Elizabeth May

“I don't love being Leader of the Green Party. It is not really something I'd recommend to a good friend. It's not fun.”

“The only party that has better bragging rights than the Greens is the Bloc Quebecois.”

“People who are good at maintaining a deep oil well will also be very helpful in converting it to a geothermal green energy source. People who have been laying pipe, it's the same skill as putting up a wind turbine.”

“Anyone can have a bad night and anyone can have a bad attempt at comedy.”

“I know that when I was on my hunger strike, I reacted very negatively to people telling me what I should and shouldn't do.”

“It's clear that the Green party loves Quebecers deeply. At the same time, we are Canadians!”

“I wouldn't want anyone to think I was less than respectful for the people with whom I work.”

“The greatest level of hostility and venom, really, is between parties closest to each other on the political spectrum.”

“First and foremost we are Earthlings.”

“I'm not interested in a balance of power in order to have power for the Green party. What I'm interested in is the balance of responsibility.”

“I certainly know that the NDP and the Liberals talk about understanding climate science; they just haven't put forward anything that suggests they actually understand it.”

“It is personal - deep in my bones and my flesh - the knowledge that we squandered our chance to avoid the climate emergency; to act when it would have been so much easier, as we did to stop acid rain, to save the ozone layer.”

“I don't use the word 'lying' easily.”

“I don't think that anyone is for abortion in the sense that you hope people are going to have abortions. You hope in an ideal world that every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy.”

“Justin Trudeau certainly understands climate science, as do his ministers. But they're refusing to take action on it because of short-term political concerns.”

“Individual actions are important because in any democracy, citizens need to feel agency. If you feel powerless, totally powerless, it's psychologically dangerous.”

“We import a lot of oil, particularly to eastern Canada, from Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, a lot from the U.S. So if we're looking at how do we phase out fossil fuels in the period in which we're phasing them out, let's only use Canadian.”

“I think the majority of politicians keep their positions for too long.”

“I love being a parliamentarian. I love it but I don't like politics. And I hate elections.”

“If one group of people say a woman has a right to choose, I get queasy because I'm against abortion. I don't think a woman has a frivolous right to choose. What I don't want is a desperate woman to die in an illegal abortion.”