Climate for Change?
Environmental issues are now centre stage. Has leader of the Green Party Elizabeth May’s time come?

BY CHRISTOPHER GULY

Since becoming the tenth leader of the 24-year-old Green Party of Canada last August, Elizabeth May has been changing the political climate in Canada. Last November she placed second in Ontario’s London North Centre federal by-election, with 26 percent of the vote—the best showing for the Greens in Canadian federal electoral history. In March she announced she’d seek the nomination for the Nova Scotia seat that Conservative Peter MacKay had retained in 2006 with 40 percent of the vote. The Green candidate in that election got less than two percent of the vote.

Though the party has not yet won a seat in the House of Commons, last year it scored its first double digits in opinion polls and raised about $800,000—double the contributions received in 2004 and 2005. Also, the environment has emerged as a top issue for Canadians, and it is one that May, 53, has long embraced.

Connecticut-born May first made headlines in the mid-’70s when she successfully led a grassroots movement against aerial insecticide spraying near her home on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, where her family settled in 1973. (She became a Canadian citizen in 1978.) May worked in a restaurant to put herself through law school at Halifax’s Dalhousie University and arrived on Parliament Hill in 1986 as senior policy advisor to Tom McMillan, environment minister in Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government. In that role, she was instrumental in the creation of several national parks, including one on British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, and helped negotiate the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 international treaty to protect the ozone layer.

However, she resigned from her position in 1988 when McMillan granted permits for the construction of the Rafferty-Alameda dams in Saskatchewan without an environmental assessment—a decision later overturned by a court that ruled the permits were granted illegally. May joined the Sierra Club of Canada in 1989 and served as its executive director until she ran for the Green Party leadership last year. She has one credential none of the other party leaders have: the Order of Canada, into which she was inducted as an officer in 2005.

Elizabeth May, who lives in Ottawa with her 15-year-old daughter, talked with Reader’s Digest at her party’s downtown Ottawa headquarters.

RD: Why don’t you drive?
May: I have a licence. I don’t own a car ’cause I can’t afford one. It makes life a lot simpler not to have one—and it avoids greenhouse-gas emissions. I sold my car in 1980, when I ran for parliament in Cape Breton Highlands-Canso [against veteran Liberal cabinet minister Allan MacEachen, who won with 18,262 votes; May received 272]. By the end of the campaign, I had a $1,300 telephone bill. So I sold my car to pay my phone bill.

RD: Tell me about the “small party” you organized and ran for in the 1980 election.
May: It was the precursor for the Green Party of Canada. We were 12 candidates in six provinces. When the election campaign was over, some of the people in the Toronto area decided to keep it going as a political party because they could see the potential. I went off to law school, and they formed the Green Party [in 1983].

RD: You’re studying to become an Anglican priest. Have you always been an Anglican?
May: In the States, where I grew up, the Anglican Church is the Episcopal Church. When I was two, my mother pulled us out of church because the minister would not accept the petition that she was working on against nuclear-weapons testing.

RD: What happened next?
May: My mother started taking us to Quaker meetings. But then she decided the people [there] were no better than the Episcopal people, so we stopped going to church, period. I didn’t go until I was 13, and a friend of mine was being bat mitzvahed. Her father was a rabbi, and I tried to become Jewish, but he suggested I find the church my grandparents belonged to and start there. So I found my own way to getting confirmed as an [Episcopalian] Anglican at 13, and ever since have been a Sunday-school teacher.

RD: Why the priesthood? Is this yet another career for you?
May: A couple of years before my mom died, I was thinking about what I was going to do post-Sierra Club. I thought what I would most like to be was an Anglican priest. After my mom died, I signed up for my first course and found that I love studying theology. I find it thought-provoking and challenging and fascinating.

RD: How long until you are ordained?
May: At this rate, by the time I’m 60. My plan is to be prime minister first and an Anglican priest later.

RD: What do you think the odds are of you becoming PM?
May: What would anyone have thought the odds were that Stephen Harper would ever be prime minister? In the late 1990s, he headed the National Citizens Coalition and gave speeches that Canada was a failed northern European welfare state.

I find it astonishing that he became prime minister. Given his long-standing beliefs and the speeches he gave within recent history, there’s a strong possibility Stephen Harper would be perfectly content to see Canada subsumed into the United States.

RD: How do you think politicians should handle contentious issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage?
May: One thing that I find extraordinarily frustrating is so-called moral issues have been co-opted by one very narrow segment of society that’s intolerant. As a practising Christian, I know that there is no teaching of Jesus Christ that directly bears on either the question of abortion or same-sex marriage. To me the message is tolerance, love and acceptance; to oppose poverty and work towards justice.

I do have a level of respect, though, for the older members of my parish who find it hard to get used to change. They’re not homophobic or bad people; they just can’t adjust as easily. People in politics should accept that there are issues of moral complexity. And the thing that really hurts democracy is when battle lines are drawn that are polarized and adversarial. Democracy gets damaged by that because you can never have a real dialogue.

We need to shift the political dynamic to the really pressing moral issues: global disparities between the very rich in the industrialized world and the unbearably poor in the developing world; the AIDS in Africa issue; and the climate-change crisis, which is profoundly a moral issue. Do we, in our generation, have a right to destroy life on Earth for future generations?

RD: Were you to become prime minister, what would be your priorities?
May: That the quality of life of Canadian communities could be protected for future generations, which means we have to deal with environmental sustainability and embrace an economic model that sustains that ecosystem. To ensure that Canada has a strong health-care system and is a champion of an improved, reformed, strengthened United Nations, with economic activities that sustain ongoing life on Earth.

RD: Your party platform covers a wide range of issues, from health care and Canada’s role in Afghanistan to proportional representation and increasing Canadian workers’ annual paid vacation time to four weeks. Yet one of the challenges you face is overcoming the perception that the Greens are a one-note party focused only on environmental issues.
May: It’s funny. I keep wondering why the Bloc Québécois doesn’t get hit with this more often. It’s the ultimate one-issue party—it wants to separate—and yet people say, “Oh, the Green Party, you’re just a one-issue party!” Hello!

RD: How much of an influence do you think you had on Stephen Harper’s about-face on climate change?
May: Huge. I don’t know if it’s an about-face or a repackaging of the old face. We’ll have to see. [Earlier this year] Stephen Harper suggested he didn’t think the climate crisis is so serious that we should return to Kyoto, which is the only thing that could possibly work.

RD: Which of the other party leaders would make the best prime minister?
May: I think Stéphane Dion—because of his experience in Cabinet. He is remarkably diligent and hard-working, and doesn’t seem to have much ego that gets in the way, which is an impressive quality in a politician.

RD: Would you ever serve as his environment minister?
May: I wouldn’t leave the Green Party.

RD: What if the Greens formed an alliance with the Liberals?
May: That’s in the realm of possibility. When you look at the history of the Greens around the world, where we’ve made a difference, and the direction we’d like to see Canada move to with proportional representation, then that leads to coalition governments.

RD: Why are green issues so popular now?
May: Canadians have always had a core-value concern for the environment. But I don’t think the climate crisis is really an environmental issue anymore.
It’s a survival question; it’s a security threat. But for some crazy reason, Harper doesn’t think we’re supposed to spend any money dealing with it
—and it’s a much more immediate threat to Canadian security than foreign terrorism.

RD: You are the highest-profile leader in the history of the Green Party of Canada. How much of a role do you think you play in the popularity of the party?
May: Because I already had something of a profile from my work at Sierra Club, I think that contributed to the fact that the leadership race got more attention.

My predecessor, Jim Harris, did a great job for the Green Party and was the right leader for that time. He did an amazing job in getting 308 candidates in 308 ridings in the 2004 and 2006 federal elections. His focus was very much internal.

But what I see as a flaw in the Green Party history was that nobody in the Canadian public heard anything from the Green Party between elections.

So my goal is to get out there between elections, see if we can be tracked the way other political parties are—and make the case that we’re a serious political alternative.

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