Emily Lowan on Next Steps for the BC Greens

Jan. 5, 2026

The party’s new leader talks taxes, rallying support and the NDP’s drift to the right.

Headed into the holiday break, BC Green Leader Emily Lowan was hoping for gains as her party renegotiates its agreement with the governing NDP to work together on shared priorities.

The two parties had exchanged proposals and discussions will resume in the new year, she said, adding that hopefully the NDP will have “a good long think about our proposal over the holidays.”

Lowan, a 25-year-old with roots in climate activism, won the Green leadership in September by campaigning on the slogan “Fight the Oligarchs, Fund Our Future” and promising to hold the NDP government to account.

She hasn’t yet run for a seat in the legislature herself and has spent recent weeks touring the province and meeting people. The party will do some polling to help decide which riding she might contest when the time comes. “It’ll likely be in the Greater Victoria area just because that’s where I grew up,” she said.

The party she inherited holds just two of the legislature’s 93 seats, but they are two seats that Premier David Eby relies on to help win key votes. The NDP’s 47 MLAs give it the slimmest possible majority in the 93-member legislature.

The current agreement between the Greens and the NDP includes commitments to make it easier to open community health centres, create affordable non-market housing and expand transit.

During her leadership campaign Lowan criticized the agreement, and she has suggested several significant additions “that reflect my campaign priorities on taxing the ultra-wealthy, for instance,” and increasing protections for renters.

It will be interesting to see how far the NDP is willing to go, she said.

One longtime Green goal that Eby has already rejected is a proposal to move towards adopting an electoral system that would give parties representation in the legislature that better reflects their share of the popular vote.

“I personally bear the scars of the last round and have absolutely no appetite to go back to voters one more time,” Eby told The Tyee, adding he told the Green Party it can campaign on the issue in the next election and win enough support to move it forward.

A referendum on proportional representation would be the fourth in 20 years, with voters never having given enough support to make the change.

Lowan said she would wait to give a full response on proportional representation but added that the question Eby presented in 2018 was full of jargon, overly complex and included a voting system option that had never been used anywhere in the world.

“It really did feel like that 2018 referendum was doomed to fail by design,” she said.

Her preference would be to go ahead and change the voting system, she continued, then ask for voter approval after it has been used a couple of times and people are more familiar with it.

Another priority Lowan campaigned on that may or may not be included in the Green proposal to the NDP is raising taxes on the wealthiest people in the province.

“I’m not talking about, you know, a doctor who owns a second home,” she said.

Instead, by “the oligarchs” she means people who have at least $100 million. “There’s about 650 individuals in B.C. that fall under that particular bracket.”

She mentioned Lululemon founder Chip Wilson and businessman Jim Pattison. “He owns Canada’s largest coal terminal, dozens of grocery store chains, the vast majority of the fishing industry off the coast, or licences rather, and advertising, car dealerships.”

There are many more in finance, resources and real estate who would be included.

“We’ve seen over time the degree of influence that these individuals have in the premier’s office,” Lowan said. “This province is comprised of a small number of multinationals that really are able to have an outsized hand in what B.C.’s economy looks like and really writes policy and has a blank cheque for subsidies.”

She advocates an “ultra-wealthy fairness tax” like the one-time five per cent tax proposed in California on wealth over $1 billion.

A one-time 10 per cent tax on B.C.’s 650 richest households would generate as much as $13 billion that could be used to build social housing or make transit and tuition free for several years, she said.

Her vision for the provincial economy is to shift so that there’s more local control and more sustainable industry.

The government’s focus on creating jobs through megaprojects and increased fossil fuel exports won’t deliver what people need, she said. “It really is sort of denying the horrors that people are living through every day and the real strain that people are feeling.”

Making gains will require continuing to build a grassroots movement of support, she said. “I think it’s just paramount that the Greens are laser focused on building power with working people, renters and young people across B.C. and focusing in on this message of wealth, inequality and driving forward long-term solutions and a more hopeful message.”

Much of the current debate among politicians seems to ignore the lived reality and concerns of working people, said Lowan. “It’s been really fascinating to see that divide, and how these other party leaders will get caught up in the day-to-day proceedings and circus of the legislature, and just how often out of touch that feels with the reality of our cost of living and climate crisis and everything we continue to face.”

After the last election, Eby talked about how the NDP’s political near-death experience had shown him the need to refocus, but Lowan said “what we’ve seen in practice is in mindlessly chasing Conservative voters while abandoning his traditional labour and progressive base.”

The mindset is evident, she said, in government policies on involuntary care, the inaction to end the long BC General Employees’ Union strike, the fast-tracking of fossil fuel projects and the adoption of a jobs plan that appeared lifted from an old BC Liberal plan.

It all adds up to a “continued drought of political imagination,” Lowan concluded.

Asked if there’s anything the government has gotten right, Lowan cited the commitment to the ban on tanker traffic on the northwest coast, though she suggested it was at odds with Eby’s mixed messages on the proposed pipeline itself and his support for increasing bitumen shipments out of the Port of Vancouver.

She said her job is to hold the government to account while also offering solutions and building a coalition around climate, labour, First Nations and progressive voters who are disillusioned with the NDP.

While she doesn’t expect an early election, the Greens will be ready, Lowan said. “Eby has sworn that there won’t be an election in the next year, but you know, we’ve seen the NDP do a 180 on those kinds of statements, so I think the Greens, we’re focused on preparing for an election at any time.”

[Top photo: BC Green Leader Emily Lowan says the party needs to work ‘on building power with working people, renters and young people across BC and focusing in on this message of wealth, inequality and driving forward long-term solutions.’ Photo via BC Greens.]