The Green Party of Ontario (GPO; ) is a political party in Ontario, Canada. The party is led by Mike Schreiner. In 2018, Schreiner was elected as the party's first member of the Ontario Legislative Assembly. In the past, the party did see significant gains in the 2007 provincial election, earning 8% of the popular vote with some candidates placing second and third in their ridings. A milestone was reached in the 2018 provincial election, when Schreiner was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in the riding of Guelph. Elections Ontario records that in the 1999 provincial election, the GPO fielded 58 candidates, and became the fourth largest party in the province. In 2003, the party fielded its first nearly full slate, 102 out of 103 candidates, and received 2.8% of the vote. In 2007, in what many consider the breakthrough election for the GPO, the party fielded a full slate of 107 candidates, receiving over 8.0% and nearly 355,000 votes. The GPO had gained the most in the 2007 election and was one of only two parties that gained a significant amount of support. The rise in its political fortunes coincided with the national rise in support for the Green Party of Canada during the same period. Subsequently, the party's popularity declined in the 2011 and 2014 elections during tightly contested races between the Progressive Conservatives and ruling Liberals. In the 2018 election, the party received 4.6% of the vote. History Early years The late 1960s is widely seen as the start of the global ecological movement, however it wasn't until the 1970s that this movement began to gain political and economic legitimacy, with advances such as the founding of the world's first green party (New Zealand's Values Party), and the entry of the West German Greens (Die Grünen) into that country's legislature. The tiny, short-lived Small Party, named after E. F. Schumacher's book Small Is Beautiful, formed in the Maritimes in the mid to late 1970s, and was the first party in the Western Hemisphere related to the green movement. This party was founded by Elizabeth May, now the leader of the Green Party of Canada. By the early 1980s, the idea of organized Green politics began to gain in international popularity, and in 1983 the Green Party of Ontario was registered with Elections Ontario. Shortly after the GPO was registered it contested its first election, fielding