Elizabeth May, recovering from knee surgery, showed up at her campaign launch at the Sidney bandshell Monday using a wheeled walker.
There has to be a cheap and easy metaphor in there about the state of the federal Green Party, though the Saanich-Gulf Islands MP was having none of that.
“This is a climate-crisis, climate-emergency election,” May told a few dozen green-shirted supporters. She spoke of this month’s alarming Code-Red-for-humanity UN report, and of the wildfires in the Interior, the flames reaching toward West Kelowna, the sky over Armstrong dark at mid-day, the closing of a section of the Coquihalla (the highway to Hope, speaking of metaphors).
“These are apocalyptic images of a different kind of planet than the one I grew up on,” she said. “Only the Greens understand that this is a climate emergency that requires acting like it’s an emergency.”
The thing is, the party most closely associated with what to many is the most important issue of this election campaign is the same one that has allowed itself to descend into a high-profile internal leadership struggle triggered by squabbling over another matter — Israel and Palestine — that is on few voters’ priority lists.
Seeing the party do this to itself sends up red flags. It might be different if the fight were over old-growth logging, or the Trans Mountain pipeline, or tax policy, or electoral reform or something else central to their platform, but Palestine is a half-a-world-away issue over which the Greens have no influence. Letting it become the flashpoint for the Christmas dinner family blow-up does little to build faith in a party that still flirts with fringe status in much of Canada.
And that has implications on Vancouver Island, where the Greens hold their only two seats in the country. In particular, the spotlight is on Nanaimo-Ladysmith, where Paul Manly won twice in 2019, first in a byelection, then in the general election that fall. There’s a sense that while 10-year MP May’s personal popularity might safely insulate her against the party’s perceived troubles, Manly is vulnerable in what up until two years ago was a New Democrat riding.
Or maybe that’s wishful thinking on the part of his opponents. The New Democrat candidate is school trustee Lisa Marie Barron. The Conservatives, who finished second last time, have nominated Tamara Kronis, a onetime Toronto lawyer who went into the jewelry business, and who Premier Doug Ford named vice chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. The Liberal candidate, for the third consecutive time, is Michelle Corfield.
Interesting fact: both Green MPs’ Liberal opponents are Indigenous women: Corfield in Nanaimo-Ladysmith and Sherri Moore-Arbour in Saanich-Gulf Islands. The latter, a Galiano Island resident who founded a national public relations company, is Metis. May’s other main opponents will be familiar to her, as she faced New Democrat Sabina Singh and Conservative David Busch in 2019, too.
May earned 49 per cent of the vote in Saanich-Gulf-Islands that time, and her party took 27 per cent on the Island as a whole, but the party earned just 6.5 per cent nationwide. The latter figure might have been almost twice its share of 2015, and the party might have hit a new high by electing a third MP (albeit one who defected to the Liberals during this year’s infighting) but May still stepped away from the helm after the election. That means that this week, for the first time since 2006, she goes into an election campaign not as party leader but as an ordinary member of Parliament.
She says she expects to remain in B.C. for the entire campaign, mostly on the Island. Don’t expect to see new leader Annamie Paul pop up here. Paul needs to focus on winning the Toronto seat. Also, says May, there’s the whole question of whether it’s safe to be dashing around the country campaigning during a pandemic (and, yes, she ripped Justin Trudeau for calling the election). What’s left unstated is that the Greens aren’t exactly swimming in campaign cash this time, or that right now Paul is a reminder of internal dissent.
Or maybe May is right and the voters won’t really care about that, not when the skies in the Interior are a spooky dark orange at 3 p.m. and the real question is: What are we going to do about climate change?
