The Decibel - An interview with Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

The federal election is in two weeks, on April 28 – so the Decibel has invited the leaders from Canada’s major parties onto the show to share their vision for the country.And while environmental concerns haven’t been top-of-mind in this election … Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault says he isn’t just concerned about climate change.Pedneault – who previously served as the party’s deputy leader from 2022 to 2024 – is proposing bold policies on a range of issues Canadians are facing, from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats to the high cost of living.The former journalist and human rights investigator, who has spent the better part of the last decade and a half working and living abroad, believes more progressive ideas are needed in this election. But the Greens are lagging in the polls, and Pedneault is running in a Liberal stronghold … So how will they be effective if they don’t make it to the House of Commons?Today, Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault joins us from Montreal. Ahead of the leader debates this Thursday, we ask him about his party’s daring proposals, what the Greens are offering Canadians, and if he’s returning to Canadian politics for good.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The federal election is in two weeks, on April 28th, and the Decibel has invited the leaders of the five major parties onto the show to share their vision for the country. Today, we're talking to Jonathan Pedneau, the co-leader of the Green Party. In recent years, the Greens have made headlines for infighting the defection of their first Atlantic MP and the resignation of their former leader, Anna Meapol. Now the party has two co-leaders, longtime leader Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneau. They launched their campaign in Montreal on March 23rd. The role for the Green Party right now is to stand up for every single Canadian that's having a hard time because of politicians and career politicians standing up in front

of them and consistently, constantly lying to them. Pedneau has never held office before. He's in his mid-30s and is the youngest leader in this race. He's also the only queer candidate leading a major party. He's from the south shore of Montreal, but much of his career has been spent outside of the country and outside of politics. Over the past decade and a half, Pedno has worked as a journalist and human rights activist. That work has taken him to war zones around the world.

In 2022, he became deputy leader of the Greens, but then stepped away in 2024 for personal reasons. He came back as the party's co-leader earlier this year. The Greens are often seen as a one-issue party, but environmental concerns haven't been top of mind in this election. And the party has a wide range of policies that it's presenting to Canadians.

So today, Jonathan Pedneau joins us from Montreal. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jonathan Pedno, welcome to The Decibel. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. So you are the co-leader of the Green Party of Canada, along with longtime politician Elizabeth May. What's it like working that closely with Elizabeth May?

Oh, it's great. I mean, we're very, very different. Elizabeth, of course, has been in Parliament for many years. I learned a lot from her. She started off as an environmental activist. My background's slightly different. You know, I started off as a 17-year-old in journalism, traveling to Darfur with a rebel group, crossing in from Sudan to do a documentary about human rights violations in that region. And most of my career has been focused really on human rights investigations.

And I'm new to politics. This is going to be my first debate. I'm the youngest as well, who will be on stage on Thursday. And I'm quite excited to defend some bold progressive values and visions that we have for this country. So as you say, you are new to politics. But you actually first attempted to enter politics back in 2009, I believe.

And this was actually as a liberal, right? So you didn't end up getting that liberal nomination. But when did you make that change from the liberals to the Green Party? Well, everyone's allowed a teenage mistake to an extent. But yeah, I mean, I was close to the Liberals. My mentor in journalism was Sasha Trudeau. We did two documentaries together.

That's former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's brother, yeah. Correct. So in the course of that collaboration, I got to know Justin as well. And I was part of his initial nomination campaign in Pepino. I think at the time, I would have been 16. The first time I went out canvassing in Montreal was with Justin and that was quite a learning experience for me. But indeed,

when I turned 18, of course, I was just back from the Sudan and this extremely powerful experience of witnessing grave human rights violations, producing my first documentary. And I thought that it would be important or interesting to provide a strong voice for young Canadians in politics. I wasn't expecting to win because I thought I'd run in my hometown in Longuet, which was at the time a very solidly Bloc Québécois riding. This is in Montreal, yeah. Yeah, on the south shore of Montreal.

And so I attempted to get the nomination, but very quickly, Denis Caden, who at the time was the Quebec left for Michael Ignatiev and wasn't a big fan of the Trudeau's, basically stopped me from from participating in that nomination race. You know, I wasn't involved in politics after that up until my return to Canada in 2022, after living abroad for nine years in South Sudan, Central African Republic, and in Norway. And over the

course of those years, I traveled to many different conflict areas from Somalia to Afghanistan to Egypt and Libya during the revolution. And it became very clear to me that not only was the world changing quite rapidly with the emergence of revisionist powers that were quite intent on destroying the rules-based order, but also that the climate emergency was having real life consequences already in numerous corners of the world. The first two and a half years that I lived in Norway, I somehow ended up living on Svalbard, which is an Arctic island as far up north as you can get. It's the northernmost civilian outpost, even north of Greece Fjord here in Canada on Ellesmere

Island. Quite remote, it sounds like, is what you're saying. Indeed, quite remote, but also very much exposed to the gravity of climate change. The year before I moved in, there had been an avalanche that took the life of two citizens in that community. And living in such a remote but also such an Arctic outpost, it is impossible not to notice the gravity of the climate emergency that we're in. And I could see it play out as well in places like the Sahel or in Afghanistan or in Somalia and how that was having impacts as well on geopolitical or internal political crises and dimensions that contributed to human rights violations. So when the invasion of Ukraine began, I was deployed there as part of my work with Human

Rights Watch and it was just so painfully clear that the world was going down a very dangerous slope. And I felt compelled to return to Canada to contribute back to my country and give back based on the experiences that I acquired abroad in terms of dealing with crises and emergencies. Yeah, you have a very interesting history there, as you alluded to, In activism, in journalism,

you've lived in a number of different countries. But I still, I guess I wonder, because you started out very close to the Trudeaus with this initial bend towards the liberals. What pushed you towards the Green Party? Because the Greens are the only ones that consistently have been ringing the alarm bell about the climate emergency,

but they're also the only party that thinks beyond the next election cycle. And one thing that was clear with Prime Minister Trudeau's period in power is that despite all the beautiful promises from 2015, we saw a number of them being broken. I think there is nothing more dangerous than people who pretend to be progressives, but don't actually

address the core deep issues at play. And- Is that what you see from the liberal zone? Oh yes, yeah, yeah, most certainly. And I got to know, of course, the Liberal Party quite closely during my teenage years. It's a party that is first and foremost preoccupied with the pursuit of power, oftentimes for the sake of power. And I don't want to diminish the amazing things that this party has brought to Canada. It is a party that's been at the forefront of several important progressive measures that led to this country being one of the best on earth. But for the past 20 to 30 years, I'd say this is also a party that has verged towards managing rather than establishing a proper vision for Canada.

And although I do think Justin tried to communicate a somewhat refreshed vision of what that country could look like, he did so in a very performative way without addressing the deep issues when it comes to inequality, but also the climate emergency. And, and I think that contributed significantly to the cynicism that a lot of young people have towards politics, me included, and certainly means that I have no interest whatsoever to join the Liberal Party. Or, for me, I think politics first and foremost is about ideas and values. It is also of course, about gaining power.

But one thing that's been very clear for me is that members of parliament like Mike Morris in Kitchener Center, Elizabeth May in Sandwich Gulf Islands, Paul Manning in the Nine Mo. These are the two current Green MPs in parliament, yeah. Correct. They've been able to have significant influence on the discussions that take place in the House of Commons. They've been able to provide significant amendments to bills because they do the

work and they do the work representing their constituents first and foremost and I think that's what politics should be about. Let me ask you more about that then because we know that elections are mostly fought in this country between the liberals and the conservatives but we do have five main parties right so what do you see as the role of the Green Party? This is a party that is currently polling at around two and a half percent. But what is your role? Our role is really to bring forth solutions and ideas that the bigger parties oftentimes

fail to see or grasp because they are so concerned about the immediate polling and about the immediate crises and you do not build the country or do not face a crisis simply by focusing on the next day. You need to have contingency plans. You need to prepare for the next week and the next year and the next decades. That's how we build a country. That's how the great men and women that contributed so significantly to the construction of today's

Canada were thinking. And I'm concerned that for the past several decades, we've had a significant lack of vision in Canadian politics. Cynically, I think someone might say, though, this sounds a lot like what the NDP say, right? And they're they're much bigger than the Green Party is. So what is the Green Party offering that players like the NDP are not doing? Honesty and ethics, I'd say that we also don't pretend as though we're going to form government. We don't go around saying, oh, I'm running to be the Prime Minister of Canada. We have a different approach to Canadian politics, one that's perhaps more authentic with how our constitution is

designed. Canadians right now, they will be asked to vote for members of Parliament. Unless you live in Mark Carney's writing or in Pierre Poitier's writing, you're not voting for Carney or Poitier. You're voting for someone who will be tasked with representing you and your community for the next four or five years. And it's an important job and one that I think, a lot of Canadians eventually in the course of their life, they need some help from their MP

to navigate the complexities of federal bureaucracy. And they also want their MPs to actually take the time to read the bills before they vote. They want their MPs to be able to stand up in defense of their communities. That's why we have the system we currently have, where an MP from Newfoundland and Labrador will not necessarily have the same input from his citizens as one from Toronto or one from the Yukon, because our country is so diverse. It

contains multitudes, and these multitudes should be represented in Ottawa. The problem is that the big parties for many years now, they've been imposing this extremely top-down structure with extreme centralization of power in the hands of the leadership, especially when they're in government through the prime minister's office. And we would like to see more Canada in Ottawa and maybe a bit less Ottawa and the rest of Canada. And that really informs how we operate as Greens. I am not the boss of Mike Morris or Elizabeth May.

We work collaboratively. We work through consensus as much as possible. And when we cannot find consensus, as long as we are within the remits of our six core values and the progressive vision that we defend, then it is still possible for MPs to vote in different ways according to what best represents their communities. And that's what parliamentary politics in a country so diverse as Canada should be about first and foremost. We'll be right back.

So I take your point that, yes, MPs play an individual role with their writings and they're the representatives in Ottawa. But then I have to ask, you're running in the writing of Outremont in Montreal. The last green candidate who ran in that writing came in fifth place. I guess how do you expect to be effective if you're not in the House? Because right now it kind of looks like it's liberal stronghold. It looks unlikely for you to actually be elected. Well, I think I'm being effective by having

the opportunity to talk with you and your listeners and communicate some strong ideas about our vision for Canada and the deficiencies of our current model. And that's a discussion that all too often doesn't take place because the bigger powers don't have an interest in changing things. They have a vested interest in keeping them as they are. And I think a lot of Canadians right now recognize that Canada, as it currently operates, doesn't

serve their benefits. So there's something to be effective, you can be effective even without being in the House is kind of what you're saying then. Everyone should be as involved in politics as possible. And I think there are different ways of being involved in politics. I think it's important to speak the truth. And I think that Canadians are not as cynical as some media would have them be sometimes. I think Canadians, and especially here in Quebec and in Montreal, we've, you know, Montreal has been at the forefront of progressive change in this country.

It was the first writing, outremont remote to send a new Democrat to the House of Commons in Quebec from Quebec. You know, the reception we're getting at the doors and in the street is phenomenal right now. I think people want to have strong voices that will represent their interests in Ottawa. And I think a lot of people are also just tired of the kind of toxic politics that Kapwadiyev is bringing to the House. And that, frankly, I want to say the cynicism that the liberal failures created. I think people want some change. And I think some people are ready to vote for it. And that's what we're banking on. But more importantly, for me, an election

campaign is about an exchange of ideas. And it's about presenting a vision of what Canada should look like. It's also about not pretending as though any single person, men or women, has all the answers to all of the problems that Canada faces right now. We're faced with serious crises from the climate emergency to the tensions that arise from the country south of the border. And any person, whether it's Mark Carney or Pierre Poirier, who stands up in front of Canadians and say, oh, I know how the world works, or I have all the answers, that's a dangerous narrative to pedal. I think the Canadian answer to this is more democracy at home, is more diversity in

parliament, and is certainly not sending a majority government in some sort of tweaked two-party system in Parliament. We consistently have these false majority governments. What does that mean, a false majority? It means a majority government elected with less than 50% of the popular vote in Canada and that is how our system works though, right? The first-past-the-post system, that is the way that works. Indeed, and Justin Trudeau promised several hundreds of times to change it I mean, that is how our system works though, right? The first pass the post system, that is the way that works. Indeed. And Justin Trudeau promised several hundreds of times to change it in 2015 and in the end never did, because of course, the system benefits the big parties.

But I think it also fuels a lot of cynicism and mistrust towards institutions when roughly 60% of the votes from Canadians don't end up having a significant influence on neither the government or the composition of Parliament. So, well, can I just jump in here though because you mentioned the big ideas and the vision for Canada that your party has. I want to ask you about some of that. And you mentioned Donald Trump.

So I think we should start there. The Green Party has actually, you have an extensive outline of the plan of how to respond to the US and Trump. And some of these things that you say, so you say that you would quote bar Trump and key US officials and quote from entering the country, suspend the safe third country agreement and create a block that you call like an economic NATO with other countries without the US. I guess some Canadians would wonder, is this really the best approach to completely abandon it sounds like our relationship with the United States? The United States is abandoning its relationship with Canada.

We have a president himself of the border, completely unstable, who says and has said several times that he wants to annex Canada. We know that we have here strategic resources that the US will want and even more so with climate change and that we remain the custodians of 2% of the waters on this planet and we know that there are several shortages. We've heard the president of the United States say on numerous occasions that British Columbia needs to open up the faucet to help California. We can be under no illusion that we are now faced with a United States that is fundamentally different from the one that we have been looking at for the past 50 to 60 years.

This is a country right now that is acting in unpredictable ways, and that is not a good partner for Canada. Is it really practical for Canada to extricate itself from our relationship with the U.S.? We think about our economies, our defense. We have the longest undefended border in the world, famously. Could we actually put Canadians more at risk by pulling back? The most impractical thing for me and I think most Canadians right now would be to abandon our values and kowtow to someone like Donald Trump, who is actively undermining democracy

in his own country, who is violating basic human rights and threatening his country's best allies, his most steadfast allies with economic sanctions. When we talk about practicality, we have to ask ourselves, why are we in the situation we're in right now? We are in this situation because for decades, we've had liberal conservative governments alike that have facilitated the creation of this super dependency on the United States. Canada's economy and of course you know we can go back in history. Canada was a colony for the British Empire. We extracted raw resources from here. We shipped them overseas to be transformed, added value to it and then sold back to us and we're doing exactly the same thing with the United States right now. If you look

at British Columbia, we're shipping raw lumber to Oregon so that it gets transformed there and then shipped back to us. The same with Alberta with beef. We're shipping live cattle to the United States so that it gets transformed into steaks and whatnot shipped back to us with added price. This is not how you build an economy. Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of thinking that the liberals and conservatives have been putting front and center

for decades. I mean, it is what our economy has been based on for a long time, right? So it's it is hard to pull away from that in a moment. Indeed, it certainly is. But it's it remains necessary, not only because we're in the situation we're faced with Donald Trump right now, but also because it's simply the best thing to do. Canada has the expertise, the resources, and the ability to produce most of the things

we need here at home with good paying jobs. Right now we're faced with this super dependency that will have serious consequences on our economy. So what we're fighting for right now is to make sure that in responding to the unpredictability from Trump, number one, we do not compromise on our values and our sovereignty. I don't think Canadians want to see us being turned into a US number two or certainly not being absorbed or annexed. And I think that also requires us to then make sure that we have the significant investments in building an economy that can stand on its own two legs.

Part of that relies on creating strong economic and defense agreements with other democracies. The world we live in right now is faced with three revisionist powers, China, Russia, and sadly the United States is entering that club. And other smaller nations from France to Ukraine to Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, we're all faced with those same challenges of how do we navigate this world where these massive superpowers are threatening the ideals that our societies are based on, namely democracy and the respect for sovereignty. So you make a point that we need to have an economy that can stand on its own two legs,

which I think a lot of Canadians would agree with, right? Like in this election, there hasn't been so much focus on environmental policy, but there has been a lot of focus on energy, energy independence, a lot of talk about pipelines. I know that you have said there should be no more pipelines, but I wonder what do you suggest we do instead to increase our energy independence? When people like Carney and Poirier say we need to build more pipelines, they're talking about spending our public money billions of dollars of it. And you don't need to look farther than TMX to know that it's going to cost several billions of dollars to build these pipelines. They're talking about using our public money to fund an industry that is quote unquote Canadian,

but that is actually owned at 70 percent by foreign interests, most of them in the United States. So basically they're talking about taking our taxes, money, and put it in the pockets of people south of the border. And I simply fundamentally disagree with that, not only because in the current context that's the wrong thing to do, but also because when it comes to climate change, we are seeing several communities throughout the country that are affected by climate change already from wildfires to floods to the smoke that we had to breathe in Toronto and Montreal no longer than two summers ago. What is the solution if we don't want foreign owned companies? Like what is the solution there? How do we prevent that from happening? The solution is when it comes to most of our resources, one thing that we have been proposing is strategic reserves. So establishing strategic reserves in Crown corporations, especially with aluminum, potash, lumber,

to help keep the mills running and invest in acquiring those assets to resell them later on on the global market when the prices are higher. But to not export to the United States right now. The United States is acting as a bully and it is trying to use economic force to obtain political objectives, namely in our case annexation. And we can simply not compromise or negotiate with that. We need to be strong and we need to be ready to invest in protecting the jobs and protecting our resources. That would decimate a lot of our industries though if we're cutting exports to the United States.

I mean there's such a huge buyer of our goods. We're talking about raw resources here and most of the things that we're exporting once again are raw resources that are then transformed there and sent back to us with added prices. That's where we need to find new export markets. I think there's a lot of talk about how do we maintain our relationship with the United States and all too little about how we create new markets abroad. Most of the energy and to a large extent, I want to commend Mr. Carney on this because his first move when becoming prime minister was not to go down to Washington or Mar-a-Lago, but was to go to Europe and make sure that our European allies knew that Canada is open for business. We right now, we have the opportunity to take a part of the market share that is being abandoned

by the United States when it comes to numerous products. I think before long, Europeans and Asians and people throughout the world will look at US-made products the way they now look at Russian-made products or Chinese-made products. It's a country that is deregulating its industries, that is attacking democratic values at home and worldwide. I think people will have some reasonable questions

about the viability of products like Apple or Tesla. It's already the case. And that opens up a market share. And if we're smart and if we're courageous and bold, we can actually build here at home some of the replacements for that. We have a massive auto sector in Canada that requires transformation, no doubt, and it requires significant investments, no doubt, and it requires

significant investments, no doubt. But Renault, for example, a French car company is owned 50% by the French state. So there are precedents. And certainly here at home as well during the Second World War, once again, the Canadian government invested significantly in transforming our economy into a war economy. And I think that in this particular moment in time, we need to shift our resources away, our public resources away from funding industries like the oil and gas industry that's again owned at 70% by foreigners and most of them Americans, and make sure that we invest it smartly into the renewable energy sector and the manufacturing of technology

that could be sold to the rest of the world, creating in Canada a democratic manufacturing hub that will be reliable for our European and Asian and South American allies. We've got all the talent here, but we've got none of the chaos of the United States, and we need to bank on that. That is a great moment for Canada to shine, but that requires some courage.

I want to ask you about one of your other proposals related to the economy. This is actually specifically to address cost of living issues. This is a $40,000 tax-free income threshold, meaning that the government would only apply taxes beyond earnings of $40,000. Currently, that rate is about $16,000. So this would be a big jump of tax-exempt money. I think a lot of people would appreciate that, but of course this would decrease government revenue here. So how would you compensate for that loss? So that's a measure that would apply to people earning less than $100,000, and that's 78% of us.

78% of Canadians earn less than $100,000. Indeed, it is a loss for the public treasury, and that is a loss that we're proposing to recoup by bringing the corporate income tax for big businesses back to 21%. So just a small history here, our corporate tax rate in Canada in the 50s was between 40 and 50%. And it slowly decreased in the 80s and especially in the 90s under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. It went from 28 to 21%. Stephen Harper cut it from 21 to 15 percent and Justin Trudeau kept it at 15 percent. And the argument here was to say, well, it's going to bring in investments

and good paying jobs for Canadians is the whole trickle down narrative that we've heard over and over again from, you know, proponents of this neoliberal approach. But wouldn't that argument still stand though, like, especially at a time when we were focused on building Canadian business? No, no, it certainly doesn't, because we've seen over and over again and for decades now that while the wages have been stagnating throughout Canada, but the profits of these companies have been increasing, not only their profits, but the size of their assets as well.

So right now, Canadian corporations throughout the country are sitting on 17 trillion dollars in assets. This is a rich country. None of this is taxed right now, Canadian corporations throughout the country are sitting on $17 trillion in assets. This is a rich country. None of this is taxed right now. We're proposing to go back to 21%. Right now, our corporate income tax rate is lower than that of the United States. There will be people who say, well, doesn't that create a risk for Canadian businesses to move to the US to benefit from? I would say I think any person with some business acumen right now would not want to invest in a country like the United States, where there is so much unpredictability coming from the president and his administration.

Canada has a rule of law, has a social net, and has a stability that is necessary for enterprises and businesses to thrive, but they need to contribute back to it. And right now what we've seen is that for the big businesses, we've seen an accumulation of wealth in the hands of very few people. It's 90 families in Canada that own as much as 12 million of us, which is to me simply unacceptable and we need to reverse that balance. Hence the need to reduce income tax for individuals. Because right now in Canada, all of us collectively, we pay $200 billion in income tax to the federal government.

Corporations, they pay $90 billion. So that's less than half than all of us pay to the federal treasury. And yet we see tens of billions of dollars in subsidies that go from the federal government, from our tax money into those businesses. Something is not right. That's money that can be used to build homes. That's money that can be used to invest in common ventures that are owned partly by the public to transform our economy. That's something that can be used to transform our economy away from fossil fuel dependency into the energies of the future.

The money is here, but for decades, it's been misspent by conservative and liberals alike who very much like to give tax breaks to their friends and sadly haven't contributed nearly enough to reducing inequality and protecting workers in this country. And that has significant impacts down the road for democracy and for climate change, and that's something we're trying to fix. Going into this election, what does success look like for the Green Party after April 28th?

Well, we want to make sure that we have Elizabeth May, Mike Morris, Paul Manley, Nanaimo, myself. We want to have a strong contingent in Ottawa. But for me personally, the most important thing is to make sure that we shift the political narrative a bit in this country. We have these big parties right now that say that have the nerve of telling Canadians that now is the time for them to to reduce their public spending, that we need to tighten our belts. After decades of providing these corporations with tax breaks. I think this is completely unacceptable. Canada can live up to its promise of not

leaving anyone behind but that requires some strong advocates for people in the House of Commons. That requires a diversity of views in the House of Commons and that will only be achieved if we make sure collectively that we do not send a majority government in the House of Commons after this next election. And just lastly here, you've been living in Norway for the last few years. So do you plan to stay in Canadian politics if, by chance, you don't win your seat in Outremont?

For now, I'm focused on April 28th, and I'm asking for the people of Outremont to give me a chance to represent them in Ottawa. I want to serve my country and I'll find every possible way I can to continue to do that. I think we'll leave it there. Jonathan Pednot, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you. Thanks a lot. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our associate producer is Azra Souter. Our intern is Olivia Grandy. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein,

and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.