Episode 4: Elizabeth May – Democracy, Civility, and Conflict

Elizabeth May is the leader of the Green Party of Canada. She is a graduate of Dalhousie Law School, a former environmental lawyer, and the former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. She is also the author of eight books. May is a staunch advocate for social justice.

Elizabeth May was voted Parliamentarian of the Year in 2012 by her fellow members of parliament, and has won various other awards for her outstanding work in the federal government.

In this episode, Elizabeth May talks about:

  • How and when she was introduced to the climate crisis
  • The time when there was no politicalization around climate change and when that ended
  • The significant benefits of proportional representation
  • How to stay hopeful in such a critical time for the planet
  • An incredible example of consensus around policy by highly polarized groups
Elizabeth May - On Conflict Podcast Episode 4 cover art

Resources

Elizabeth May’s website and social media:

Resources referred to in the episode:

Elizabeth May – Quotes From The Podcast

  • (Some times may be different due to audio editing done after)
  • 3:24: “The biggest challenge facing humanity is the climate crisis, and our inability to resolve conflicts is a contributing factor.”
     
  • 5:26: “Any country that has first past the post, which fortunately is a minority of democracies, but there’s a built-in incentive to find and fuel conflict in political discourse.”
     
  • 11:16: “In terms of conflict and climate, the rubber hits the road in something like Syrian droughts that lead to political destabilization and hundreds of thousands of people killed.”
  • 11:38: “We do know that culture change and climate are related. But the political conflict and the failure of democratic decision-making in industrialized nations, our refusal to respond in a timely way, is why we’re in the mess we’re in right now.” 
     
  • 13:09: “If democracy was working well, we could have avoided the climate crisis.” 
     
  • 15:44: “For the longest time, there was no difference between how a progressive-conservative spoke about climate change, how a liberal spoke about climate change, and how and NDPer spoke about climate change. […] There was a general understanding that this was serious stuff and we had to act.” 
     
  • 16:28: “If we had proportional representation, not only does it change who sits in a parliament, it changes our political culture, because wedge issues simply don’t exist under PR. You don’t get an advantage by suppressing the vote of other people. You actually have an incentive under proportional representation to try to appeal to everybody.” 
     
  • 19:18: “I’d say the embedded nature of conflict is most visible in the House of Commons. Bear in mind, the distance between the government’s benches and the opposition’s benches is described as two swords’ lengths. You don’t have to really be very creative to see that the system is built around the notion of opposing teams.”
     
  • 20:18: “Among the principles that we [all 80 Green Parties around the world] adhere to is trying to achieve a culture of peace and nonviolence. So I work at language in parliament to remove violence from my language, which means depersonalizing. It’s a very conscious effort that I make so when I know that somebody has just said something that is completely not true, I would never say that someone lied. […] I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt. […] I adhere to this by asking questions in a way that takes out anything that could be seen as a personal attack. So I try to defuse conflict even in approaching issues on which we don’t agree, kind of resurrecting, I hope, the old Canadian adage that we can disagree without being disagreeable. […] I try really hard to create that space where someone I don’t think is going to agree with me at all, it gives them space to think, ‘Oh well that was pretty reasonable. Okay, I get it, so we don’t agree, but there’s room here to keep a conversation happening,’ which is what I think is important, I mean parliament is actually parler, it’s all about speaking, it’s a French word, it’s about, we are talking to each other. So we have to talk to each other.” 
     
  • 22:24: “We have absolutely everything we need in our hands, as technology, as economics, we have everything we need to avoid a climate crisis that becomes more than we can adapt to, and we have the tools to be able to adapt to that which we can no longer avoid, those are not theoretical. We have them. We’re not getting there because of the embedded nature of partisan conflict.”  
     
  • 22:51: “It’s important not to say, ‘How dare you mislead people like that you vile fiend.’ It’s better to say, ‘It’s a shame that the minister has been forced by his or her talking points to make a claim which is so easily refuted.” 
  • 25:40: “The growth of power of political parties has overtaken a lot of the effectiveness of an individual member of parliament. So I feel that I am able to be more persuasive and have some impact, but overall, it’s very frustrating.” 
     
  • 28:08: “If I’m trying to be effective and persuasive, it’s to Canadians everywhere, because I’m not ever going to be able to make those changes by myself, ever. Unless, and even as a prime minister, it’s really a moment of all hands on deck, and you really need every single Canadian citizen to say, ‘I’m not going to sit by and watch this happen anymore. I’m absolutely going to engage. I’m not going to assume that someone else is taking care of this.”  
     
  • 28:35: “An engaged and informed electorate will absolutely drive any government to do the right thing.“ 
     
  • 28:54: “I think one of our biggest problems is a sense of lack of agency for the individual citizen to think, ‘I’m really not in a position to do anything about this.’” 
  • 31:12: “Things are dire, but we still have time.” 
     
  • 31:34: “There’s still time for us as a society, as a species, to ensure a healthy surviving biosphere and the other species making it with us and our low-lying island state brothers and sisters around the world surviving on their islands not ending up under water. All of these things are still possible, but the window on those possibilities is closing, and it’s closing rapidly, so that’s where political action and individual citizen engagement is critical.” 
     
  • 32:25: “Hope in this context is hard work, and we absolutely have everything we need to get through this, but we need a lot more people making a full time effort.” 
     
  • 34:49: “We can’t allow ourselves to think, ‘Oh that’s alright, that’s sometime in the future,’ or ‘I can’t do anything about it.’ It’s terribly important to me that we communicate the truth.”
  • 44:42: “One of the things that Jim [MacNeill] used to say […] was ‘If we change the way we make decisions, we’ll change the kind of decisions we make.’”
     
  • 44:55: “So what you want to do is bring to a table people who appear to be opposites.” 
     
  • 45:56: “The essence of it is to start on the question of higher-order principles, where do we all stand on this. And also to open up to really being able to listen to each other, and ideally to be in a situation like Chatham House Rules where you’re not taking a position on behalf of your sector, you’re just allowed to come up with ideas and you won’t be reported out of the group that you ever said it. You need to be able to actually communicate open and freely.” 
     
  • 46:32: “The decision-making model of the Green Party of Canada is always consensus-based decisions. We don’t take votes.” 
     
  • 47:39: “If you want to have respectful decision-making that lasts the tests of time, you don’t go for winner-take-all solutions.”
  • 48:27: “I think it’s terribly important that we recognize that we invest in war a lot and we don’t invest in peace long-term.” 
     
  • 49:30: “In terms of what the individual person can do the next day, right now, one of the things that’s most disheartening is the rise of anonymity on social media and a deliberate and funded effort to make the public space toxic and unpleasant so that people would rather keep their heads down and not have their name out in public, […] there’s just public shaming and bullying all the time.” 
     
  • 50:29: “I always try to remind myself [regarding hateful social media comments], ‘This isn’t a real person. If someone asks a real question and they appear to be genuine and fair-minded, I will answer their question. If it includes a death threat, I report it to Twitter, but quite often they say ‘That’s a pretty nasty thing, but it doesn’t quite meet our test for an actual death threat.’ There’s an awful lot of misogyny and cruelty and meanness, and you just have to recognize that this is a tool being used by people who want to see our species extinguished, so I’m not really interested in giving them any space, but I don’t let it get to me either. […] A lot of it is a manipulation trying to affect public opinion by making it unpleasant for people to do helpful things. What could you do that’s helpful? If you […] see that someone has said something that stands for our survival that’s a fair and compassionate thing to say, give them a thumbs up, share it with others, so that you don’t allow the space to be overtaken by toxic discourse. You have to really not respond in kind. Rise above it, and support those who are still out there.” 
     
  • 52:04: “It’s very clear that the public space in social media is unregulated, unmanaged, and is trying to destroy civility. And it’s really cruel.” 
     
  • 56:31: “Take the polarization out of it as much as possible. Try to find a place of, ‘I’m sure we can all agree that ___. It’s also good to say, ‘It’s always good to know that in Canada, we can disagree without being disagreeable.’ Give people something that they’re reading on those threads that allows them to see that there’s space for disagreement without this really unpleasant degree of conflict and challenge and threat. There’s deep threats of violence in language, and we don’t need to accept that. We can, as Canadians, support, and communicate ourselves in ways that communicate to the others who are reading all those communications, ‘Right, we’re still a country where people can talk to each other. We’re still a civil place. We’re not descending into the Trump-like world of politics.” 
  • 58:26: “It’s been fascinating for me to hear from you, as professional mediators working in resolving interpersonal conflict, how much that spills out into the larger political discourse.”  
     
  • 58:38: “The one thing that I hope I stand for, and I know that a lot of constituents will say to me, ‘I don’t agree with everything you do, but I really appreciate that you’ve never heckled. I really appreciate that you try to bring civility to parliament.’ And that is something that I think we can all contribute to, by expecting better of our elected representatives. So encouraging your own MLA, town council, MP, wherever you are, encouraging them to set a higher standard.” 

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Julia Menard and Gordon White, in addition to being the co-hosts of the On Conflict Podcast, are also the Principals and Founders of the On Conflict Leadership Institute. Julia and Gordon firmly believe there is a strong correlation between conflict and the responsibilities of leaders, and that idea sparked the creation of the Institute. Come follow Julia and Gordon as they explore the nexus of conflict and leadership over at the On Conflict Leadership Institute (OCLI).

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