OTTAWA — Green leader Elizabeth May said Wednesday she won’t comply with a prominent party member’s call for her to step down in order to force a leadership convention.

She said she has a mandate from her Saanich-Gulf Island constituents, and the support from party members and Canadians in general, to focus on issues like climate change and democratic reform.

“I couldn’t do my job as a member of Parliament if I was in a leadership race right now,” she told The Vancouver Sun.

Former Green executive-director Johan Hamels made the appeal in a letter last month to senior party figures, saying the party needs its first leadership race in a decade in order to renew itself after a bitterly disappointing 2015 election result.

Hamels was one of three senior Green officials who complained in interviews with The Vancouver Sun that May and top party brass are stifling postelection debate despite leading a party that claims to be the most democratic in the country.

The Greens went into the campaign with a B.C.-focused strategy aimed at securing a historic breakthrough by winning 10 to 15 seats. But the party was only able to hang on to only May’s seat and, for the second election in a row, the party’s share of the national vote shrank.

Yet the Greens didn’t follow the path of Tom Mulcair’s New Democratic Party, which assigned its party president to travel the country to assess what went wrong during the NDP’s free-fall from first to third place during the campaign.

Instead, the Green party is quietly holding its constitutionally mandated leadership review, with 20,000 members invited to send in votes by email by April 19.

Hamels put his concerns in writing to senior party figures last month.

“I find it surprising that four months after the federal election, I have not yet been called upon as a Green party member to critically assess our current situation and determine where we need to go in the coming decade,” said Hamels, now the party’s liaison official with Green parties around the world, in his Feb. 6 letter.

Hamels, who was the party’s executive-director during the 2011 election when May first won her B.C. seat, said a leadership campaign — even if May ran and was reelected as leader — would raise new ideas and leave the party “galvanized and rejuvenated.”

But party officials, who discussed the matter in a monthly conference call Sunday, are rebuffing the request and instead proceeding with the constitutionally mandated leadership review next month and a policy convention in August.

Critics say the party is deliberately keeping quiet about the leadership review in order to avoid setting off a debate about the party’s strategy and leadership.

May rejected any suggestion she’s taking a top-down approach.

“The process is transparent and open and is more democratic than any other party.”

May breezed through the review process after the 2011 election, getting 94.5-per-cent support, after a process that include her posting a letter to members on the party website appealing for their support.

She said Wednesday she doesn’t expect to appeal directly to members this time, saying, “I don’t think it’s appropriate.” However, she said the party is run in a collective fashion and if the party’s ruling council pushes her to take that step she’d have to consider it.

Ard Van Leeuwen, who ran for the Greens in an Ontario riding in 2011, supports the call for either a leadership convention or an NDP-style post mortem. But he said the Green party is rejecting appeals to open up an online forum and other mechanisms to allow for a full debate before the leadership review vote.

“Rather than encouraging everyone to get involved, the party has discouraged involvement and discussion by effectively sweeping the review under the rug.”

Hamels, a senior Green organizer in Belgium before moving to Canada in 2009 with his Canadian spouse, said Canada’s Green party isn’t living up to the international standards of the global Green movement.

“They promote silence and it is unworthy of the Green party,” he said.

“I’m calling upon the leadership to be open and transparent in a way the Green party should be.”

Considerable criticism is coming from Quebec, where failed candidate JiCi Lauzon, a prominent cultural commentator, complained last month to the Le Devoir newspaper that the Green party showed a lack of sensitivity toward Quebec’s “distinct culture.”

Another Quebec candidate, who like Lauzon lost badly in October, told The Sun Wednesday that the Green party “embarrassed” its candidates in the last election.

Cyrille Giraud said communications material sent from head office to francophone-majority ridings either came in English or was badly translated.

“The communications in French was a disaster.”

Giraud, a member of May’s “shadow cabinet” with the responsibility of being an advocate on Quebec issues, also criticized May for naming Quebec environmentalist Daniel Green as her deputy leader without consulting Quebec members.

“The party is supposed to be grassroots when it’s not,” he said. “There’s a lack of communication between members of the party when the decisions are being made.”

poneil@postmedia.com

Twitter: poneilinottawa

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