Watch for federal party leaders’ profiles
First in a series of ive articles looking at the life and politics of the leaders of the major federal political parties seeking your vote in the Oct. 21 election.
Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada
• 1954 Born in Hartford, Conn. Parents were political activists.
• 1973 Moved to Cape Breton, N.S., with her family.
• 1978 Became a Canadian Citizen.
THE RESUMÉ
• 1980 stood as a candidate for the Small Party – a precursor to the Green Party – in Nova Scotia.
• 1983 obtained law degree from Dalhousie University.
• 1986-88 senior policy adviser to Tom Mcmillan, environment minister in the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney.
• 1988 Resigned in protest as Mcmillan’s senior policy adviser when the government granted permits for the construction of the Rafferty and Alameda dams in Saskatchewan without an environmental assessment.
• 1993-2006 executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada.
• 2001 Staged a 17-day hunger strike in Ottawa to draw attention to the Syndey Tar Ponds issue, an industrial waste site linked to illnesses and birth defects.
• 2008 Elected leader of the Green Party.
• 2011 Became the first Green Party member to win a seat in the House of Commons, as MP for Saanich-gulf Islands, B.C.
• 2012 Chosen parliamentarian of the year by Macleans magazine.
• 2013 Chosen hardest-working parliamentarian of the year by Macleans magazine.
• 2015 Named honorary doctor of divinity, Atlantic School of Theology.
WHAT YOU MAY, OR MAY NOT, KNOW ABOUT ELIZABETH MAY
Elizabeth May was born into an American activist family. Her artist mother, Stephanie, was on U.S. president Richard Nixon’s “enemies” list. Her father, John, an insurance executive, was also involved in social activism.
Her parents were involved in a group that lobbied, successfully, to convince president John F. Kennedy to ban atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.
Her parents moved the family to Baddeck, N.S., in 1973, apparently “fed up with their tax dollars being used to buy napalm.”
May began her activism in the mid-1970s when she became involved in a grassroots movement in Nova Scotia opposing the spraying of the insecticide Agent Orange on forests near her Cape Breton home.
For that activism, her family paid a high financial cost.
May and a local group of residents went to court to prevent herbicide spraying. They won a temporary injunction against Scott Paper in 1982 to hold off the spray program, but lost the case at the end of a two-year court battle.
May’s family had to sell 70 acres of their land to pay the legal fees.
Ironically, by the time the Nova Scotia judge ruled the chemicals were safe, Agent Orange had been banned from export in the U.S. and was never used in Nova Scotia’s forests.
JUICY TIDBITS
Elizabeth May, 65, got married in 2019 to B.C. hops farmer John Kidder, 71. The date – April 22 – was Earth Day. To ensure the wedding was a low carbon affair, the Electric Vehicle Club of Victoria helped transport people from the cathedral to the reception.
May re-used all the flowers that had been leftover from the Easter Sunday service at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria. The couple used mason jars instead of new vases for centrepieces at the reception, which was a potluck dinner.
"We're not wealthy and the idea of having a zillion people for a sit-down meal is pretty hard to do on a budget," May told CBC news. "But potluck is certainly going to be — it makes it doable to have a lot of people."
Her husband is the brother of Margot Kidder, who was romantically linked to former prime minister Pierre Trudeau — Justin’s dad — in the 1980s.
2019 POLICIES
In a March 3 Hill Times article, Elizabeth May said, “We must eliminate all fossil fuels from our electricity grid, enhance the east-west grid and facilitate clean and renewable energy bought and sold inter-provincially. We must move to 100 per cent electric vehicles, and switch to biofuels for tractors, fishing boats and other industrial equipment. Our built infrastructure must be overhauled to eliminate the waste of energy and money. And we must plant trees – everywhere. These steps will create millions of jobs."
The Green party plan has a target of zero carbon emissions by 2050 — and an idea on how to transition workers from the oil industry to new jobs in a clean-energy economy.
To transition to a carbon-free economy, the party proposes a national building retrofit plan that will create “millions of new, well-paying jobs in the trades.”
In an August interview with Global News, May said the Greens support the seven principles and 10 recommendations from the Task Force on Just Transition for Canadian Coal Power Workers and Communities.
“Our … platform contain(s) a commitment to the $300 million recommended by task force members to establish community support and a jobs bank.
“We must create transition pathways that support those (fossil fuel industry) workers immediately. Just looking at the requirements of Mission: Possible for retrofitting buildings, we will have more jobs than available workers for building tradespeople such as carpenters, electricians and plumbers. We will need four million of these workers.”
To transition workers from the fossil fuel industry, the Green party will fund retraining and apprenticeship programs, May says.
The Green Party platform also proposes to support post-secondary education with a budget plan that would put $10 billion to support post-secondary institutions and trade schools.
They would make college and university tuition-free for all Canadians and forgive the portion of existing student debt that is held by the federal government.
BOTTOM-LINE ME
Few will be surprised by the Green Party platform for the 2019 federal election.
The agenda is heavy on environmental issues and climate-change concerns, topics that have been dominant in Elizabeth May’s life since her formative years growing up in a family of activists.
She has a bold plan for switching Canada from a fossil-fuel economy, to one based on green energy. It’s a plan that includes money for retraining workers who have depended on carbon-reliant industries, with a proposal to set aside millions from the federal budget to retrofit buildings and pull them away from fossil-fuel heating systems.
Elizabeth May dreams of a day when all vehicles will be electric or powered by biofuels.
FRIDAY: Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.