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Annamie Paul sends notice of resignation to Greens, quits party

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Outgoing Green Party Leader Annamie Paul says she has officially sent in her notice of resignation to the Green Party of Canada on Wednesday.

In a tweet, Paul said she will also end her membership with the party.

“It was an honour to work for the people of Canada and I look forward to serving in new ways,” she said.

On Sept. 27, the embattled leader announced that she started the process of withdrawing from the role, calling her less than a year at the helm of the party “the worst period” in her life.

Paul failed to win her Toronto Centre riding for the third time in September's federal election, and the party ran the fewest number of candidates since 2000.

In 2021, just 398,775 Canadians voted Green. The party secured 1,189,631 votes in 2019.

Paul is the first Black and Jewish woman to be elected leader of a major political party in Canada. She said in September that while she was happy to break the glass ceiling, it wasn’t without its fair share of personal distress.

“When I was elected and put in this role, I was breaking a glass ceiling. What I didn't realize at the time is that I was breaking a glass ceiling that was going to fall on my head and leave a lot of shards of glass that I was going to have to crawl over,” Paul said at the time.

“When I arrived at that debate stage [the English-language 2021 leaders’ debate] I had crawled over that glass, I was spitting up blood, but I was determined to be there. I was determined to be there so that the next time someone like me thinks of running and wonders whether it's possible to be on that stage, they will know that it is possible to do that.”

The Green Party has been embroiled in intra-party politicking that also included an attempt to strip Paul of her Green membership earlier in the year.

Former leader Elizabeth May has stayed mostly mum on the internal disputes but said on CTV’s Question Period in early October that a “leader who has resigned but then hasn’t resigned, is untenable.”

May said she wouldn’t step in as the party’s interim leader, and instead wants Paul Manly to take on the role. Manly lost his seat in Nanaimo-Ladysmith during last month’s federal election.

With files from CTV News’ Rachel Aiello.

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