Stuart Parker (politician)

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Stuart Parker (born 1972 in Vancouver) is a Canadian politician and university lecturer. He led the Green Party of British Columbia from 1993 to 2000, becoming the first BC Green leader of African descent and founding the party’s youth wing, the Young Greens (1988–1992). Under his leadership, the Greens grew in popularity and helped form the province’s first Red-Green coalitions in municipal elections. He was involved in environmental activism, including anti-clearcutting protests in Clayoquot Sound (1993) and the Slocan Valley (1997).

Parker’s approach brought both support and criticism, and in March 2000 he was defeated for the leadership by Adriane Carr as the party moved in a more centrist direction. After leaving the Greens, he worked with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and sought political office in Ontario in 2009, attempting to win the NDP nomination for St. Paul’s. He later sought a federal NDP nomination but was disqualified in 2010 over past social media posts. He left the NDP in 2018 over provincial subsidies to fossil fuel producers.

Beyond party politics, Parker has been active in civic organizing. He helped found Proudly Surrey (2018), a civic party aiming to elect local officials in Surrey, BC. In 2020 he co-founded the BC Ecosocialists, serving briefly as acting leader and as a candidate for the 2020 BC general election before resigning after allegations of transphobic comments. By 2023 he described himself as conservative and anti-woke, and in 2024 he joined the BC Conservative Party as a party staffer.

Parker has also pursued academia, including a travel-heavy postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on the religions of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Polynesia. He lives in the Vancouver area and works as a university lecturer at Simon Fraser University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. He is the son of Valerie Jerome and the nephew of Olympic sprinter Harry Jerome, and he gave the keynote for British Columbia’s Black History Month in 1994.