House Rules: Elizabeth May Went to Ottawa to Champion Environmental Issues. Now She Is Out Is Out to Rescue the Democracy
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OUR SCHEDULED forty-five-minute interview has stretched well past an hour, but Elizabeth May still has plenty to say. She launches into an answer, veers onto a different thought, sidesteps into another story, and just when I think she has lost the thread she grabs it and pulls it into a firmly knotted conclusion. Democracy, climate change, family, religion: we have covered a great deal of ground by the time her legislative assistant, Paul Noble, knocks on the door of the boardroom, two floors below her suite of offices in the Confederation Building, just west of Parliament Hill. Noble tells May that the Liberals won’t field anyone in the House of Commons today to speak to C-7, the Senate reform bill. If the New Democrats don’t fill their time either, and if she hustles over to the House, she could score a ten-minute speaking slot to address the Conservatives’ proposed reforms. Calling for a nine-year, non-renewable term limit for senators and an optional nominee selection process, the proposals fall short of the Green Party’s demand for an elected Senate, and May’s personal position that the legislative body should be abolished altogether.
May fires off instructions, asking Noble to dig up C-7 material, to click off her laptop but not close the lid until the lights are off, and to grab her green briefcase and her coat and come back in fifteen minutes. She manages to work in a please and thank you, but when the door shuts behind him she says, “This is how I talk to people; it’s terrible. I have to be very, very concise to save time.” At the appointed minute, Noble returns and they’re off, hopping onto a green minibus that shuttles MPs and political staffers between outlying office buildings and Parliament Hill. May clutches her coffee mug and calls out cheery greetings to fellow passengers from her seat near the front, while Noble perches near the back with her briefcase.
It’s a short ride to Centre Block. After quickly smoothing her hair and straightening her green jacket, which is adorned with an Officer of the Order of Canada pin, the fifty-seven-year-old Member of Parliament for Saanich–Gulf Islands, British Columbia, slips into the House of Commons, desk 309, up against the gold curtains in the back row. Parliamentary expert and Queen’s University professor emeritus Ned Franks once described the House as being much like the country it serves, ‘a vast sparsely populated tract dotted with isolated human settlements.’ That image resonates this morning. May is stationed farthest from the Speaker, on the Opposition side, alongside the remains of the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois. Beyond her, the near-empty chamber is a study in perpetual slow motion. MPs drift in, address the House, chat with their seatmates, and then disappear. High above, the public galleries empty and refill, as late-November tourists wander through.