawyers. We both went to law school in the States, had an American law practice, and we work remotely in both Canada and the US. The American side of my practice is still mostly focused on suing various agencies of the government for government abuses, government overreach and a lot of that is in the prison context. So inmates who aren’t getting the medical care that they need, victims of police brutality, and also we represent victims of institutional sexual abuse. So that’s a lot of athletes who’ve been abused by their coaches,  men who were abused by their priests, that sort of thing.”

“That’s the American side of our law practice, in Comox, I am doing criminal defense with BC Legal Aid and I’m doing that up the north island right now. So that’s my professional career. I have my master’s degree in clinical psychology in addition to my law degree.” 

“I ran in the last election as well. That was during COVID when everything was on Zoom. All of the candidates were on Zoom.  This time it’s so nice to be able to come out to the communities and actually meet people and hear your voices. I am running again for the same reason I did last time, which is,  for the future of my kids, for all the kids,  nieces, nephews, friends who can’t yet speak loud enough for themselves to where the government will listen, pay attention and do the right thing to protect their futures.”

“So that’s the Reader’s Digest version of my story. There’s a much longer bio of me on my website , but that’s  the quick one and  I’m really happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us.” 

Mike Moore, the MC for this event, asked, “You seem like you are more socially minded,  working with inmates and sexual abuse and things like that. I don’t hear the words ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ come out in your introduction, which makes me wonder why you’re running for the Green Party instead of something like the NDP, which seems to be more socially minded.” 

Jessica Wegg: “One of the tenets of the Green values is social justice and so that’s a big part of what we are, but underlying everything the Green party does is paying attention to climate and how does this affect the environment?   A key difference between the Greens and the NDP is that when we look at these social issues, we’re not just looking about how we solve the housing crisis. Or how do we deal with the affordability crisis? It’s how we can do this while keeping in mind that we are in a climate emergency. It is absolutely intrinsic in everything that we do.” 

Cortes Currents: There’s some marked differences between the Liberals and Conservatives, but when it comes to the climate crisis, how much of a difference do you see between the two parties? 

Jessica Wegg: “They’re not too different. They’re all promoting pipelines, and Carney ‘axed the tax.’  I think he’s doing it to take the wind out of Poilievre’s sails, but it just means that you’re matching what the Conservatives want, which I don’t think is good. We can’t just put our climate concerns on the back burner while we deal with the US, which is what the Liberals have done.”

Cortes Currents: What about  things like housing,  groceries and income?  Do you see much of a difference between Liberal and Conservative approaches? 

Jessica Wegg: “I can’t think offhand what the Conservative approach is. I know the Liberals pretty well because Jennifer Lash shows up to all candidates meetings. Aaron Gunn does not, so I don’t get to hear what they’re proposing. I haven’t had a chance to look at it.” 

“What I am noticing is that everyone is saying we need more housing and we need to use Canadian lumber and Canadian labor to build the housing.” 

“We want to make sure that we’re banning corporate ownership of single family homes because they are our homes, they’re not stocks that you can just trade and artificially inflate market prices. We want to invest massively in government subsidized housing for people and make it affordable. Affordability should be linked to income, and not to the market value, because A, we know the market value  is whatever the market makes of it, and B it’s not affordable. Paying 80% of something in this market is still not affordable for most people. So the Green party would index it to income. Rents wouldn’t be higher than 30% of your income, to make it actually affordable for you and not affordable based on the environment you happen to live in.”

 A woman asked, “How do the Greens hope to attract young voters?”

Jessica Wegg: “We were actually asked this yesterday. We were at a high school in Campbell River, and they asked us ‘how can you get more youth involved?’ It is a hard nut to crack. We think that lowering the voting age to 16 would help. You would hope that they’d be more approachable and they would get out to vote, they’d educate themselves. Also I will say the NDP previously advocated for 16, as well. We’re always taking suggestions, if you have any, because  it’s tricky.”

“The other thing about elections is that most of the volunteers end up being retired because they have time. Kids are in school and they otherwise have jobs or sports or activities, and it’s hard to get them involved because they’re busy.”

Someone else said she stopped voting Green after Elizabeth May supported the government’s imposition of the Emergency Act when the truckers were occupying Ottawa.

Jessica Wegg: “Elizabeth May did vote for it; Mike Morris did not.” 

“There is no Green Party position. These are the positions of individuals.  We’re not whipped, so Elizabeth May couldn’t tell Mike Morris, ‘Hey, this is how we’re voting on the Emergency Act.’” 

“He didn’t think it was an appropriate use of that bill. So he said no, because  it didn’t align with his values, and it didn’t align with what he thought his constituents wanted. Elizabeth May felt differently, and so she voted another way.  A key difference in the Green Party is that we are not whipped. The Greens in Ottawa work for their constituents. They don’t work for the boss. There’s no Mark Carney telling you how to vote; there’s no Poilievre telling you how to vote. You go to the people who elected you, you talk to them, and you figure out what is going to be best for North Island Powell River.  Everything is led by  the people who live in the ridings and not by the party that is the umbrella under which we fall.” 

 “We really want you to talk about proportional representation. Here’s something good to know. If you send an electronic petition to your MP and there are 500 signatures they don’t have to agree with it, but they have to present it in parliament.” 

Cortes Currents: Jessica asked me to check how many signatures you need if the petition is written on paper – it turns out to be only 25, as opposed to 500 if it is electronic.

Someone who said he’d lost hope, wanted to know how the Greens could keep going, how they could keep their hope in the world.

Jessica Wegg: “It is really easy to lose hope and to feel despair, and I think that’s what we’re seeing a lot of in this election.  People are afraid and they have lost that spark that gives them something to fight for.”

“I have to have hope because if you don’t have hope and you don’t believe something better is possible you stop fighting for it and you let the negativity and the hatred fill the space where you once had hope. One of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs is called ‘Anthem,’ and there’s a line in that song where he sings,  ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ You have to trust that that crack exists, that there is a way for the light to come in and for the change to happen.  Sometimes it is telling yourself, I’m going to see this day through, I’m going to trust that there is something better around the corner and sometimes it comes easily.”

“Sometimes the sun’s shining after weeks and weeks of rain and gray skies. It’s easy to have hope on those days. But on the days when you’ve lost hope, you know that you are still fighting. One of the reasons that I’m doing this is because I can’t give up. I have to keep fighting, to keep that hope going to keep momentum, and to be an example to people that there is still a reason to be doing this. Even if it’s just a few of us, even if it’s just those of us in this room who are still fighting and still hoping that’s enough, you can be where the light shines through if you just let yourself be open to it.” 

Links of Interest:

• Our Plan – Green Party of Canada
• News & Press Releases – Green Party of Canada
• Q&A With NIPR’s Green Party On Some Key Environmental Questions – Cortes Currents
• The Creative Force of Green – Cortes Currents
• Campaign Stories from North Island Powell River – Cortes Currents
• Behind the Campbell River Premiere of Yintah – Cortes Currents
• Green Party Candidate Jessica Wegg talks about the coming election – Cortes Currents

Top image credit: Jessica Wegg having a photo op with some of the people at her meeting; All undesignated photos by Roy L Hales

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