Green leader bullied us, former staffers say
Elizabeth May, party execs flatly deny three ex-employees’ allegations of ‘verbal, emotional abuse’
OTTAWA— Three former Green Party staffers are accusing longtime leader Elizabeth May of workplace bullying, alleging she has created a toxic work environment with conduct that includes yelling at employees and putting them down in front of their colleagues.
Rob Rainer, a manager of six non-profit organizations before he served as the party’s interim executive director in 2014, said the Green Party has failed to address and prevent a pattern of “verbal and emotional” abuse by the 63-yearold leader.
“What I witnessed was her proclivity to be negative and — most seriously — to berate, belittle and bully individuals,” Rainer said. “How we speak to other people can really, really hurt.”
May and the party’s current executive director, Emily McMillan, and another high-ranking party official flatly denied the allegations and dismissed them as nothing more than the grumbling resentment of former employees.
In a statement issued Saturday, the Green Party said it “stands firmly behind” May.
“She is admired and respected by staff, her constituents in Saanich-Gulf Islands, and by the party’s members and supporters,” the statement said.
Rainer is calling on the party to apologize “to everyone who has been hurt by (May’s) behaviour” and bring in an external investigator to examine her alleged conduct.
“She should be forced to step down as leader of the party and sit as an independent MP,” Rainer said.
Diana Nunes said she worked as the party’s director of finance for more than 10 years until she was “abruptly” termi- nated in April 2015. She recalled numerous instances where May allegedly “threw a fit” and yelled at employees, though she herself was never the target.
Nevertheless, Nunes called May a “bully” who is “mean to the core.”
Another former staffer, Vanessa Brustolin, said she worked as the party’s Manitoba-Ontario organizer for three months last summer.
She claimed that May yelled at her on three occasions and that she was let go by the party after complaining to her division boss and May’s assistants that, “if she spoke like this in private industry, she’d be fired.”
In a 50-minute interview addressing general and specific concerns raised by the former staffers, May rejected being characterized as a “bully.” Instead, she described her leadership style as generous and supportive, stating that she “habitually” gives her own money to party operatives who are in financial difficulty.
She also said she “can’t recall ever yelling or screaming” in the workplace.
“I studied for the priesthood. I’m really quite a committed Christian. I believe in treating people the way I’d like to be treated myself,” May said.
“I am the antithesis of the bully leader.”
The allegations are emerging less than two years before May’s fourth federal election as Green Party leader. In her 11 years as the party’s flagbearer, she has become the public embodiment of the environment-focused movement, having been the Greens’ champion since the early days of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.
But the political landscape has dramatically shifted, with a Liberal government spouting big talk on core Green issues such as climate change and environmental protection.
May’s party appears entrenched on the sidelines of political relevancy, consistently scoring in the midsingle digits in national polls. And she remains the only person ever elected to Parliament under the Green banner, as the party’s share of the popular vote in the last election was barely half what they scored in 2008, her first national contest as leader.
Some longtime activists in the party are jostling for a change. Former Green Party president Mark MacKenzie, who is now a local councillor in the eastern Ontario Township of Renfrew, said he believes the party has grown too closely associated with May’s image and personality.
“Somebody else needs to be on the website. Somebody else needs to be featured. Somebody else needs to be speaking for the Green Party,” he said. “It has pretty much been the Elizabeth May Party of Canada.”
The bullying accusations appear to fly in the face of May’s frequent public calls for a better, more respectful tone in Parliament. They also contradict the glowing praise she receives from some party volunteers and staff.
Stacey Leadbetter, a longtime Green activist who ran for the party in Durham in 2015, called May “a shining example of what a Green Party leader should be.” Other former staff contacted by the Star declined to be interviewed, but indicated they had respect and admiration for May.
McMillan, the party’s executive director, said she believes the allegations stem from resentments over being let go by the party. She said the party has human resources policies and an internal dispute resolution mechanism to address issues in the workplace.
On Saturday, the party said it has not received any formal complaints about May through its internal process.
She added that, in her years working with May at the Green Party and Sierra Club — which May ran for several years before jumping into politics — she has never seen the leader yell in anger at an employee.
“I just think it’s sad that a woman in power is held to some kind of standard that you’re supposed to be meek and mild all the time,” McMillan said.
“There’s always going to be disgruntled former people in various roles who want to do damage.”
The three former staffers making the allegations paint a different portrait of the leader.
Rainer, the former interim executive director, said he submitted a written summary of his experience working with May to several party officials in November 2014.
The document, which was obtained by the Star, outlines exchanges Rainer had with May, describes how her conduct pushed him to “within hours of quitting” on several occasions and states that by the end of his term with the party, he had “a profoundly visceral reaction to the presence of Elizabeth and even the sound of her very voice.”
Rainer’s document also alleges May told him over the phone that she had the power to have him fired and once included him on an email to party executive officials that accused him of incompetence.
Rainer wrote that at one point he called May in an effort to smooth over their relationship, and that she allegedly told him “respect has to be earned.”
“She has a way of speaking that is very hostile — very cutting, degrading kinds of comments,” Rainer said in an interview.
“Once you get in her bad books, life is going to be tough.”
Patricia Farnese, a lawyer who sits on the five-member legal entity that owns the party and hires the executive director, said she received the document from Rainer.
Farnese said it is the only time she has been given a written complaint about May’s behaviour.
The complaints were discussed and taken seriously, Farnese said, adding that she viewed them in the context of well-known friction that existed between Rainer and May over disagreements about whether party staffers are adequately paid.
That, combined with the fact that he no longer worked for the party, prompted the decision not to pursue any internal action in response to the allegations, she said.
“It seemed to us to be driven by a conflict in what (Rainer’s) job was and what the roles of the job were,” she said.
McMillan, who did not receive Rainer’s document, said she has never received a “formal complaint” about May’s behaviour toward party staff.
May also responded to a number of specific allegations from the former staffers.
In 2006, Nunes said that May requested that her new office in Ottawa be repainted. When May came back to the office before it was done, Nunes claimed the leader threw “a fit,” yelled at another employee and threatened to bring in former workers to get the job done.
In a separate incident, Nunes also claimed May was upset that her daughter was denied a party stipend for work she had done. Nunes alleged that May “slammed” her office door “so loud that every staff member in that place stopped and wondered what was going on.”
May said she recalled wanting her office painted in 2006, because it was “fire engine red” and she couldn’t work there without getting a headache. She said that when she came back from a trip to B.C., her office was the only room in the entire workspace that hadn’t been repainted. She suggested there was “some smirking” from staff, whom she said had supported her rival in a recent party leadership race. May claimed she told them, “if you guys can’t get this done, I’ll bring in some volunteers,” but she denied yelling or getting angry about it.
“I’m not fussy about my work environment,” she said. “I’m just a workhorse.”
May also recalled that she asked for a stipend to compensate her daughter for work done during the 2011 election campaign. She said she had a “very poor” relationship with the party’s executive director at the time and that she remembered only the decision to deny the stipend request.
“I certainly don’t remember slamming a door,” May said. “I’m not a door slammer.” A third incident that May confirmed occurred in 2014, when she was on a conference call with a group of party employees. Nunes and Rainer, who were not on the call, said that May swore at a contract employee during the conversation about an upcoming party event. They said the employee was so distressed by the exchange that she went on sick leave and resigned a few days later.
Rainer’s summary of complaints describes the fallout of the exchange, and notes that he emailed with the employee about what happened. The report notes the employee felt May’s conduct was the worst “display of abusive bullying” the employee had ever experienced.
The employee declined to be interviewed when contacted by the Star.
May acknowledged that she swore during the call, but said she didn’t swear at the worker — she said “you’ve got to be effing kidding me” during a discussion about a website and train tickets to an upcoming event.
“I do remember that I lost my temper, and I apologized to her right away,” May said. “I went into that telephone conversation having not had a full night’s sleep in about three days, and I was very apologetic . . . I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t use language like that.’ ”
Brustolin, meanwhile, said she found May to be “belittling and demeaning” after she was hired in the spring of 2017. She claimed that May yelled at her when she tried to explain what she knew about environmental assessments during an exercise at a staff retreat about how to improve the Environmental Assessment Act. She said May started yelling at her about how she was one of the people who wrote the act, and that “I think I should know more about it than you.”
“(It was) loud to the point that everybody in the whole place just turned around and watched her yell at me,” Brustolin said.
May recalled the incident as well, but disputed Brustolin’s story. She said she was asked to give a briefing on the act, and then Brustolin chimed in about her own expertise in the area.
“I thought, well look — why don’t you do the briefing then?” May said. “And then unfortunately it became apparent that it was really back to me to do the briefing.
“It’s such a minor thing and certainly not to make her feel bad,” May added. “I would never undercut anybody.”
Brustolin also said that a few weeks into her job, May’s chief of staff Debra Eindiguer and another staffer brought her to a meeting to give advice on how to work with the party leader. Nunes said such meetings occurred for new hires that may have to interact with May.
“They basically just talk to you about how to appropriately approach Elizabeth and speak to Elizabeth so she doesn’t yell at you,” Brustolin said.
She said she was told how to respond to May’s periodic chain emails, to avoid saying things like “‘I hope you’re enjoying a holiday,’ because she’s never on holiday.”
McMillan and May confirmed that training meetings for new staff sometimes address how to work with the leader. They said that May rarely interacts with staff at the partisan office, which is separate from her parliamentary office on the Hill. The training deals with things such as how to communicate with the leader, who has different email addresses and electronic devices for various functions of her job, May said.
“It’s not like a do’s and don’ts, like I’m going to fly off the handle,” May said.
“Saying ‘have a good holiday’ is great, if I’m actually going on holiday. That’s not a rule,” she explained. “Say I walk through (the) Pride parade . . . The physical effort of it is exhausting. So if the next day someone says, ‘I hope you had fun at the Pride parade,’ you say: ‘Uhh, no, really . . . That was kind of work.’
“It’s not like, ‘don’t say that.’ It’s a question of empathy,” she said.
May said the idea that she is a bully at work is simply “not a reality” and that, after so many years in politics, it’s natural that some people don’t like her. She pointed out that 93 per cent of Green members who voted in an online leadership review after the 2015 election approved of her performance.
“Not everybody is going to love every encounter,” she said.
“I do my best to be a very thoughtful and kind person.”
“She has a way of speaking that is very hostile — very cutting, degrading kinds of comments.” ROB RAINER FORMER GREEN PARTY INTERIM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR