The Green Party of Canada has failed to run a full slate of candidates in the 2025 federal election. According to Élections Canada, the party nominated candidates in just 232 of 338 ridings, falling far short of the 309 needed to meet the 90% threshold for automatic inclusion in the federal leaders’ debates.
Despite this, the Green Party was still granted a spot in the debate based on a list of intended candidates it submitted to the Leaders’ Debate Commission two weeks prior to the nomination deadline. Dozens of those names never became official. The Greens also fall short on another key requirement: they are polling below 4% nationally.
Globe and Mail: The Greens Shouldn’t Be There
In a strongly worded editorial, The Globe and Mail criticized the Debate Commission’s decision, agreeing with Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet that the Greens should not have been invited. The editorial noted that the Green Party “never had a viable plan” to meet the candidate threshold and accused it of relying on a loophole — the commission’s early deadline — to claim eligibility without delivering.
Elizabeth May blamed the shortfall on Elections Canada bureaucracy and the compressed campaign calendar. But as The Globe pointed out, this is the second consecutive election in which the Greens failed to run a full slate, calling her explanations “hard to swallow.”
“The Greens have demonstrated that actions, not promises, should be the basis for the commission’s decisions.”
— The Globe and Mail, Editorial, April 13, 2025
Worse Than 2021
The Green Party’s 2025 performance is even weaker than in 2021, when under then-leader Annamie Paul, the party nominated 252 candidates — still well short of a full slate, but significantly better than the 232 it managed this year.
That makes this the lowest number of Green candidates in a federal election since 2000, despite having two sitting MPs, a co-leadership structure, and a full-time debate commission that provided advanced notice of criteria.
Leadership Gap
At the centre of this failure is co-leader Jonathan Pedneault, who stepped down from party leadership in mid-2024 and returned only shortly before the 2025 campaign began. While Pedneault has resumed a high-profile public role, this collapse in basic organizational capacity suggests that he did not do the preparatory work needed to lead a national campaign.
For a party that claims to represent long-term thinking, the failure to run candidates in over 100 ridings is not a technical glitch — it’s a breakdown in leadership.
