Elizabeth May

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May set tongues wagging last year when she announced she would run in the Nova Scotia riding held by Conservative National Defence Minister Peter MacKay. It wasn’t the first time she caused a stir.

May became the leader of the Green Party in 2006, promising to do something about the climate crisis. But she made her mark in environmental circles some 30 years before, when a campaign to prevent a forestry company from using a herbicide to kill spruce budworms led her from a Canadian court to the Swedish prime minister’s office.

In the late 1970s, May and 15 landowners took a company to court to prevent it from spraying the herbicide. When a judge ruled against May and the landowners, and ordered them to pay the company damages and legal expenses, May headed to the company’s head office in Sweden.

After meeting May, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme criticized the company for planning to use, in Canada, herbicides that were banned in Sweden. The company reached a settlement with the landowners.

May raised eyebrows again in 2006, just before stepping down as head of the Sierra Club of Canada. She participated in a poll of experts that determined Brian Mulroney was Canada's “greenest” prime minister, largely for his part in finalizing an acid-rain treaty.

Some left-leaning commentators and environmentalists criticized May’s endorsement of the former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

Last year, May drew the ire of Conservatives and NDPers for making a deal with Liberal leader Stephane Dion. He agreed not to run a candidate in May’s central Nova Scotia riding. In return, May agreed not to run a candidate in Dion’s Montreal riding. NDP leader Jack Layton described her initiative as “backroom dealing” and one of May’s advisor’s resigned.

The Green Party hopes to see several of its candidates elected to Parliament in next month’s federal election — the party currently has one member elected from British Columbia — so observers are questioning the wisdom of May running against a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet in the Conservative stronghold of Central Nova. But May, who has never won a seat in the House of Commons, is convinced she’s making the right move.

She explained to reporters: “I very much wanted to run against someone who was part of Harper's government because my personal reason for entering politics was [that] I felt that Harper's policies and approaches are antithetical to everything I care about.”