In the middle of speaking to a crowd of Green supporters in Charlottetown on Monday, Elizabeth May asked how many had tuned in to watch Greta Thunberg’s speech earlier in the day.
About a dozen raised their hands.
The teen activist from Sweden drew headlines on Monday after a forceful, at times frustrated, speech, in which she demanded world leaders act as if climate change were an emergency.
“Right now, she’s the only leader in the world worth listening to,” May told the audience of about 160 people at Memorial Hall in the Confederation Centre.
Similarly, during her speech, May argued that her party stood alone amongst her federal rivals in advancing a plan to address what she called “runaway global warming.”
"The glaciers are now moving faster than the politicians."
— Elizabeth May, Green leader, during stop in P.E.I.
“The glaciers are now in rapid retreat. So we used to talk about something moving slowly as being glacial. The glaciers are now moving faster than the politicians,” she told the crowd.
May noted that global average temperatures have already risen by 1 degrees Celsius. A further rise beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, she said, would result in irrevocable, accelerating warming.
“I know our platform is head and shoulders above the other parties. We are committed to doubling the current target, which is what’s required,” May said.
The Green platform promises to reduce Canadian greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2030. Both the Liberals and Conservatives have committed to a 30 per cent reduction of carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2030, while the NDP’s plan calls for reducing emissions by 38 per cent.
May said less ambitious targets were insufficient to keep warming from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The Green platform proposes a number of measures to reach the target, including ceasing all new coal, oil or natural gas projects, cancelling the Trans-Mountain pipeline, establishing a national electrical grid and implementing a large-scale program to retrofit homes and commercial buildings.
The platform anticipates the transition to a cleaner economy, as well as other technological advances, could cause job losses for workers in industries such as oil and gas. To address this, the platform calls for "income protection, jobs guarantees, retraining and resettlement." The platform also calls for implementing a basic income guarantee nationally.
The platform does not say what these, and other, commitments will cost. May has said a costing of the commitments will be released by the parliamentary budget office.
On agriculture, the platform calls for national standards to reduce the use of nitrogen fertilizer, funding and research support for farmers to shift to organic, and a goal of replacing one-third of Canadian food imports with domestic production. May suggested farmers who protect watersheds should also be compensated for doing so.
"Farmers are somehow expected in our society to cut into their own profits to do things for the public good, including carbon sequestration," May said.
"If a farm family is producing ecological benefits because they've been asked to do an environmental farm plan, they should be paid.”
May is one of very few political leaders to call for the closure of the Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County, N.S. The P.E.I. Fisherman’s Association, as well as all provincial political parties on P.E.I. have opposed a proposed effluent pipe that would empty into the Northumberland Strait.
But the plant’s union has suggested 2,700 jobs could be lost if the pulp mill shuts down. This is a real possibility, as Northern Pulp faces a 2020 deadline to close its current effluent treatment site near the Pictou Landing First Nation.
May made it clear her sympathies lay with fishermen.
"We converted our forests in Nova Scotia into a pulp economy at the behest of Scott paper,” May said, referring to the mill’s former owner.
“We have paid dearly for getting that mill in Pictou. Now, the workers that remain need to be able to have proper pensions, a just transition. But, as the fishermen all along the Strait say to me, 'why aren't we called workers?'"
