Chad Hipolito/Red Deer Express

Defunct Party | Joe Anglin, seen here on a quarter of land five miles west of Rimbey, Alta., might be the last leader of the Alberta Greens.

After leading the Alberta Green Party for only 10 months, Joe Anglin has acquiesced to an Elections Alberta decision to de-register the party.

The feisty ex-Marine from rural Alberta says he was unable to file the proper financial documents because the former executive of the party refused to hand over the paperwork.

“This has been just a circus,” he says, “dealing with a bunch of wingnuts.”

But David Crowe, the former chief financial officer and a player in the Alberta Green Party since 1988, flat out rejects Anglin’s accusation, saying he provided everything the Greens needed to comply with the law in the form of an electric file.

The breakdown in the Alberta Green Party has been brewing since Anglin took over the party as interim leader at a bizarre annual general meeting last fall. The meeting was held in Anglin’s riding of Lacombe-Ponoka, where he had garnered huge support for a Green Party candidate. (Much of his popularity can be tracked to his having exposed Energy and Utilities Board spies during a meeting of concerned landowers fighting a power line.) Anglin brought about 200 supporters to the meeting. Then-leader George Read fled, met with his executive in the parking lot, and declared the meeting closed.

But inside, Anglin continued the meeting, where he was elected interim leader.

“They think it was a coup. I call it politics,” he says. “In the end, democracy is about numbers…. We organized to a level they had never seen before. They were defeated long before we reached the meeting.”

While Crowe admits leaving the meeting was a bad idea, he insists he did everything he could to reconcile the two factions, and that he did indeed provide all the financial information that Anglin needed to file a full report with Elections Alberta.

“There’s only two explanations,” he says of the de-registration. “Either it was complete incompetence on their part, or this was their intention all along.”

Anglin says the same thing of the old executive, claiming that they were not ready for the expansion the party was about to undergo, and wanted to keep the Green Party as their own private club. In other words, if they couldn’t have it, nobody could.

Edwin Erickson, a former Green candidate and the deputy leader for a very brief time under Anglin, left the party after taking one look at the party’s financial papers.

“When I saw the cardboard box full of garbage, there was no way I was going to be CFO and try to make an honest report,” he says. “I’m not going within 10 miles of that situation. I want to accomplish something politically in this province, and you don’t hang out with a bunch of losers if you want to get anything done.”

And the recriminations don’t stop there. Anglin also spreads blame to the federal party, and leader Elizabeth May. “I think Elizabeth May could have saved this whole thing,” he says. “This small group of people are die-hard loyalists to May…. All she had to do was put her foot down.”

If that’s the case, says Crowe, she did it without speaking with anyone. “I was actually quite disappointed,” he says, “that no one from the federal party phoned us to offer their sympathies or any wise words. I had zero contact with the federal party.”

The federal Green Party is staying out of the situation, and would not comment on Anglin’s statements or the de-registration.

David Parker, a former provincial Green Party leader and regular candidate for Edmonton-Centre, also remained neutral, saying neither side was willing to compromise after the September meeting. But he did point to the party’s weak constitution as one reason Anglin was able to take over so abruptly at the fall meeting. Despite the damage, Parker says the meeting was a wake-up call pointing to the need for better organization in the future. Crowe agrees that the constitution was maybe too “simple” for a political party.

“Those are tough lessons for a party that was trying to do things differently, to do things by consensus,” he says. “That’s a fact of political life. You might be the Green Party, but you still need a solid constitution.”

Even if people like Parker and Crowe are able to recreate a party around Green values, they are still fighting an uphill battle. University of Calgary political scientist David Taras says the Greens have already been squeezed out of the province’s political landscape by people like Alberta Liberal leader David Swann.

“What’s the effectiveness of a protest party, when their policies have been adopted by the Liberals and the NDP?” he asks. “By continuing to exist, they actually do damage to the environmental movement.”

The absence of the Green Party could change the political landscape for the next election if Green voters do move over to the other opposition parties, and the vote isn’t split. “If you add four per cent to David Swann,” Taras says, “things are good for the Liberals.”

But at this point, the Greens are not droping out entirely. Both Anglin and Crowe will continue to organize ahead of the next provincial election, although it’s very unlikely they will work together.

Crowe will attempt to reorganize a party with Green values, but he intends to do so outside of the society that was set up as a holding phase after the party’s de-registration.

Anglin, meanwhile, insists he’s personally still in the game, and says he will run in the next provincial election, perhaps as an independent, with the Wildrose Alliance, or some other new party.

“I’ll work with anybody to improve this government and the way we govern ourselves,” he says, including in his purview everyone from Brian Mason to Ed Stelmach.