Green Party leader Elizabeth May plans to attend the Gay Pride parade in Toronto and accompany the Green Party float.Sarah Dea/The Globe and Mail
Elizabeth May gives her end-of-the-session press conference by cellphone after passing through security at the Vancouver airport, where she is waiting for a flight to Toronto.
It is 6 a.m. on Friday.
Such is the glamorous life of the Green Party Leader, who does not have a seat in the House of Commons and desperately needs to win one in the next election to keep her job.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP Leader Jack Layton each addressed the parliamentary media at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa, just before the House rose for the summer on Thursday, with Canadian flags as their backdrop and cameras capturing their every gesture. Ms. May is on her cellphone talking to one reporter, who had asked for her take on the session.
She's got about 15 minutes before she has to board the plane.
"The high … was the passage of the Climate Change Accountability Act," she says, noting that the successful vote in May (after four years of being stuck in the House) demonstrated co-operation between the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois. The Harper government did not support it.
However, the bill, which requires the government to set medium- and long-term targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, still has to pass through the Senate.
"The substantive worst thing that happened was the destruction of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act as part of the Budget Implementation Act," she says. The act required federal departments to conduct environmental assessments on projects in order to receive federal funding.
On this morning, Ms. May is leaving her new home on Vancouver Island, where she is working hard to beat Harper cabinet minister Gary Lunn in his Saanich-Gulf Islands riding, for Toronto, where she to appear on a panel about sustainability with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Throughout the summer, there will be garden parties and fundraisers in places like Brockville, Ont., Ottawa, Cape Breton (her friend Farley Mowat will be there) and in Toronto, where another literary icon, Margaret Atwood, will attend.
There's the Pride Parade in Toronto and the Calgary Stampede that she also plans to attend.
And like Stephen Harper, who was once ridiculed for his get-up at the Stampede, Ms. May is learning.
Two years ago she was voted the worst-dressed leader at the Stampede when she showed up in a denim outfit she had purchased at Frenchy's (a famous used-clothing store chain in Nova Scotia).
"I got there and they said 'what the hell is that woman wearing? It looks like a leisure suit.' So I figured out … they want you to go to Calgary and spend money at a western outfitter's store. I got it now."
In 2009, she was elected best-dressed leader.
Ms. May is now focusing on winning her West Coast riding. The most recent EKOS poll has her party winning two seats, which is good since it has no representation in the Commons. The problem is, however, that the polling firm has projected that both seats will be in Ontario.
But Ms. May is an optimist. She was criticized for wasting her time in the last election for trying to beat Defence Minister Peter MacKay, but this time around her party polled to determine a winnable riding and decided upon Saanich-Gulf Islands.
Ms. May, who has been criss-crossing the country as she works the riding and tries to be remembered in political Ottawa, takes inspiration from the Green Party Leader in the U.K., Caroline Lucas, who became the first Green to win a seat in the Commons in the most recent election.
"She's the first elected Green in a first-past-the-post system … in a pretty seaside community. Do you see where I'm going with this?" jokes Ms. May.
That's it. She has to board the plane now. No entourage, no one to carry her bags.