Adriane Carr - [ Green Party ]
By Duncan Speight | April 6, 2005

Former college instructor Adriane Carr was a co-founder of the Green Party of B.C. in 1983, and was elected as the party's leader in 2000.

Her election came after former leader Stuart Parker was ousted in a non-confidence vote that followed the election of a new board of directors.

Carr led the Green Party to its best showing in B.C. in 2001 – with 12.4% of the vote and 12 candidates finishing second. Seven Green candidates attracted more than 20 per cent of the vote.

Carr herself got 27 per cent of the vote in Powell River-Sunshine Coast in 2001, tied for second place with the NDP.

Since then, she has campaigned for proportional representation that would give parties seats based on their total popular vote. She has noted that the B.C. Liberals took 96 per cent of the seats in the 2001 election with 58 per cent of the popular vote.

A resident of the Sunshine Coast, Carr ran in last fall's byelection in Surrey-Panorama Ridge.

She had said that if she won, she wouldn't run for re-election in May's general election. Instead, she said would run again in her home riding on the Sunshine Coast where she had already been nominated.

The NDP's Jagrup Brar won the byelection. Carr came third with less than nine per cent of the vote.

Carr was also a 12-year member of the executive of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, and is married to WCWC founder Paul George.

As a representative of WCWC, Carr helped resolve the logging conflict in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in the 1990s, winning UN Biospehere Reserve status for the region.

She grew up in Burnaby, graduating from Burnaby North in 1970. She then earned her B.A. and M.A. in geography at UBC.

She than taught for 12 years at the Langara campus of Vancouver Community College, where she was also a faculty union representative.

Carr is also musical, and was in a children's choir that toured the world. She has a degree in piano teaching.

Carr and George have a son in high school and a daughter attending UBC.