It’s too bad Elizabeth May doesn’t have better ideas. If she did, she could be a fearsome force on the federal scene.
The Green party leader is personable and entertaining, and she’s able to inject a bit of life into something even as unpromising as a Maclean’s/CityTV leadership debate that lacks the one person the participants all want to replace.
It’s when you listen closely to her that the problem arises. May has been leader of the Greens for 13 years and a member of Parliament for eight. Yet it’s still hard to make sense of positions like those she championed in Thursday night’s debate.
Such as her idea, for instance, that a good way to punish SNC Lavalin for its questionable activities would be a sort of forced community service, in which the troubled Montreal firm would be required to build public projects on a not-for-profit basis until it learned its lesson — a proposal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh dismissed as “a ludicrous idea.”
Or her response to a question about Quebec’s contentious Bill 21, banning public servants from wearing religious items, which she termed “clearly an infringement on individual human rights” — before proposing Ottawa find jobs outside the province for those Quebecers who are denied them at home. (Uh, okay, fair enough. But what about people who don’t wear hijabs or turbans but still don’t get jobs? Would she discriminate against them?)
Also noteworthy was her assertion, which may come as a surprise to those who thought the Greens were really into the environment, that the “carbon emergency” is something else altogether.
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See Also:
(1) Trudeau tries to mislead on RCMP and SNC-Lavalin
(2) Trudeau’s refusal to lift cabinet gag order troubling
(3) Trudeau’s immigration policies alarm many Canadians
(4) Let’s drop this charade that a single decade old tweet should ruin a campaign
(5) ‘Well, show it:’ Trudeau challenged by Quebec voters over position on Bill 21
