Elizabeth May
It is personal - deep in my bones and my flesh - the knowledge that we squandered our chance to avoid the climate emergency; to act when it would have been so much easier, as we did to stop acid rain, to save the ozone layer.Collection: Chance
I was part of Environment Canada's work to stop acid rain, create national parks, clean up the Great Lakes, develop new environmental legislation and negotiate the treaty that saved the ozone layer.Collection: Environmental
Once you got a solar panel on a roof, energy is free. Once we convert our entire electricity grid to green and renewable energy, cost of living goes down.
Whether we make it a condition or just through persuasion or just through popular support, whatever it takes, we really do need to shift through a system of voting where the way the Canadian public votes is the way the Canadian Parliament is formed after the election.
But if we keep doing politics the way we're doing politics, and we keep doing climate action the way we're doing climate action, we will not have a history that judges us because we, certainly as a civilization, won't be here.
The only party that has better bragging rights than the Greens is the Bloc Quebecois.
The greatest level of hostility and venom, really, is between parties closest to each other on the political spectrum.
The most important thing is guaranteed livable income, which will take a while to bring in because it means all the provinces have to participate.
Democracy is too important to be left to politicians.
The only thing we're interested in as Greens is making sure that we are protecting Canada from an imminent threat and that imminent threat is the climate crisis.
I don't think that, you know, adherence to ignorance is really something that encourages voters to support you.
I certainly know that the NDP and the Liberals talk about understanding climate science; they just haven't put forward anything that suggests they actually understand it.
I don't use the word 'lying' easily.
Justin Trudeau certainly understands climate science, as do his ministers. But they're refusing to take action on it because of short-term political concerns.
There's a lot of propaganda that contaminates a discussion around what we should do about pipelines, how our economy may or may not be dependent on exports of raw bitumen.
I've been working with every single government since June 1992 to try to get climate action.
Andrew Scheer talks about an energy corridor. So do I, but his corridor is for pipelines and mine is an electricity grid that's running 100 per cent on renewable energy.
But Alberta has the best potential of any province for solar energy. It has enormous potential for wind power. And so replacing coal in Alberta with wind and solar is totally doable, and good for their economy.
I loved practising law when I practised law.
I don't like protecting pharmaceutical industries and increasing their profits and making our drugs cost more. If the U.S. Democrats could get rid of those problems I'd be much happier.
Ah, the first NAFTA was really, had a lot of disastrous elements for Canada's environment.
The reality of the Green party is that we are a party committed to bringing forward big ideas, new ideas and demonstrating by our conduct in parliament and through the election that we really want to work for Canadians, work across party lines, work across jurisdictions.
I'm a firm believer that if we could restore real parliamentary democracy, the best way to do that would be to get rid of political parties.
I want a group of Green MPs who will demonstrate to Canadians that it's possible to be respectful, ethical, hard working and actually stick to principle.
It's very clear the Conservative party does not want to move to real climate action.
One thing is that you won't get climate action without equity, and Greens around the world have always understood this. This has been the dividing point between the green party of France and Emmanuel Macron: You can't get climate policy without equity.
I really think a minority Parliament delivers better democracy in Canada when parties are prepared to cooperate.
The Lester B. Pearson era is what I hope to replicate.
We've certainly always been a feminist party, with strong feminist principles.
Women care about a wide range of issues - climate change, social justice. What the Green Party tries to do is apply gender analysis to a whole lot of questions that people might not think of as women's issues. For instance, women in developing countries are the most vulnerable to climate crisis.
The movement across Canada to fight toxic chemicals is a women's movement. It's a concern about health; it's very intimate.
And of course the Green Party wants to remove carcinogens from our food, our cosmetics, our backyard pesticides.
A woman has a right to a safe, legal abortion. I've never wavered in that position since I was, like, eight years old and realized what was going on when I heard my mother arguing with people about the issue.
Politicians in Canada should not put their religion on their sleeve.
Within the Green Party, we have candidates from every faith and religion and a lot who don't believe there is a God and wonder why anyone would be so foolish as to think so. And everyone is respected and welcome.
I try to be friends with everyone.
We have an existential crisis, which is the climate crisis. Canada is one of the laggards in the industrialized world. Our record is terrible.
The process of forming government in a minority is one where you talk to everyone and see: What do you have in common? And is there enough commonality?
The oilsands will be phased out by 2030 or 2035.
I've been a feminist all my life, or at least as long as I've been conscious of being a woman.
I don't think that anyone is for abortion in the sense that you hope people are going to have abortions. You hope in an ideal world that every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy.
If one group of people say a woman has a right to choose, I get queasy because I'm against abortion. I don't think a woman has a frivolous right to choose. What I don't want is a desperate woman to die in an illegal abortion.
We cannot ever accept a government that thinks they can get away with tiny targets on climate which they then don't achieve.
ncrementalism is out, and doing deals with people just for power, when our children's futures at stake is not something I will ever do.
I can work with anyone.
You have to look at what the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous people says which is free and prior informed consent. Now, if you say 'we're going to build a pipeline, what does it take for us as the colonial power of Canada to make you agree?' That's not free, prior and informed consent, that's coercion.
I stick to stuff I'm pretty sure of and I know this: when the price of a barrel of oil is under $80 a barrel and you build a pipeline, you are driving up greenhouse gases.
The National Energy Board process was completely flawed. It didn't allow interveners to do cross-examination, and they said we could do paper questions.
The safest way to ship bitumen is by rail. Now, there are other things that you get doing it that way. There's probably more greenhouse gases in shipping it by rail. I think certainly there are.
In the world of globalization, the fossil fuel masters of the universe who are digging up our boreal forest and our muskeg and scraping out the bitumen would rather have Canadians take all the risks - and then the oceans take the risks to ship it to refineries that they've already built in other countries rather than create jobs for Canadians here.