News and Features
How Elizabeth May, Canada's Green MP, is changing Ottawa
By Noah Richler published Nov 1, 2012
Gulf Islands–Saanich MP Elizabeth May, the Green Party’s first representative, makes history on Parliament Hill
June 2011 -- a month after the last federal election. In the scrum area of the House of Commons, media wait to cull quotes and sound bites from politicians still coming to terms with Canada's shocking new order. After four tries, the Conservatives finally hold the majority. Liberals and Bloc Québécois have been decimated. For the first time in party history, the NDP can claim the title of Official Opposition, a bevy of kids in its ranks. In from the floor comes NDP leader Jack Layton, his back as proud and straight as the cane he'll use until his death a couple of months later. Here's Bob Rae, the Liberal Party's interim leader, confused he isn't boss; and the striding Peter MacKay, minister of national defence, waving away the press as he mounts the stairs out of bounds to them. And then the newcomer who could fairly be described as a piece of living history: Elizabeth May, the first Green Party MP Canadians have ever elected. Jubilant, effusive, she points to the single aide by her side. "Meet my cabinet," she says.
If a statue is ever made of May, then it should be in this pose -- arms filled, a loaded bag on one shoulder, the gaze pointed skyward because there are issues to be sorted and no time to be wasted, and a smile that is genuine because May's fundamental decency will not be compromised, not even by Parliament. In the House, the campaign for civility the newcomer is formulating will demand that she take her seat should someone heckle, no matter how important the argument she is trying to make, just as in personal encounters May is approachable and sincere because otherwise there's really no point in talking. She is the sort of indomitable and spirited outsider Hollywood loves to make movies about. An independent working with insufficient means to make the principled point of some impossible case.
In 2012, that impossible case was Canada -- or at least the version of the country imperilled by the Conservative Party's omnibus Bill C-38, the Jobs, Growth, and Long-Term Prosperity Act that prompted May, foremost among a broad coalition of opposition MPs, to raise alarms. In April of this year, when I visited May in her parliamentary offices, she had its 452 pages in hand and a look of urgency and astonishment on her face. The several interns and staff members squeezed into the two rooms worked around her, the door adjoining them open out of necessity.
"Stephen Harper poses a terrible threat to the Canada I love," May declares. "Any Conservative I can defeat is a good thing for the country."
