{news} Candadian Green Leader has CT roots

[Green Party-CT]

The Saturday Profile
An Accidental Canadian Finds Her Environmental
Footing
 
By IAN AUSTEN
The New York Times, October 14, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/world/americas/14green.html


ONE afternoon 33 years ago, Elizabeth May was
picked up outside her dorm at Smith College for
what she thought was a weeklong study break. She
never returned.

Once in her parents� car, Ms. May learned that
the family�s home, a farm outside Hartford,
Conn., was up for sale. Her father had quit his
job as an insurance executive and all of them,
including her younger brother, were headed to a
new life in Cape Breton, the picturesque but
economically deprived island in Nova Scotia.

For Ms. May, her parents� impulsive move soon
meant trading a life of relative affluence for
periods of near poverty. Undergraduate life at
Smith was exchanged for years of waiting tables
and cooking in a restaurant. And instead of her
parents� circle of politically active friends,
including George McGovern and a young Bill
Clinton, there were villagers who were suspicious
of, and sometimes unfriendly toward, all who
were, as they put it, �from away.�

That situation, however, gave Ms. May a
perspective that was critical in her development
into one of Canada�s most prominent
environmentalists. After founding the Sierra Club
of Canada and running it for almost 17 years, Ms.
May has emerged as the leader of the Green Party
of Canada, an also-ran in Canadian politics but a
group with a platform nonetheless.

Under Canadian election law, the 5 percent of
votes the party won in the past two national
elections entitles it to about 1 million Canadian
dollars a year, or about $800,000, in government
campaign financing. And in Ms. May, the party �
which has yet to send a single member to
Parliament � has its first leader who is a
well-known figure.

Ms. May�s switch from environmentalism to
politics was prompted, she says, by the election
of a minority Conservative government under Prime
Minister Stephen Harper in January. �I was going
through a nail-biting, wrist-slashing phase of my
life known as watching Harper get to victory,�
she said.

Perhaps the most surprising factor in Ms. May�s
ascent is that she has overcome misgivings about
her American upbringing, though she did become a
Canadian citizen. Many Canadians, particularly
voters on the left, are mistrustful of
politicians who have simply lived in the United
States, not to speak of being born there.

Yet, the chaos that Cape Breton brought to her
life has helped her bridge many of the subtle, if
significant, gaps between Canadians and
Americans. �I�m lucky that I didn�t go to
Toronto, where I then immediately joined an
environmental group,� she said. �I wouldn�t have
developed that strong sense you need to find the
differences in a culture that aren�t immediately
apparent.�

Canadians, Ms. May said, are more cautious and
deferential to authority than are Americans. And
brash appeals simply do not work here.

�In the United States, I can say: �I�ve got a
check here, who�s going to match it,� � Ms. May
said of her money-raising efforts. �If you do
that in Canada, it�s a terrible social faux pas.
People look at their shoes.�

Ms. May�s introduction to fund-raising and
campaigning came early. Her mother, Stephanie
May, was a founder of the Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy, and that took Elizabeth to
Washington for a news conference when she was
still a toddler.

�My mother represented motherhood, I represented
the contaminated innocent,� Ms. May said. �I sat
on Hubert Humphrey�s lap for a good chunk of the
press conference.�

Stephanie May�s political work expanded to
include fund-raising for several Democratic
campaigns, including the presidential bids of
Eugene McCarthy and Mr. McGovern. Mr. Clinton,
Mr. McGovern�s Connecticut organizer, became a
regular houseguest and remains a family friend. 

THOSE campaign efforts ultimately produced
disappointment, culminating in the re-election of
Richard Nixon in 1972. That and the general
disruption of the era gradually soured the Mays
on the United States. In the fall of 1973, they
decided to abandon the country for a 100-acre
farm with two dilapidated houses that Stephanie
May had purchased on a whim while vacationing in
Cape Breton the previous summer.

To support the family, or so they thought, they
bought a long-closed restaurant along the Cabot
Trail, Cape Breton�s scenic highway, that was
housed in a permanently moored sailing schooner
built in 1918. Attached was a gift shop.

Within a year, the money-gobbling Schooner
Village transformed the family into what Ms. May
called �nouveau pauvre,� as they slept in the
gift shop�s storeroom over the winter because
they could not afford to heat their house as
well. Instead of finishing her college degree,
Ms. May took correspondence courses in restaurant
and kitchen management.

When not cooking, waiting tables or begging
neighbors for vegetables that missed a supplier�s
weekly shipment, Ms. May found time for
environmental work. Gradually she become noticed,
not just in Cape Breton but nationally, for
organizing a campaign against aerial spraying by
the pulp and paper industry, which spread a toxic
cloud over the entire island. 

It was a difficult crusade. The closing of coal
mines and the decline of fishing had brought
unofficial unemployment levels in Cape Breton to
over 30 percent. For many people, work meant
cutting spruce trees or leaving the island. But
the province eventually banned all aerial
spraying of insecticides. 

With credit for her work experience, Ms. May was
admitted to law school in Halifax without even an
undergraduate degree, and won scholarships that
paid her living expenses and tuition.

After practicing advocacy law for a while, she
accepted a post in 1986 as special adviser to the
environment minister in the Conservative
government of Brian Mulroney.

But that ended two years later, when the
government allowed a province to build two dams
in Saskatchewan without an environmental
assessment, and Ms. May quit in protest. A court
later found that the government had acted
improperly, though the dams were ultimately
built. 

IN 1989, she started the Sierra Club of Canada
and, as in Cape Breton, took on unpopular causes
� in particular, Alberta�s oil sands or, as she
prefers, �tar sands.� While they are a source of
wealth for Western Canada and oil for the United
States, they require tremendous quantities of
natural gas in the extraction process � a huge
contribution to the greenhouse gases that are
widely believed to be contributing to global
warming.

�So we�ve got a huge amount of energy being
consumed in order to produce the oil, which we
then sell to the United States for cars that
don�t have proper energy efficiency standards,�
she said. �This is an appalling megaproject.�

While calling for a moratorium on new oil-sands
developments, she is also focusing on ending
subsidies to the industry. �Fix the tax system,
stop subsidizing the most profitable companies in
the world to produce the world�s most profitable
product,� she said. �Should be simple.�

On a recent afternoon, Ms. May was wearing a
green and yellow Green Party pin (which actually
bears a resemblance to the logo of the oil giant
BP) as well as the tiny white, enameled medallion
of an officer of the Order of Canada, one of the
country�s top civilian honors.

�Canada�s a wonderful country,� she said. �If you
beat up on the government for 30 years, you can
still get the Order of Canada.�





__________________________________________________


       
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Tim McKee cell (860) 778-1304 or (860) 643-2282
   National Committee Member of the Green Party(Connecticut)
    Cliff Thornton for Governor- Campaign Manager


  Paid for by Thornton For Governor, Max Wentworth, Treasurer-   www.VoteThornton.com
   



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