ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep. 41 Elizabeth May

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Ask Salt Spring Answered's Damian Inwood talks to Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May about a variety of topics including foreign interference, environmental racism, and housing.

You're listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered in which we talk to Elizabeth May who is the Green Party leader and MP for Saanich, Gulf Islands on her visit to Salt Spring for the Pride Parade. So I'm here with Elizabeth May, who is, of course, the Green Party federal leader and MP for Saanich, Gulf Islands. Welcome, Elizabeth. Thanks, Damien. And we were here this morning with Ask Salt Spring. And yeah, well, welcome to Salt Spring.

I know you're here for the Pride weekend. And I come back to Salt Spring a fair bit, but yeah, I never miss Salt Spring Island Pride. Yeah. Okay, now we talked about a wide variety of things. One of the things you talked about initially was the foreign interference, electoral interference issue, and you were referring it to something out of a John

le Carre novel. Perhaps just tell us a little bit about how that all went down. It sounded quite interesting, the way you were kind of sent off to a small room with no windows and stuff. Yeah, no, it's interesting because, oh, I don't think that it ever really gets explained by media because how much does media know about it, what it's like to have top secret security clearance. It does take a while. Unfortunately, I went through all the hoops to get top secret security clearance when the door to that was opened by a preliminary report from former Governor General David Johnston. Long story short, he said he thought that federal political party leaders should be able to access the documentation he'd looked at before he came

up with his first set of recommendations. And I did that. That did involve its own bit of cloak and dagger. But in any case, when we had the more recent and initially alarming report that came from a parliamentary committee itself and innovation in response to foreign interference is called the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. title, but it does include Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, Bloc Québécois, and Independent Senators. All of those parliamentarians also have to have had top-secret security clearance. They're the ones that I have so much respect for them. They did a lot of heavy lifting. They went through 32,000 pages of intelligence reports that were top secret and put together two versions of a committee report. One which has stuff cut out of it so that it can be read by any Canadian. So if you're interested in it and you want to know what did the committee want to share with Canadians that isn't top secret, it can be found online as the National

Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Report on Foreign Interference. What I want to know was what's the part they had to hide from the public, because there was an enormous amount of speculation, and almost it was gathering from speculation to a galloping assumption to the point of statement of fact that somehow there were currently serving members of parliament who were traitors and so I couldn't wait to get my hands on it to figure out if that was true I didn't know what I would do honestly do. How do I make that information public? Because I think Canadians have a right to know. And I have to say I was vastly relieved to read the report

and be able to conclude, oh, there aren't any currently serving members of Parliament who have consciously committed acts that amount to preferring and having greater loyalty to a foreign government than to Canada. But you asked what it was like. So you show up at a building that's not a parliamentary office, not one that I'd ever been in before, and you show up at the door. It's been redone, repurposed facility. And you walk in and they identify you, take your passport, keep it. And they send someone down from an upper office to escort you, at which point they

take away cell phones, laptops, any devices at all. And they also take away pen and paper. And you can't bring any staff members with you. And the office itself is either windowless or they've adjusted the Venetian blinds so you can't see in. The goal is to make sure that, and they pointed this out to me, that they didn't want anyone across the street to be able to use a telephoto lens and take any pictures of the stuff I was reading. And so it has, as I said, it has a bit of Jean Le Carre safe house feeling. You get in there and you start reading and you can't take notes. I mean, it's obvious you can't. You can't take anything away with you. It's a top secret document. But the process of reading it and committing to memory the things that you think you want to share with the public and then figuring out what can I share and what is actually a violation of the Official Secrets Act if I were to share it. And the penalties for violating the Official Secrets

Act include going to jail. So you want to be pretty careful. Right. And are you able to comment on former MPs? Well, there was one former MP. Yeah, that's the thing. In the public version of the report, and earlier at Ask Salt Spring, I had brought with me the public version just because every now and then I want to verify what I can say, but I'm quite certain. The public version of the report makes reference to the only example, which is described in more Someone not serving, name not mentioned, who was so engaged with service to another country that this former MP, the word used was proactively, contacted someone in the security department of a foreign government and gave that person a document that the former MP knew to be confidential. So when I have gone through all of the documentation and say, look, that case requires further investigation. The fact they're former doesn't really, I mean, what matters is that I'm able to tell Canadians there isn't anyone currently serving that falls into that category at all. But one of the truisms

when you start getting into this business of talking to, well, for, you know, plain speak, spies within the Canadian government, the people who do intelligence and security, they'll all admit that intelligence isn't evidence. So if they get a hot tip from an intelligence asset that they've got in some other part of the world, it might be true. It might not be true. I mean, CSIS quite famously, I think we all remember, decided that Maher Arar was somebody who was, gosh, how to put it, that he was not a reliable Canadian citizen, that we were okay as a government with allowing the U.S. government to hand him over to another government for him to be tortured. This happened, and we had the Maher Arar inquiry that looked into it. CSIS can make mistakes. So you want to be careful with if this report on the former MP

might still be not true. But that's the only example. And what I want to see is, let's investigate that case. Yes, it's a former MP, but was that intelligence that's now been reported publicly only as former MP did the following things? Let's investigate it. Let's know if that intelligence is actually evidence. And any individual who is a member of parliament betrayed his or her country needs to have accountability. I think Canadians expect that at a minimum. So I don't think that case is over and done with. It disturbs me a great deal. But we also need to be aware, and some people said just because I said there were no current traitors in Parliament, that I was somehow saying, well, nothing to see here,

move on. No, there's foreign interference is a live issue and requires much more from all of us as elected people. And the things that I found, you know, surprising, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, was the extent to which foreign governments target, for instance, journalists, target community organizations and attempt to co-opt them so that someone could, as an elected person, unwittingly be working with what they think is an appropriate community organization in their riding without knowing that that community organization is co-opted by a foreign government. So the watchfulness, the eyes open, the pay attention to, you know, have much more situational awareness as an elected person. And not just federally, by the way, but provincially and municipally, foreign governments

do target Canadian democracy. And we've been pretty much asleep at the switch for a long time. Yeah. Any idea why Polyavra didn't get his clearance and go in and look at that stuff? He needs to answer that question himself. It is, I think, because it's in the public documents, I think I'm surprised he doesn't want to get top-secret security clearance because there's two areas of vulnerability in our democracy that are identified in the public version of this report, and both of them have to do with internal political party processes, like how does someone

get nominated to represent their party on the ballot, and how does someone become a leader of their party. Leadership races are also targeted by foreign governments. I'm either cursed or blessed with having a really good memory. So when I was going through all this stuff, I remembered, oh yeah, Karl-Heinz Schreiber. I remember because Stevie Cameron was the journalist who revealed that Karl-Heinz Schreiber had brought European right-wing money to Canada in 1993 to support Brian Mulroney in beating Joe Clark in that Conservative Party leadership race. So that foreign interference moved our political spectrum to the right. The only leadership race that's mentioned in the public document of the committee that's been released

is that there was foreign interference in the leadership race that Pierre Pouilly have won so yeah I I think he should get his clearance so we can all talk about it yeah okay let's move on um you talked about a private member's bill that you just had passed, environmental justice, I think you said, and that deals with racism. I was, I still am actually aghast. When I first came to Canada, which is almost, is over 50 years ago now, I remember the CBC breaking the story about Grassy Narrows and the mercury poisoning, the Mityamada disease in the Dryden area. And it's still going on. It's still going on. nothing has happened it seems well I mean the pulp mill that was doing the polluting it was called read paper and it was I was very um

I'm I'm grateful for friendship I had with uh he's now he passed away but he was probably Canada's first environmental muckraking journalist. His name was Warner Troyer. And Warner Troyer wrote a book about grassy narrows called No Safe Place. Yeah, to this day, the indigenous peoples of grassy narrows have the symptoms of Minamata disease, suffer from the effects on their health of mercury contamination, and it hasn't been fully dealt with at all. And that's an example of what's called, not just, I've gotten some, you know, attack social media stuff as if I made up the term environmental

racism. There's a huge body of academic work on the reality that racialized communities, indigenous communities, but also, of course, lower income communities, people without political power, are much more likely to be having a toxic waste dump put in their backyard, or other actions that show differential protections of the local environment and human health, and it amounts to environmental racism. So the bill that I put forward is actually focusing on the opposite. How do we promote environmental justice? How do we give the tools to disempowered communities to level the playing field with polluters so they can get justice. So will this help the situation there and other situations like it?

I certainly hope so. I mean, the nature of private members bills is that they can't mandate that governments spend money. I mean, my first private members bill, which was on Lyme disease and that passed, and we did get a Lyme disease strategy from the federal government, and it did result in the federal government putting millions of dollars into research into Lyme disease. But again, once the bill passed on Lyme disease, I was still pushing because the strategy I still don't think is strong enough. The bill on environmental justice, likewise, says the federal government must develop a strategy to promote environmental justice. I'm, now that it's gotten royal assent and it is law, the clock is ticking for Environment Canada to come up with an environmental justice strategy.

And I'm pushing as hard as I can with a network of grassroots groups that have worked on these issues that they replicate what the U.S. government has done. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has had a program in environmental justice since 1994. So Canada is, as ever, we're playing catch-up. But I'm hopeful that we'll see tools created and funding in place such that communities like Grassy Narrows with the mercury contamination, Organa Satake, the Mohawk community that right now has illegal dumping of toxic waste, and it's known everywhere that there's this illegal dumping of toxic waste in the community, have the tools to demand that's cleaned up and

the community and human health is protected. I'm hoping, but I don't assume that my bill will make a difference. It's getting it passed and having it become law is not the end of the story, but it's critical. And now I have to make sure that the government response and the strategy that's put in place makes a real difference in the lives of real people. Okay now another topic which of course comes up regularly here on Salt Spring was housing and the lack of it and you were talking about how you were aghast at the number of tent cities that have grown up across the country. Yeah. You know, the homeless crisis obviously is real.

It's real on Salt Spring, even. But I was interested that you talked about putting housing where it's needed or getting people to where they're needed as opposed to necessarily solving every problem locally. Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated issue and so simplistic answers are unlikely to work. So when I look at the reality but I think the reality is that contrary to what many people elsewhere would assume about Salt Spring Island I think we may have had we may have per capita one of the highest homeless rates in in the country it requires an urgent response that recognizes that it's an emergency but do all the people and we need to make sure that there's the proper access to housing supply, which is a different issue too, which deals with the affordability crisis,

such that the work that needs to be done for the population of Salt Spring, whether it's in nursing and personal care workers and service industry jobs and construction jobs and everything. We need to make sure there's housing for people who work here. But there's for people who are here and also in a very precarious situation and don't have roots in the community and so on, do we have an obligation to provide housing here? Or can we provide and ensure on an emergency basis, because there should not be any tent cities anywhere across Canada, that all Canadian residents have a secure roof over their head and a door that locks and

sanitation and heating and cooling and a safe living situation. Housing is a basic right. And I think we need to, as a country, step back and adjust our planning around immigration and local homelessness needs to be addressed as an emergency. But we've also got the overlay of specific ecological conditions on the Gulf Islands, as reflected in the Islands Trust Act back in the day from Dave Barrett. So it will take local governments, CRD, islands trusts, provincial governments, federal government

to figure out together what's the fastest way to ensure the safest housing for all. Some of it will be here. Some of it might be elsewhere. But I look at Canada, and as a Canadian who knows a lot of the different parts of our country, we've got places where you don't need to build infrastructure or new schools. You've got buildings standing empty in the prairies and various parts of Atlantic Canada? And is there a way to make sure that we're creating, we're looking at the places that are depopulated both for new immigration

and for addressing the immediacy of homeless emergencies and doing it as quickly as possible? All right. Well, it's strange because when I first came here in 1973, I wasn't allowed to go to Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver. I had to go to the prairies as part of my landed immigrant application. And I don't know if they still do that or not, but... It's not as common now as it was then. Where did you go in the prairies? Calgary originally. Well, particularly for people who are coming who are not English or French speakers,

there's a real need to make sure that cultural supports, language supports, there's some real crises. And I talk to a lot of the organizations that help new Canadians get settled, particularly for new Canadians when the wife and mom in a family doesn't have the language skills and gets increasingly socially isolated. There's a lot to be considered in a wraparound sense of how do we make sure that new Canadians coming from very different cultures are able to succeed living here that's the number one thing is that they're they're healthy survive and thrive that's a different issue than the Canadians who find themselves by it's increasingly unfortunately common

to go from being housed to being unhoused and in a very precarious situation so those urgent situations need to be dealt with as an emergency so does that mean that the federal government should get back into creating housing yes yes and and it's not the federal government's job alone, but we had much more. I mean, of the own, when you look at the G7 countries, Canada's proportion of social housing is pathetic compared to other similarly situated, wealthy, industrialized countries. We don't have the same percentage of investment of publicly built social housing as other countries have. So if that's a benchmark, we're way behind. And we need to make sure that

we have public investment, which for the most part is going to mean federal dollars, in adequate public housing, which is not private sector, not for-profit housing, and much, much more and everywhere. Yeah. I think you were asked about your inside information with regarding to Pierre Trudeau and whether he would possibly step down in, I guess, a reflection of what happened in the States with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Yeah.

And I don't know whether you answered yes or no on that one. You said you'd heard that some people were wanting him to step down, but there was no real kind of push coming from the party. Is that true? I mean, in looking at, and again, knowing everybody in Parliament, I mean, it's a pretty small community. We don't often think of Parliament as a community. But at the moment, there are 338 of us.

It's not so big that I don't know everybody, right? So I don't think within the Liberal Party, there are a couple people who've put their hands up and said out loud, Justin Trudeau should step aside. There are a few of them who have done that. And there are clearly unhappy members of his caucus. After the loss of Toronto St. Paul's in the by-election, and it's been widely reported that Toronto St. Paul's was a safe liberal seat.

I never thought so. I was a safe seat for Carolyn Bennett. Carolyn Bennett was a local doctor. She seemed, whenever I was in Toronto St. Paul's, it seemed to me she delivered half the babies in the riding. But we got a local connection to Carolyn's in-laws live on Main Island. But never mind. There's, when she was, I mean, this is the kind of bad decision-making

and in some ways poor judgment of Justin Trudeau, is that when he reshuffled his cabinet last summer, he didn't get any real political benefit out of shuffling his cabinet, but he ended up having some big hits because he decided in reshuffling his cabinet to tell Carolyn Bennett, who was then in his cabinet, when the shuffle's over, you're not in cabinet anymore. So then she said, well, then I'm not running again. And then they said, said well would you like to be ambassador to denmark so she's now in copenhagen and she's that that created the by-election in

toronto st paul's again that was a safe riding for carolyn bennett she stayed there forever she would have been re-elected forever but it wasn't a safe riding for the liberals because what and they didn't plan ahead or anything they they ran in toronto st paul's a person who'd been on the staff of christia freeland minister of finance so not a big name not someone really known in the community and on and on bad planning and what a hit a huge blow to the liberal morale. They've already seen that their polling numbers are dropping like a stone. You're already seeing lots of liberals saying, I'm not going to run again. But another self-inflicted wound in that cabinet shuffle, Trudeau shuffled David Lamedi, who

was his minister of justice, who did not see it coming, hit him like a ton of bricks. He was suddenly out of cabinet and no longer minister of justice. So he quit parliament right away. So now they have a by-election in La Salle de Maradona that has to be announced by the end of July. And the liberals are running someone. And the rumors are that maybe the liberals will lose that riding, too. Not to a conservative, but maybe to the Bloc Quebecois. So I mean, I don't know everything there is to know about politics, by any means.

I love being in parliament. I don't like politics. But I look at this and I think, gosh, if the liberals had any sense, they'd have a succession plan, and they'd be saying to Justin, we want to be able to thank you for all your service, and we're going to have the biggest thank yous you've ever seen, and pack your bags. But I don't know who they'd find to be his successor, and what they're all looking at is who's the best liberal leader to take on Pierre Poiliev in the next federal election. Personally, I don't think it's Justin Trudeau, but nobody's asking me in the liberal caucus who I think would be better.

So, you know, I just don't see it. I don't see it coalescing as being enough of a push that he'll have to leave. You mentioned Ben Malroney, sort of tongue-in-cheek, I think. Yeah. Well, I knew Brian Mulroney quite well, and I know Brian Mulroney didn't like Pierre Poiliev much. So if you're looking at celebrity and sizzle, which is why the liberals recruited Justin Trudeau in the first place to run for leader, they worked hard to get him to run for leader back in, gosh, it was 2012, was it 2012, 2013? I'm trying to

remember when it was, because when I got elected, the liberals were being led by an interim leader, magnificent human being, Bob Ray, who's now our ambassador to the United Nations. But Justin got in, he was a newly elected liberal when I was elected in 2011. The party recruited him to be leader because of the celebrity factor and the sizzle. So if you're looking for something that would really make it hard for Pierre Poiliev to campaign against a liberal leader, and it wouldn't be the first time in this country. We're finding that way the um jean charret was leader of the progressive conservative party in parliament when like the media and pundits and jean chretien and everybody and their dog said jean charret you have to save

canada quebec will separate you must become the liberal leader in Quebec. I mean, and he, Jean Charest actually left being leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in the federal parliament to become premier of Quebec for the liberals. Weird things happen. The liberal who ran against me in the last election, the mayor of Central Saanich, Ryan Windsor, is running for the Conservative Party nomination to run against me next time. I don't change my party colors, but some people do, and it's not untoward. It's pretty common in Canada, and I just think it would be fun to imagine how hard it would be for Pierre Poiliev to attack Ben Mulroney, but Ben Mulroney has shown no indication that he wants to be liberal leader.

I just have fun with thinking outside the box. Right. Now, sadly, we're losing our provincial Green Party MLA, Adam Olson, who's become so familiar with us on Salt Spring Island. How do you think that's going to affect the scene provincially? He's been around, obviously, in provincial and municipal politics for a long time. And he's, you know, he's become the face that's kind of, you know, the green face, if you like.

Well, I can't pretend that I wasn't shocked and disappointed and sad. I mean, I love working with Adam. We worked together for a long time. I know he's very committed Green. He's now the provincial campaign chair. There are a number of highly qualified people running in the nomination race to be the Green Party of British Columbia candidate for North Saanich and the Islands. Interested to get to know them. I don't know all of them. Sonia Firstenau is a spectacular leader. I wish she

was our premier. So the Greens will do well in the next provincial election. But obviously, I wish I was able to keep having Adam Olson being my MLA. But there's no question, when he talked about how he looks at his kids growing up, and he thinks about the life he's got, and it's not easy, especially since the more difficult, we talked about this today with Ask Salt Spring, with the lovely circle of people chatting, politics is becoming less pleasant. I mean, it was never great, I'm sure, but it's becoming more toxic, nastier. And a lot of people are, and Adam didn't cite that as reasons why he was leaving, but a number of my friends who are members of parliament federally who have decided not to run again are citing the fact that they just find it so unpleasant. And that's hard because we need good people in elected office to make sure democracy works. Isn't there a way of protecting people from all the trolls and all that stuff that's going on though i mean well you never know i mean there is i mean we now have on a daily basis

notification from the sergeant at arms office in ottawa lock the doors of your offices we never used to get those notices so as members of parliament were told don't keep your door open to people off the street because we have credible warnings that there might be personal attacks and potential violence. I mean, I don't get freaked out by it, but you can't afford to say when you've got staff and older volunteers that you're just going to ignore that and leave your door open. I want to leave my door open. I don't like the idea of keeping a locked door on an MP office. But this seems to be a new world we're in, and a lot less, well, a lot less caring and neighborly than I think Canadians actually are. But people react, and of course the assassination attempt on Donald Trump

is going to increase people's sense that we don't have enough security. And that, I think, is a shame. Yeah. Well, it does seem that the politics north of the border is now starting to reflect a little bit what's going on south of the border. Yeah. And I guess you have to blame Donald Trump for some of that. Well, you know, and Donald Trump opened up

like a whole Pandora's box of things that you thought would never emerge ever, that were beyond the realm of the acceptable, that would just not, I mean, you'd never get elected if you said the kinds of things he said the time he got elected, right? So, okay, well, if that's shifting the needle on what's acceptable in public discourse for people running for not

just the, you know, for the highest office in the land in the most powerful country on earth, it does have an effect on Canada. And I think we have to push back on it. And as Canadians, we have to actually say out loud to our leaders, don't go replicating that. Don't be playing footsie with white supremacists and think we're not going to notice in Canada. That's not on. And we expect better and we and I think we can

protect our democracy and our values as Canadians by speaking them out loud like we are a country that succeeds because we care about each other and we cooperate and we can are concerned in public policy with the greatest good for the greatest number and not for lining the pockets of the billionaire class. But a lot of our public policy does line the pockets of the billionaire class. So it's a pushback from Canadians that's needed to make sure we don't fall prey to a kind of Trumpian political climate. Right.

Are you an optimistic person? I am, hopelessly. Remember, one of my seats, my first seatmate in parliament was the member of parliament for Thunder Base Pier North, Bruce Heyer. And he used to say, Elizabeth, you know, you've got a drug problem, which of course was very funny because I've never done drugs. And he said, yeah, you're on hopium. So yeah, I'm still remarkably optimistic. And I kind of think you've got to be because the nature of the climate crisis and the world becoming less stable. Remember when we had this

era where we thought it was the end of history, the Cold War was over. And the thought of a land war in Europe was unthinkable, even a couple years ago. And then Putin invades Ukraine. The idea that we'd see a nuclear weapons arms race again. Once Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev started down the road to treaties to get rid of nuclear weapons, I did not think we would go backwards. But thanks to Trump and Putin, we've gone backwards. So you have to be optimistic to be able to say, I see all these things in front of me. I'm not closing my eyes and thinking, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I see evil. But we have to be able to confront it and put forward solutions and protect everybody

from the worst elements of what humanity can do and the worst elements of what humanity can be and raise up the best of us. And that's why something like Kamala Harris coming out of nowhere, okay, there's a sign. There's a pulse for democracy, isn't that good? She's got a pulse, she's got some pizzazz and Canadians, I know we don't get to vote in U.S. elections

but there's no question citizens all around the world are impacted by who's in the White House and if it's somebody like Trump who thinks that climate crisis isn't real, and in the brief time he was president, in the first term, he pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, legally pulled them out. Well, it would be a very big risk. And especially since he's cozy with Putin and Kim Jong-un. I mean, what the heck? But anyway, you wonder about how somebody can be a U.S. Republican and be cozy with dictators and authoritarian leaders

when the U.S. is historically, in its own mythology at least, a beacon of democracy. Yeah. Well, I think we're all feeling a little bit happier now since Kamala came on the scene. Fingers crossed. Every which way. Because the debate was pretty awful to watch, wasn't it? It was. It was like, can this be real life? Have I got the wrong channel? Where did real life go? My signal's gone funny.

Yeah. Yeah. Awful. Well, thanks for coming in and chatting. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, David. And enjoy your Pride weekend. I always do.

South Spring Island Pride, I do all the big pride parades all across Canada. And South Spring Island Pride is always my favorite because it is, it may sound like a pun or something, but it is local and organic. I mean, when you're in the Toronto Pride Parade or Vancouver Pride Parade, you've got all these really big, big flatbed trucks with really big boom boxes on them and banks you know really big corporations uh it's not they're just you know pink washing themselves and claiming to be concerned with lgbtq two spirit plus rights well maybe they are but it's awfully corporate and it doesn't feel very local and salt spring island is pure authentic local defense of l two-spirit rights. And I love it. Yeah. Great.

Well, you've been listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered on cheer.fm, the voice of the Gulf Islands.