Surrounding May as she tosses out questions and offers suggestions to her mostly youthful staffers, volunteers and interns are a half-dozen actual and honourary university degrees, two framed handwritten notes from “family friend” Bill Clinton, and photos of her with celebrities such as Clinton, Sting and Gordon Lightfoot.
May, a 58-year-old U.S.-born environmentalist, writer, lawyer, Order of Canada recipient and former senior aide to a cabinet minister in the Mulroney Tory government, has won plaudits over her efforts to stall, criticize and draw attention to bill C-38.
The consensus among analysts is that May’s exploitation of parliamentary procedure rules, and her famously media-savvy communications skills, have shown what a single MP can accomplish in a Parliament increasingly known for its predictability and deep devotion to scripted “media lines.”
“She adds something that is sadly lacking in our current party-dominated Parliament: spontaneity, individuality, and a capacity to identify important but neglected issues.” Ned Franks, a retired Queen’s University political scientist and frequent critic of Canada’s Parliament, said in an email interview.
And May is also being vindicated in the eyes of environmentalists who didn’t take seriously her warnings, going back to the 2005-06 election, about Harper’s plans for the environment if he ever won a majority, says veteran environmental activist and author Tzeporah Berman, co-founder of ForestEthics.
“Elizabeth warned us that he had a plan, that he was going to take us back decades,” Berman said Thursday.
“But not enough of us listened.”
May is far more measured in her assessment, saying she remains “depressed” by the failure to prevent what she considers the complete gutting of decades of environmental protection laws in C-38.
“And I think it’ll get worse,” she said, predicting that Harper’s next move will be to eliminate Environment Canada.
It may be premature to mark May down as a parliamentary star. Some critics note her recent rise in prominence is tied to a federal budget that has galvanized environmentalists due to sweeping changes to legislation like the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
But C-38 was finally passed in the House of Commons this week and is expected to soon get approval in the Senate.
May rarely gets to ask questions in the House of Commons because the Green party, with just a single seat, is not an official party. As attention focuses on foreign, social and economic matters unrelated to the environment it is less likely to get media attention, those critics say.
And they also note that the Green party, which recorded its lowest share of the popular vote since the 2000 election last year despite May’s breakthrough win in the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands, is still stuck at around five per cent in the polls, according to threehundredeight.com, a website that compiles recent public opinion data.
“It’s really just the Liz May show. She’s done nothing for the party in terms of popular support,” said Ipsos Reid pollster Darrell Bricker.
May is an unusual politician, handing out hugs and warm wishes to friends and political rivals on Parliament Hill like they were campaign buttons.
Admirers describe her in almost saintly terms, with David Suzuki once calling her an “eco-hero.”
But critics are equally strong in their judgment. Some former Green party insiders still bitterly refer to her privately as “EMe,” a play on “EMay.” The slur characterizes their view that she puts her own ego and activist agenda ahead of the party’s long-term interests.
“Elizabeth’s style is very focused on her,” according to David Chernushenko, an Ottawa city councilor who lost to May in the 2006 Green leadership race and later resigned his post as deputy leader.
“It’s a very singular leadership style and that’s what she’s always done and that’s who she is,” Chernushekno said in a 2007 interview.
Liberal interim leader Bob Rae, a May admirer, recently told The Walrus magazine: “Sometimes she’s a bit too self-righteous, but that’s part of her theological makeup. She can’t help it.”
May dismisses the criticisms of former Greens, noting she got votes of support from more than 90 per cent of the voters in a 2011 leadership review of party members.
May is unapologetic about her critics’ complaint that she puts key environmental issues ahead of partisan political advantage.
Before the 2008 election she prompted deep and open criticism among some Greens by announcing an electoral alliance with then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion. She agreed not to run a Green candidate in his Quebec riding if no Liberal ran in the Nova Scotia riding that she was trying to take from cabinet minister Peter MacKay.
She also said publicly that Dion would make the best prime minister — a statement which, along with other comments and actions, suggested that Green supporters consider voting strategically to back other candidates in some ridings in order to help Dion and stop Harper.
May was beaten easily by MacKay in 2008, prompting more internal criticism of her judgment. And after the election she revealed she discussed with Dion a possible Senate seat in exchange for supporting a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois coalition to replace Harper’s minority government in late 2008.
May says her deep suspicions of Harper, which took shape during her first brief and deeply uncomfortable meeting with him years ago justifies her willingness to work with other opposition parties.
Wearing her activist rather than her politician’s hat, she said Canada can’t wait until 2015 to vote Harper out of office.
“I think the damage he’ll do to the country by 2015 will be so severe we’ll never recover.” Harper, she maintains, could follow in the footsteps of former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, who was driven from office after bringing in the Harmonized Sales Tax with no mandate after the 2009 election.
“Where did Harper ever say in the election campaign that he planned to eliminate fish habitat protection? When did he say B.C. salmon would be sacrificed to build pipelines?
“If anger builds and the Conservative caucus becomes more restive there’s no reason to assume that he’s still be prime minister in 2015.”
May said she knew in her bones that Harper was hostile to environmental issues during her brief initial meeting with him, organized with the assistance of former MPs Monte Solberg and Deb Grey. It was shortly after Harper assumed the leadership of the old Canadian Alliance Party in 2002.
“They got me a meeting with Stephen Harper and he was there by sufferance. He was there about two seconds and left the room. I mean, there was no reason to be that hostile.” She said Harper, who once called the Kyoto climate change accord a “socialist scheme,” has on occasion been “civil” at social meetings.
“Both our daughters were in the same dance class. My daughter’s much older, she used to help Rachel on with her tutu and things. We’d see each other at dance recitals. But it was very, very clearÉthat every single thing I cared about was going to be unraveled.” Before May left the Sierra Club of Canada in 2006 to seek the Green leadership she tried to organize Canadian environmental groups to prevent a Harper victory in that year’s election. That effort failed.
“There are a lot of people (in the environmental movement) who wish we had listened and been a lot more organized,” Berman said.
The May family’s devotion to environmental issues runs deep.
Her mother was a prominent American anti-nuclear activist, a role which led to the Clinton family friendship, and both parents were regulars at peace and anti-nuclear rallies.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, her father left a senior position in the insurance business when the family moved to Cape Breton in 1972 when Elizabeth was a teenager.
The family – Elizabeth has one younger brother – bought a restaurant and gift shop on the Cabot Trail that they operated until it was expropriated in 2002 due to a construction project.
May quickly moved into environmental activism, leading a campaign against chemical spraying of Cape Breton forests in 1975 that targeted the voracious spruce budworm. And her media skills emerged quickly, as that battle became the subject of both a National Film Board documentary and a CBC Fifth Estate broadcast called “Miss May’s War.”
May waged several other environmental campaigns and, after getting her law degree, gained such prominence that in 1986 Tom McMillan, then struggling to assert himself as prime minister Brian Mulroney’s environment minister, hired her as a senior adviser.
McMillan was anxious to build bridges with the environmental movement that was deeply suspicious of the Mulroney government, and ignored Mulroney’s private advice that he would regret hiring the activist.
May was a key player in some major environmental achievements — which in 2005 resulted in Mulroney being voted by environmentalists Canada’s “greenest” prime minister — the creation of the South Moresby National Park in B.C., the negotiation of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, and agreements to open other national parks and start cleaning up the Great Lakes.
But some environmentalists were suspicious of her collaboration with a Conservative government, and in 1986 Pollution Probe alleged that she warned of possible funding cuts if the group didn’t endorse the creation of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
May, who vehemently denied that charge, said in a 1989 interview that she “lost respect” for some of her former co-collaborators in the movement.
May became disgruntled with the Mulroney government’s handling of the proposed Rafferty-Alameda dam project in Saskatchewan and resigned in 1988. Within months she was campaigning in Prince Edward Island against McMillan in the election that year. Her former boss, who ignored Mulroney’s warning about such an potential occurrence, was narrowly defeated and his political career was destroyed.
May moved back into the environmental movement as founding head of the Sierra Club of Canada, though her re-entry got off to a shaky start when the magazine Borealis, published by the group Canadian Parks and Wilderness, put out a profile of May that outlined her achievements but contained some unflattering quotes.
May told author Ed Struzik, an award-winning Edmonton Journal writer highly respected in the environmental and science communities, that she shared with opposition MPs and environmental groups information that her minister insisted be kept secret.
And she also talked about her use of the alleged psychic power of crystals during the campaign to convince former B.C. Premier Bill Vander Zalm’s government to stop logging on South Moresby in British Columbia.
May, who dismissed the Borealis profile Thursday as a deliberate “hatchet job,” left the Sierra Club in 2006 to run for the Green Party leadership against Chernushenko.
She won easily and scored a breakthrough two years later by arguing her way onto the leadership debate in 2008. The party, which was as high as 14 per cent in some polls after her leadership victory, took almost a million votes, representing 6.8 per cent of the popular vote.
But in 2011 the Green vote plunged to 572,095 votes and 3.9 per cent of all votes cast, the lowest total since the 2000 campaign.
The party is currently at a little more than five per cent, according to the threehundredeight.com website that collates recent polling data.
May, at her staff meeting, speaks in her trademark sing-song voice to staff that has charmed many friends and foes during her decades of fighting in the environmental trenches.
But her partisan edge shows when she’s giving instructions on a media event she orchestrated this week in hopes that Tory MPs would take a quiz she developed on the details of the 425-page omnibus bill.
Not a single government MP took up the offer, but she warned staff anyway to be careful of possible cheaters – noting her longstanding charge that Harper brought in notes to the 2008 debate despite rules to the contrary.
May has had an unorthodox approach that has led her to work as Mulroney government appointee, a Liberal party collaborator, and a Green party leader who has made no bones about her belief that there are occasions when one shouldn’t vote Green.
“There’s lots of Greens who obviously don’t want me saying that Stephen Harper’s a bigger threat than any of the others.”
But conversations between all opposition parties are necessary in order to develop a coherent plan to remove Harper from office, May argues.
It’s the kind of talk that makes traditional political organizers cringe but wins nothing but admiration from many others.
“Elizabeth is fearless in her willingness to break new ground, and she’s left a lot of naysayers red-faced,” Berman said.
“She will put people and progress before partisan politics, and we need more of that.”
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Peter O’Neil
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