The 2022 Leadership Race

At age 17, Jonathan Pedneault smuggled himself into Darfur in the back of a pick-up truck filled with rebels to document the deadly rights and environmental crisis for a CBC/Radio Canada documentary. By then, he had spent two years giving conferences to fellow students about genocide and Canada's responsibility to prevent mass atrocities. That was his first foray into foreign reporting. 

A gay, mixed-race single son of a single mom, Jonathan was raised in a poor suburb of Montreal. An early understanding of how privileged he was to be born Canadian impacted everything he later set about to do. For Jonathan, privilege comes with immense responsibilities. And he is one to take responsibility seriously. 

Over the next fifteen years, Jonathan worked to report on crises throughout the world and advocate for greater accountability and global social justice. 

Through his work, Jonathan interviewed fishermen in Somalia who had turned to piracy to fight off illegal fishing, documented sexual abuses by UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, witnessed failed revolutions in Egypt and Libya and documented excessive force by police in places as diverse as Chile, Belarus and the United States. 

With two years spent living on Svalbard, in the high arctic, and years reporting from places affected by extreme weather events such as the Sahel and Central Asia or with refugees leaving drought and hurricane affected Central America to face abuses at southern US borders, Jonathan has been in the belly of the climate beast. He knows what's coming. And why we need to urgently get our act together. 

Jonathan is an organized thinker, who seeks impact in everything he does. He believes the Green Party of Canada is the only party that has shown the moral courage and strength needed to face the coming crises. But he believes the party too needs to get its act together, and project itself as the credible alternative it is. Together with Elizabeth May, he's asking the membership for a mandate to empower the GPC to implement the changes Canadians from coast to coast to coast need. It is, after all, our shared responsibility.