By NANCY WIGEN
In this time when our security and future are threatened, I heard someone say, “I’ve always voted Green, but now we need someone tough to protect us.”
Like who? Elizabeth May has been our MP for 14 years and she is the best, most hardworking, smart and effective representative we have ever had.
Elizabeth succeeds across party lines, working with respect and kindness together with other MPs who are doing good work for us. While in office she has got three private member’s bills (PMBs) passed into law on our behalf, while Pierre Poilievre, with more time in office, has not passed even one PMB.
The first PMB was to create a federal strategy to confront Lyme disease. The second prohibits keeping whales, dolphins and porpoises in captivity, and the third is a law to provide a strategy for environmental justice, which became law in June 2024.
In 2011, there was a lot of controversy about how MPs’ expenses were not made public. The big parties had all decided against revealing how they spent public dollars. It was assumed that as the only Green MP Elizabeth would not be able to make a difference, but she set up a website attached to her office and posted every expense for which she spent public dollars. Having been shamed by her good example, within a year every MP was required to submit every invoice and all their spending of tax dollars became public.
Another very important victory is the passing of Lindsey’s Law, which established a DNA data bank to register the DNA of missing persons and was initiated by previous MP Gary Lunn. Elizabeth and many others, including Indigenous leaders, got the law passed. By June 2024 the National Missing Persons Program had the DNA profiles of 2,500 missing persons, which has helped identify more than 90 people who were otherwise lost. Elizabeth has also brought millions of federal dollars for infrastructure into Saanich and the Gulf Islands.
Also, she and past Green MLA Adam Olsen have worked hard to try to save our wild salmon from diseases from fish farms. That is still ongoing.
Any time I have raised an issue with our Green MP, or our Green MLA, I have gotten a personal reply, with information relevant to my concern, or thanking me for my advocacy, including for saving an important salmon-spawning site in the Fraser River from being turned into a gravel pit.
Elizabeth’s belief that “you can do anything you want if you don’t care who gets the credit” gets egos and partisan politics out of the way, so work gets done, but often those who don’t deserve it get the credit. The news media tend to ignore all but the big parties so we don’t hear of what Green members do for us.
I’d like us to have proportional representation, with all MPs working together, but when Green policy is to work across party lines it comes to almost the same thing. I hope Elizabeth continues as our MP, and many more Green candidates are elected in the next election to give us a truly democratic government.
A positive, constructive, creative attitude bringing us all together in cooperation and unity makes Canada so much stronger than the division, fear and hatred sweeping the world right now. That’s why I support Elizabeth and the Green Party to lead the way.