ELIZABETH MAY FIGHTS TO SHAKE UP OTTAWA
Elizabeth May a determined political dynamo
SIDNEY, B.C. — In the late 1950s, just as The Mouse That Roared took off, the satirical story of a tiny country that brings a nuclear-armed U.S. to its knees, Elizabeth May was a toddler learning from her peace-activist mother small voices can have powerful results.
Influenced by her mother’s view that even a housewife can make a difference, May imitated her mom’s campaign lobbying houses of worship to call for a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing.
“I would play with my toy telephone saying, ‘I want to speak to ministers, priests and rabbis. I have a atition,’” said May. “I was too little to say petition. So I learned, literally, at my mother’s knee.”
Her mother, Stephanie May, a prominent civil rights and peace activist, joined 17 Nobel laureates, including Linus Pauling and Bertrand Russell, in suing the U.S., Soviet and British governments to stop atmospheric nuclear testing. She ended up on U.S. president Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List.”
Her daughter learned to sit still in the face of inequality or bad government is not an option. “What makes me believe that one person can change the world? My mom. Because she did,” May said.
Today, Elizabeth May may be Canada’s best-known version of the mouse that roared, an environmental activist and politician with outsized ambition, unafraid to take on the mighty and the influential, and who considers no issue too big or complicated to tackle.
As the leader of the tiny Green Party of Canada, she is accustomed to being small and roaring loud.
On Thursday night, May took advantage of a rare turn in the national spotlight, offering a reminder of her qualities to anyone who tuned in to the campaign’s first leaders debate.
Many viewers then lamented on social media that this may be the only debate in the campaign in which she participates. (She has not been invited to the Globe and Mail’s debate on Sept. 17, nor to the event organized by the Munk Debates on Sept. 28.)
Canadians saw her chutzpah in July when she said prescription drugs should be accessible to all by 2020. While other party leaders ignored her, May argued Pharmacare is a necessary but unfinished component of Tommy Douglas’s universal health care program.
May compares herself to Douglas, the former Saskatchewan premier credited as the father of universal medicare.
“I aspire to be someone who makes a huge difference in Canada, the way Tommy Douglas did,” she said.
She was elected Greens’ leader in 2006, but failed to win a parliamentary seat until 2011, when she defeated veteran Conservative MP and cabinet minister Gary Lunn in Saanich-Gulf Islands.
She was the first Green to become an MP. Former NDP MP Bruce Hyer jumped to the party in 2013.
Because the Greens lack official party status, May only gets one official question a week during question period. But because she uses her Parliamentary desk as her office and is always in the chamber, the Speaker frequently gives her more floor time.
In public opinion polls, the party hovers around five-per-cent support. But May has not let this stand in her way as she seeks out new ways to exert influence.
“She’s brilliant in that. She did prep work even before she got elected,” said Adriane Carr, a former deputy Green Party leader, now a Vancouver councillor. “She had people researching every single way she could legally have effect as a single member of Parliament.”
May converted her small office into a pod for eight researchers. Her interns attend committees and take notes, information she uses in the House. This was the case with Bill C-38, which the Harper government used to gut the Environmental Assessment Act. By the time it was passed, May had made more than 400 amendments.
In 2012, she finessed a private member’s bill on Lyme disease through Parliament. These bills usually die on the order paper, but the Federal Framework on Lyme disease Act became the Greens’ first legislation to get unanimous support.
“Many people in politics told me I was making a mistake, that I should never show up in Parliament because it wasn’t important, and that I should tour the country building the Green Party,” May said.
“I did not think that voters the of Saanich-Gulf Islands did something so brave as to unseat a sitting Conservative cabinet minister … for me to forget my job was to work for them.”
An author, environmentalist and lawyer by trade who started by battling insecticide spraying in Cape Breton, May ran the Sierra Club of Canada for 15 years. In the 1980s, she was an environmental adviser in Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, but quit on principle when it issued permits for the RaffertyAlameda dams in Saskatchewan without an environmental assessment.
In 2003, just before her mother died, they discussed her future.
“I went through the list with her. I said I don’t think I want to go back to law, not the conventional practice, I’m certain I don’t want to go into politics, and I can’t just go to another environmental group, it wouldn’t make any sense,” May said.
She took up theology: “I figured my future would be in being a nice little old lady Anglican priest with a nice parish somewhere.”
May, who is divorced with an adult daughter, notes she is following in the footsteps of many Canadian women leaders who have been unable to sustain marriages because of work.
“I am happy, and happily single. I am busy. But I work darn hard, and I don’t think there is a man on the planet who would put up with it,” said May, who estimates she works 16 hours a day, seven days a week.
May believes the national media often regard her as a foil, the obligatory opposition voice when needing to balance stories about the environment.
And yet May has mastered how to get her message out even when mainstream media aren’t paying attention, largely through the adept use of social media. She has, by reputation, one of the best political blogs on Parliament Hill.
May insists the key to her success are these kinds of grassroots meetings, which she holds twice a year in nine locations across her diverse riding.
“It really speaks about her ability to make the best of what she has,” says Mario Canseco, the vicepresident of Insights West, a public opinion research company.
“The fact that she is very active, particularly on social media, talking about specific issues, it is the kind of thing to do when you are all by yourself. She has found a way to be a part of the conversation.”
But Canseco said May can sometimes go too far in trying to attract attention, leading to embarrassing gaffes.
These include her ill-timed support for former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi just as his sexual proclivities were being exposed and he was charged with sexual assault. She apologized, noting her single tweet had come out before the depth of his problems became known.
The other was her vulgarity-laden attempt at humour at the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner in May, when she failed at a play on words when welcoming Omar Khadr back to Canada (“Welcome Back, Kotter”).
She was almost dragged offstage by her friend, Conservative Transport Minister Lisa Raitt, just as she shouted: “Omar Khadr, you got more class than the whole f — king cabinet.”
Paul Wells wrote in MacLean’s after the Press Gallery dinner misfire, that May has been unable to gain any ground and has “stripped the Green Party for parts” to keep her aspirations alive.
“The Green Party, as a party, has wasted away ... it is basically a wizened life-support apparatus for May’s continued tenure as a Member of Parliament.”
She wrestles to explain why she continues and why she believes the Greens could hold the balance of power after Oct. 19.
“I don’t like politics. It is hard. But democracy is worth fighting for. When they said war is too important to be left to the generals, democracy is too important to be left to the politicians,” she said.