Elizabeth May

Elizabeth May (born June 9, 1954, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American-born Canadian politician who served as leader of the Green Party of Canada from 2006 to 2019.

May grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of political activists. In 1973 her family moved to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and in 1978 she became a Canadian citizen. Throughout the 1970s May advocated for environmental issues, gaining particular attention for her attempts to stop the spraying of pesticides over forests in Nova Scotia. In 1980 she stood unsuccessfully for the federal House of Commons from a Nova Scotia riding as a candidate of the fledgling Small Party, of which she was a founding member and which laid the groundwork for the formation of the Green Party. May briefly attended both Smith and Williams colleges in the early 1970s and received an LL.B. from the Dalhousie University School of Law in 1983. From 1986 to 1988 she served as a senior policy adviser to Tom McMillan, the environment minister under Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and was credited with creating several national parks. After a new dam project was exempted from a full environmental impact assessment, May resigned in protest.

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In 2001, while serving as executive director (1993–2006) of the Sierra Club of Canada, May staged a 17-day hunger strike to draw attention to the Sydney Tar Ponds, an industrial waste site responsible for illnesses and birth defects in the former city of Sydney (now part of the Cape Breton regional municipality) and the surrounding area. In August 2006 she was elected leader of the Green Party. Later that year she again stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons, this time in the Ontario riding of London North Centre, though she surprised pundits by winning 26 percent of the vote. Her efforts as leader to balance political expediency and adherence to her party’s grassroots origins were seen by some as raising the profile of a historically marginalized political sector, while others saw them as a betrayal of the party’s bedrock countercultural values.

May won the right to participate in the party-leader debates in the 2008 federal election, but the Green Party failed to win representation in the House of Commons. Even though Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion chose not to run a candidate against May in her Central Nova riding in Nova Scotia, she still finished a rather distant second to the Conservative Party candidate, incumbent Peter MacKay, the defense minister in the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In the 2011 federal election, however, May became the first Green Party member to win a seat in the House of Commons. In 2013 she launched a tour titled Save Democracy from Politics, during which she encouraged discussion of the “democracy deficit” that she alleged had been created by the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system at town hall meetings across Canada.

May led the Green Party in the 2015 federal election. Arguably her greatest impact on the contest was her suggestion that, absent a Conservative majority, the New Democratic Party and the Liberals be given a chance to form a coalition government (if they so chose) without going through the constitutional formality of waiting for the Conservatives to present their “Speech from the Throne,” which likely would be rejected, effectively serving as a lost vote of confidence that would prompt either the formation of a new government or another election. Ultimately, her point was moot, as the Liberals won a landslide victory that allowed them to form a majority government. Although no other Green candidates would join her in the House of Commons, May won another term. She was reelected in 2019, and two other Green Party members were also victorious. Shortly thereafter she stepped down as party leader. May was reelected to represent her riding in the 2021 snap federal election.

May wrote a number of books, including Paradise Won: The Struggle to Save South Moresby (1990), At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada’s Forests (1998), How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (2006), and Losing Confidence: Power, Politics, and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy (2009). The memoir Who We Are: Reflections on My Life and Canada was published in 2014.