A 24-year-old climate activist advocating a sharp left turn in the B.C. Green Party leadership race has run up against a difficult verification process for thousands of new members who had flocked to vote for her.
In less than two months, leadership candidate Emily Lowan seems to have doubled the party’s membership.
But with voting now underway, the thousands she signed up face a two-tier vetting process that could suppress her votes, which her supporters suggest stems from a party hostile to the success of her insurgent, anti-establishment campaign.
The B.C Green Party says they “spent months preparing” to verify members, but Lowan was only notified of the new process a few weeks into her campaign.
In late July, her campaign was told that members who joined the party after October 2024 would be subject to more rigorous identity checks than long-standing members. Party officials said the change was meant to protect against “foreign interference.”
Lowan is one of three contenders for the leadership, left vacant after former leader Sonia Furstenau resigned in January following her failure to win a seat in last year’s provincial election.
While she was encouraged to enter the race by the party’s executive director, Lowan is running as the outsider. Her opponents—two-term Comox councillor Jonathan Kerr and 23-year-old executive council member Adam Bremner-Akins—lean on their electoral experience and party ties and are more centrist politically. Both have endorsed the extra verification system for new members.
Lowan, by contrast, has made youth recruitment central to her campaign. Under the banner “Fight the Oligarchs, Fund Our Future,” her platform includes taxing the wealthy, free post-secondary education, rent control, grocery price caps, free transit, halting fossil fuel expansion—including TC Energy’s U.S.-backed Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project—and divestment from Israel.
Her supporters believe that, despite initial encouragement from party officials, Lowan’s attacks on billionaires and focus on working class interests has alienated the traditional centre of power in the party.
Since she launched her campaign on July 3, Lowan has reportedly signed up as many as 4,500 new members, expanding the Greens from 5,500 to about 10,000 by the August 10 membership deadline.
Among the newcomers is Orion Kidder, who also volunteers on Lowan’s campaign. Though federal Green leader Elizabeth May is his aunt by marriage, Kidder had never engaged with the party until he saw Lowan speak at a candidates’ forum this summer.
“I like that she is both a politician and an activist,” Kidder said, adding that the appropriate role for leftist and environmentalist politicians is to “get activist.”
Another supporter, writer Nick Gottlieb, rejoined the Greens after letting his membership lapse in 2021. He said he was drawn to Lowan’s willingness to name the culprits of the climate crisis.
“Emily’s message that billionaires are the problem driving climate collapse and other environmental issues is much needed and really absent anywhere else in Canadian politics,” he said, adding that her opposition to the genocide in Gaza is “probably the boldest thing any Canadian politician has said” on the issue.
While Lowan’s campaign has drummed up immense enthusiasm, new members The Breach spoke to said the new verification process has served as a barrier towards building the B.C. Greens into the mass movement Lowan envisions.
Member verification process ‘confusing and exhausting’
The party hasn’t provided precise membership numbers to the campaigns or the public.
Leadership voting began September 13 and runs until September 22. A week before voting started, the party said it had verified only 20 per cent of new members. By September 11, it revised its numbers to 3,700 new members, of whom 1,500, or 40 per cent, had been vetted.
When Lowan repeated the 4,500 figure, as reported by long-time B.C. political columnist Rob Shaw, at a September 13 leadership debate, the moderator corrected her and insisted the true figure is 3,700.
A former B.C. Green staffer, however, said that neither figure reflects well on the party’s verification process.
“In any other field, a system that fails to process 60-80% of new sign-ups would be deemed a failure and thrown out,” wrote Ryan Clayton, the Greens’ former director of digital management and regional manager for Vancouver and the North Shore.
The party says it intends to verify all members by the close of voting.
In a statement to The Breach, a B.C. Greens spokesperson said that as of the end of September 15, about half of new members “have chosen to complete verification.”
Traditionally, members could verify with a credit card, except youth aged 14 to 29, whose memberships are free. The party estimates that roughly a third of Lowan’s new recruits fall into that category.
But now, all new members must use an AI-based app called Vaultie. The process requires a 24-hour wait, uploading a selfie, and submitting two pieces of ID. If the app fails, members can book a Google Meet or Zoom call with the party, or have another verified member vouch for them.
Jen Kostochuk, a Victoria resident who joined to support Lowan, said she first heard about the new rules from Lowan’s campaign rather than the party itself. When Vaultie didn’t work, she scheduled a Google Meet and also vouched for her sibling and a friend who had been told by Vaultie they were verified, only to later receive an email from the party saying otherwise.
“We do need to consider the accessibility issues that this has raised for other new members across all ages, including those who already feel disillusioned with voting at all, but really believe in Emily’s platform,” Kostochuk said. “The whole process has been quite confusing.”
It took Kidder, who was notified of the vetting process by the party, half an hour to get Vaultie to accept his identification. “It was a bit of a pain in the butt,” he said.
Gottlieb, who lives in Terrace, renewed his membership but received no communication from the party—except, “mysteriously,” emails from Bremner-Akins’s campaign, suggesting his emails may have been shared. After unanswered inquiries, he was eventually told that, as a past member, he didn’t require further verification.
For AK Saini, a Victoria-based volunteer with physical and neurological disabilities, the process has been overwhelming.
“It’s confusing and exhausting,” Saini said, adding that some new members are so frustrated they’ve opted not to vote.
Sources within the Lowan campaign told The Breach that they spent weeks asking for a verification option that took a single step, occurred on the same day, and could be completed in under 10 minutes.
Since then, the party has opened in-person verification opportunities in Vancouver and Victoria, though the campaign says that can still require multiple steps that span over several days. The party’s other option, extended online office hours over Zoom, has fulfilled their request for speed. Verification rates have now doubled.
“Through the verification process, we have found examples of multiple sign-ups from outside BC, duplicate registrations, and other issues,” a spokesperson for the B.C. Greens told The Breach. “While we do not know if any of these issues were deliberate attempts to interfere, requiring ID verification ensures that we catch them so that voting is a fair process for everyone.”
A familiar playbook?
The Greens’ verification fight echoes the B.C. NDP’s controversial disqualification of insurgent leadership contender Anjali Appadurai in 2022.
At the time, the NDP imposed strict checks on new members, grilling them about their political affiliations, and hired a canvassing firm to run the process. The move cleared the path for David Eby to win unopposed.
Appadurai has since endorsed Lowan, but the two situations aren’t identical.
In the NDP case, staffers pressed new members on why they had joined, their past donations, party loyalties, and even whether they had read the NDP constitution. As The Breach reported, the party contracted Public Outreach, a private consulting firm, to manage this process for some 7,000 members.
The aim then was to prevent Appadurai from mounting a serious challenge to Eby. In contrast, Lowan was actively recruited to seek the Green leadership.
“I don’t think the party is intending to suppress votes, but this is, unfortunately, the outcome,” said Kostochuk. “As a new member, it’s been disappointing.”
Gottlieb was more skeptical, suggesting the verification scramble is tied to Lowan’s surge in recruitment.
“I don’t have any information with which to allege this is deliberately a voter suppression campaign, but it certainly looks like it,” he said.
A party spokesperson said that through the enhanced vetting process, the party discovered “examples of multiple sign-ups from outside BC, duplicate registrations, and other issues,” but didn’t specify how many memberships this applied to.
“While we do not know if any of these issues were deliberate attempts to interfere, requiring ID verification ensures that we catch them so that voting is a fair process for everyone.”
Foreign interference claims led to ‘suppressing voter participation’
On August 28, Lowan’s campaign lawyer Benjamin Issitt sent a letter calling the vetting “cumbersome, unnecessary, discriminatory and prejudicial.” The added barriers, he argued, violate the Greens’ constitutional commitments towards “morally equitable decisions,” participatory democracy, social justice and respect for diversity.
The letter notes that a Canadian Security Intelligence Services report the party invokes in defence of its new vetting process says a major aim of foreign interference is to “suppress voter participation.”
It’s “highly ironic” that the party’s safeguards against foreign interference would have the effect of “suppressing voter participation,” Issitt wrote on behalf of Lowan’s campaign.
The campaign asked for proof of interference, suggested limiting extra checks to members signing up with foreign IP addresses, or applying the same rules to all members. Failing that, they called for voting to be delayed until 80 per cent of members are verified.
Party lawyer Sean Hearn countered in a September 1 letter that under the leadership contest rules that Lowan, Kerr and Bremner-Akins agreed to, the party’s chief electoral officer “may verify the identity of new Party memberships at their discretion.” Lowan’s campaign now wants voting extended until 80 per cent of new members are cleared.
The party says that’s not going to happen.
“Our team has the resources and systems in place to ensure that every new member who wants to participate will be verified in time,” a spokesperson for the party said. “Because all eligible members who want to vote will be verified, there is no reason to delay the end of voting.”
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Good article – I hope it helps and that all the new members who signed up, people who finally decided to participate in electoral politics, are not forever discouraged by this problem!
Typo I think it’s Ben Isitt
A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from Kerr asking if I’d decided whom to vote for, after answering “Yes”, he then asked if I’d vote for him, to which I gave no answer. I’ve voted for Emily Lowan, and put Kerr last.
Pretty much the same for the NDP as well (I’m a longstanding member and was a political staffer when the party was in power). Doesn’t bode well for the Green party if they’re afraid of the future generation.
This is why we need more direct democracy and actual socialism. Party machines are self-serving, it’s not about voters or policy, it’s just about getting as many votes as possible to keep the party alive and moving in the direction the party brass and their biggest donors desire.
I have been a phoner for Kerr and have not heard about this verification process as a problem for anyone. The people running the campaign want the process to be user friendly & easily done. Many members are not aware there is a campaign going on.