I love this Sunday – Palm Sunday. I hear from many readers that my religious references are barely tolerated, NOT their cup of tea. Still, please let me share why it is a jubilant historic event. The local people rushing forward with cloaks and palms to cover the dusty path to Jerusalem, were not acting with religious fervour. This was a political demonstration against the occupying force. Every palm frond was a protest sign. The crowd was massing against an occupying force. The story’s arc is a cautionary tale. The crowds that praised the non-violent rebel leader on Sunday had turned against him by Friday — an angry mob calling for the release of a common criminal and death to Jesus. I always suspect an organizing hand, like a rent a crowd used today by dictators to bus in their supporters. 2,000 years ago, they overcame the village square intimidated those too frightened to shout in support. Well, that is a longer story, but the nature of that celebration and of the cries of Hosanna at Palm Sunday service never fail to lift my spirits.

My 2018 trip to Jerusalem was part of my work as co-chair of the Canada-Palestinian Parliamentary Friendship Group. I paid my own way, but the Palestinian Authority organized the trip and helped enormously. The Canadian permanent mission in Ramallah was also hugely helpful. We were 18 MPs from every party in parliament. We toured the West Bank – Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Jerusalem and many refugee camps along the way. Even then, eight years ago, the Canadian government thought Gaza was too dangerous and did not allow us to go there. The situation for Palestinians was unbearable then. I worry that the international agreement that respects Jerusalem’s special status as shared among the three theistic religions with sacred ties there- Judaism, Islam and Christianity, but even in 2018 it was clear Israeli so-called “settlers” (whom I observed to be well armed and menacing thugs) were determined to kick other religions out of Jerusalem, and do violence to the Palestinians. It is so much worse now.

This week I participated in a press conference with the Canadians preparing the next flotilla to try to deliver aid to Gaza. We must not lose sight of the threat to Palestinian civilians as the weak cease fire frays and humanitarian supplies continue to be blocked.

I attend church this morning far from home, in Hamilton, Ontario. I am here for the JUNOs! Political work is weird and, to stay relevant in the media frame, I try to attend major national events where other party leaders are likely to be! I am very excited to see (and maybe meet) Joni Mitchell, receiving a lifetime achievement award. “Big Yellow Taxi” has been the anthem of the environmental movement! It came out in 1970, the year I always mark as the beginning of my firm commitment to environmental work. I was in Grade 10 and organized for that first Earth Day, April 22, 1970 in my high school.

By the way, our local Green association (The Green SGI EDA that puts out this letter- an all volunteer effort every week!) has organized handing out reusable, organic cloth bags to give out at local grocery stores with reminders to Reduce, Re-use Recycle, and REJECT. Reject plastic and excess packaging! Buy local. It will be a fun activity next month on Saturday April 25^th.

Yesterday in Toronto I attended a great rally at Queens Park denouncing multiple anti-democratic and anti-environmental actions by the Doug Ford Ontario government. Organized to align with US demonstrations against Trump – No Kings – there were demonstrations across Ontario, and a few elsewhere in Canada. The anti-Ford rally focused quite a lot on a recent outrage. In a huge affront to the City of Toronto municipal government, Ford proclaimed that he can take over the Toronto Island airport, expand it to long runways to allow jets to land in the downtown. The federal government has the power to stop this mad scheme. Ford says Carney is on board. So far no federal Liberal MP has contradicted that claim. It may give an unexpected boost to the Green candidates in the upcoming by-elections in Scarborough Southwest (Pooja Malhotra) and University Rosedale (Andrew Massey).

This week in Parliament I was glad I had the chance to speak and explain why I was voting against the so-called “anti-hate” bill, C-9. I fear it will lead to police over-reach in shutting down non-violent protests and citizen assembly. But it, of course, sailed through. Explaining why I hate the “anti-hate” bill, here is my C-9 Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqbkzi1Qsjo

I also was lucky to secure a 60-second speaking opportunity on March 24 – David Suzuki’s 90^th birthday to mark the occasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM5MYXJe4Nc

And here is my attempt to slow down the bulldozed cyber security bill – C-8… as ever, moments after I spoke it was pushed through “on division” without a vote. Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMVqdmnd5ao 

As all of you know, with all the challenges in Canada, the turmoil globally, the reckless and dangerous actions of Trump and Netanyahu continue to shock the conscience of the world. Canada can and must do more. This week the prime minister announced more support for military spending and even suggested we might be involved in opening up the Strait of Hormuz. Please let our government know how we feel about our obligation to do more work for peace, relying on diplomacy and international law. We have to try!

With love and thanks,

Elizabeth

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #312 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Last night I spoke to the Centre for Peace in Vancouver, co-housed with the Canadian Memorial United Church. I chose the need for peace-building as my theme. As Canadians we take pride in our historic role as a peace-builder and peace maker. This record is increasingly one of a different era, that of Lester B Pearson and his role, before being our prime minister. Back in 1956, Louis Saint Laurent was prime minister and Lester B Pearson his Secretary of State for External Affairs. Yet, from that relatively lowly spot in world affairs, Pearson defused a dangerous global conflict. Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, a major shipping route (echoing today’s dispute over the Strait of Hormuz). Nasser was reacting to the UK and French governments’ decision to renege on the promised financing of the Aswan dam.. Despite Nasser’s offer to compensate those British and French private interests, owners of the canal, the UK did not trust Nasser, neither did France. A military campaign to re-take the canal was launched by Israel, invading the Sinai Peninsula, while the UK and France launched their own campaigns. Both the USA and USSR were concerned about the conflict. Into this mix came our steady, mild-mannered Canadian. Pearson, the diplomat, went to the United Nations and quietly and steadily built a coalition of nations keen to resolve the Suez Crisis. It was Pearson who found the key, creating the first-ever United Nations peace-keeping force. For this Lester B Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet here we are over 70 years later, standing on the sidelines at best, supporting Trump and Netanyahu, at least tacitly, at worst.

As I defend the United Nations Charter and the paramount importance of the United Nations in our Parliament, too many MPs denounce my position, asking if we should let Iran’s tyrannical thuggery of a government continue to brutalize its people.

As ever, I call for diplomatic solutions. I plead for our government to find like-minded nations capable of crafting a multi-lateral solution. I do not believe international law has collapsed. We must use the tools we have to work for peace.

It is clear that the growing world order that buttresses transnational corporate trade is under threat. No doubt the World Trade Organization is ignored by Trump as are all of the US trade agreements. Here today, gone tomorrow. But the old motto of the World Federalist Movement “World Peace through World Law” is still our guiding star through the fog of war.

The world seems increasingly at war. It is four years since Putin did the unthinkable, launching a full scale war in Europe. Ukraine hangs on, but faces steep losses, of its infrastructure and innocent civilians. The conflicts in the Middle East have steadily worsened since the illegal attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians, and then the predictable, brutal and illegal Israeli war on Gaza and elsewhere in the West Bank. Now all worsened by the February 28 attacks on Iran, by both the US and Israel, allowing a spreading war engulfing Lebanon, Gulf states, Iran and threatening Canadian forces and civilians in the region. The genocide in Darfur prosecuted by Sudan hardly merits a mention. Meanwhile Canada has drifted ever farther from our peace-making history. While the Liberals’ 2025 campaign platform committed to spending 2% of our GDP on our military to meet a target set by NATO, the 2025 budget pledged far more- 5% of total spending. And in setting out our path to prosperity, the prime minister’s statements increasingly mention three economic sectors- “being an energy super power” meaning more fossil fuels and nuclear, renewables are not mentioned, Artificial Intelligence  and the Military are centres for economic growth. .

Canada highlights those three sectors in joint statements following trade visits, such as with the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Prime Minister Carney is hardly the first prime minister to see economic growth opportunities in military spending. Back in 1997, former PM Jean Chretien committed a modest $10 million to get a seat at the table for whatever subcontracts might come to our aerospace sector from Lockheed Martin’s planned super expensive F-35 fighter jets. At the time, the Green Party noted that the F35 millions did not stem from an analysis of Canada’s Defence needs. The F35, as a single engine jet was not suitable for Canada, according to many analysts. Its high cost was a result of its capabilities to evade radar detection, to sneak up on an enemy and drop bombs before they could see us coming. We have continued putting more billions in the F35 increasing our domestic commitment to a home-grown military industrial complex. In 2019 we published our Green Plan “Mission Possible” calling for Canada to cancel the F35 bombers and buy water bombers instead.

We keep putting more money into war and preparation for war. As for climate – we move in the wrong direction. Despite a lot of talk of a national fire-fighting force to deal with “FireWeather” as John Valliant has aptly named it, the budget calls for money to lease four water bombers.

Meanwhile our role in the global arms race grows. This report from Project Ploughshares is illuminating. https://ploughshares.ca/canadas-soaring-arms-exports-what-the-2024-numbers-reveal/

“Canada is exporting weapons at some of the highest levels in its history. The latest government report, released in June, shows $2.5-billion in arms exports to countries outside the United States in 2024, including to states with troubling human rights records and those engaged in active conflicts.”

Ploughshares notes recent efforts to reduce military sales to Israel but also notes several limitations on new export authorizations to Israel …, it does not cover indirect arms transfers to Israel through the United States. A key example of this is Canadian-made components integrated into American-made F-35 combat aircraft, intended for Israel. Jenny Kwan, NDP MP for Vancouver East tried to block this loophole in her private members’ bill C233. I joined Kwan and was the official joint seconder for the bill. Despite widespread public support, the “no loop holes” bill only received 22 votes in support. It was defeated at Second Reading on March 11. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-bill-loopholes-arms-exports-9.7124756

News coverage did not give the kind of detail I think Good Sunday Morning readers might appreciate- noting how all MPs voted. The bill did not receive any votes from Conservatives or Bloc Quebecois, and obviously all Green MPs (me) plus all NDP supported it. Here is the interesting break down of Liberals who voted in favour and then 2 categories of Liberals who either “paired their vote” arranging in advance that if they were missing the vote another MP from another party also missed the vote, or who chose not to vote at all, the latter being braver than the paired vote Liberals. Liberals who voted YES took a real stand and deserve letters of thanks.

Liberals who voted “Yea” (15)

Fares Al Soud (Mississauga Centre)

Sean Casey (Charlottetown)

Michael Coteau (Scarborough—Woburn)

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (Beaches—East York)

Greg Fergus (Hull—Aylmer)

Steven Guilbeault (Laurier—Sainte-Marie)

Lori Idlout (Nunavut)

Iqra Khalid (Mississauga—Erin Mills)

Chi Nguyen (Spadina—Harbourfront)

Aslam Rana (Hamilton Centre)

Gurbux Saini (Fleetwood—Port Kells)

Kristina Tesser Derksen (Milton East—Halton Hills South)

Patrick Weiler (West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country)

Salma Zahid (Scarborough Centre—Don Valley East)

Sameer Zuberi (Pierrefonds—Dollard)

Liberals who paired (2)

Wade Grant (Vancouver Quadra)

Alexandra Mendès (Brossard—Saint-Lambert)

Rechie Valdez (Mississauga—Streetsville)

Liberals who did not vote (12)

Abdelhaq Sari (Bourassa)

Ahmed Hussen (York South—Weston—Etobicoke)

Amandeep Sodhi (Brampton Centre)

Bardish Chagger (Waterloo)

Francis Scarpaleggia (Lac-Saint-Louis) (The Speaker, so not surprising)

Karina Gould (Burlington)

Marcus Powlowski (Thunder Bay—Rainy River)

Sima Acan (Oakville West)

Sophie Chatel (Pontiac—Kitigan Zibi)

Taleeb Noormohamed (Vancouver Granville)

Tim Louis (Kitchener—Conestoga)

Will Greaves (Victoria)

The Green Party is the only party embracing the core value of peace and non-violence. Putin’s attack on Ukraine posed a real challenge for the Green Parties around the world. Canadian Greens joined our colleagues in Europe and most Greens globally in supporting sending Ukraine military support for actions in self-defence. The Greens in the US left the Global Green movement over this issue. We continue to be a voice for peace and diplomacy amid the bellicose calls for more war.

As ever, all we are saying is give peace a chance.

Thanks for reading and please support the call for peace, nuclear disarmament and sanity. Go on line and support the Peace Charter: https://www.internationalpeacecharter.org/about/

Love and thanks,

Elizabeth

PS an early SAVE THE DATE! May 2, 2026 will mark the 15^th anniversary of Canada’s first elected Green, either provincially or federally! And yes it was our first win in Saanich-Gulf Islands. Join our celebration from 7-10pm May 2 at the Unitarian church on West Saanich Road. More details soon on amazing entertainers and speakers, RSVP to Saanich-Gulf Islands Greens <info@sgigreenparty.ca>

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #311 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Last Sunday, the prime minister, not unexpectedly, announced three by-elections to fill currently empty seats. Two of those vacancies are due to the prime minister’s desire to clear the decks of some Trudeau-era Cabinet ministers he wanted to move elsewhere- Chrystia Freeland to duties in Ukraine while living in the UK, and Bill Blair to High Commissioner from Canada to the UK. Only the Terrebonne by-election was due to events not driven by Carney himself. The Supreme Court of Canada nullified the results that had elected a first-time Liberal by only one vote. On April 13^th voters in University Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest, and Terrebonne will choose their next MP. Greens are off to the races. Yesterday I was with Scarborough Southwest candidate Pooja Malhotra walking gingerly up icy driveways. Pooja took one quite dramatic fall on a particularly icy patch, but in good Green fashion bounced back up proclaiming “no damage done!” We had a surprisingly good reception at the door. The new Liberal candidate had, mere hours before her appointment as Liberal federal candidate, been the Ontario NDP’s deputy leader. And in more floor crossing news, this week Carney got closer to a majority after Nunavut NDP MP Lori Idlout joined the Liberal ranks. Lori is a very dedicated Inuk woman and we are friends, but I wish she had not made that move.

Meanwhile our University Rosedale Green candidate Andrew Massey is finding Liberal voters quite angry that the federal Liberals are (apparently) supporting Doug Ford’s move to expand the Toronto Island airport. Ford wants to massively extend runways to where commercial jets can land in downtown Toronto. Former Toronto Mayor David Miller won on the issue of keeping the Toronto Island airport small. “No Jets” is a familiar urban Toronto rallying cry. Toronto area Liberal MPs are now suggesting, times have changed.

Globally Greens have done well in two recent elections. As I shared on Sunday’s March 1 letter, on February 27, the Greens of England and Wales won a decisive victory in the Manchester area by-election in Gorton and Denton. And last Sunday, the German Greens pulled off an upset win in German “car country” electing the first premiership by a German of Turkish origin. Good and inspiring news all round! As quoted from the Guardian: “Significantly, Mr Özdemir met this challenge head-on, foregrounding the economic opportunities unleashed by a confident green agenda. As he told one broadcaster: “If you unite climate action and the economy, you can find a lot of support.” His victory showcased the potential of a pragmatic programme focused on gamechanging climate investment and improving the quality and delivery of public goods, from rail networks to social housing.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/09/bitter-result-friedrich-merz-greens-baden-wurttemberg-cem-ozdemir

The three April 13^th by-elections are not likely to be the last this year. Rumours increase that Mark Carney will name North Vancouver MP Jonathan Wilkinson to a European diplomatic post.

This week my efforts to raise awareness of the routine bulldozing of dreadful bills through parliament got a tad more media notice. For the first time since Carney became Prime Minister, the Senate amended a bill. C-4 the Affordability Act had a hidden bit if weirdness in amending the Elections Act, with changes to take effect 26 years ago. The Senate amendments would have required he government to deal with privacy protections for Canadians’ information held by federal political parties within three years. Not only did the Liberals reject the Senate amendments, they were joined by the Conservatives, the Bloc and the NDP. I was the only MP to speak in favour of keeping the sensible Senate amendments. I blasted them all and asked if they were not embarrassed to be standing for a bill that had hidden sections operating a time machine. Maybe they were embarrassed. Maybe that is why not one MP asked me a single question. Within moments, the Speaker proclaimed that as debate had collapsed and no recognized party had requested a recorded vote, C-4 rejecting Senate amendments was now carried on Division. Royal Assent quickly followed.

Here is my Speech on Bill C-4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfuUYVO4UWE

In more climate backtracking, this week Mark Carney’s welcome announcement of investments in Arctic sovereignty included massive subsidies to oil and gas. Going all the way back to the efforts to develop the gas deposits of the Mackenzie Valley.. Carney’s announcement included $1,5 billion for the 800km Mackenzie Highway project, now being referred to the Major Projects Office. While $1.5 billion is stated, the true costs will be double or triple that. The big winners will be mining and fossil fuels.

Work this week also included opposing the widening war in Iran, in both my question in QP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpgVnmbb5uk and my speech in the Take Note debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBW5CjtdqcE.

And noting that March 9th marked Mark Carney’s first anniversary as prime minister, I held a press conference to provide something of a review.

Press Conference: https://www.cpac.ca/headline-politics/episode/green-party-leader-elizabeth-may-speaks-with-reporters–march-12-2026?id=5ed73856-d44d-4b76-aafb-c7bec5ca5bdc.

I am grateful for the many notes I received from readers after last week’s letter.

Please hang on to hope. There are positive glimmers to be found in the beating hearts of democracies everywhere.

love and thanks

Elizabeth

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #310 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Likely most of you know about my Friday. Such an unusual, difficult and yet inspiring day. Friday the 13^th and not unlucky – mostly.

On Thursday, late in the afternoon, we learned the Prime Minister had invited all party leaders to join him on a flight to Tumbler Ridge to join a community vigil. So it was that Friday morning I joined Mark Carney and his wife Diana Fox Carney, Pierre Poilievre, Don Davies, and Yves Francois Blanchet on a 10-seater government plane for the five-hour flight.

I was determined not to drop the ball on my parliamentary work. I have been trying to stop – or amend, Bill C-14. A Liberal bill, it is taken right from Poilievre’s rhyming slogan “Jail not Bail.” I find it shocking that people who have not been tried or convicted of any crime would be denied bail due to this new “tough on crime” populist swing. When I went to law school, we learned that the cornerstone of British common law justice was the 1760’s maxim of Sir William Blackstone: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” It is the basis of the core principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. But C-14 would reverse the onus and put the burden of proving why they should be allowed to continue their lives until trial – keep working, caring for family, etc. – on the accused. Often the accused person is disproportionately a person of colour, indigenous and without resources to get a good lawyer. Bail and the business of speedy trials is all provincial jurisdiction, but the federal government can pass a retrograde law like this.

The only serious scheduling conflict for me in going to Tumbler Ridge was tabling my C-14 amendments at Report Stage. NDP MP and friend Lori Idlout had agreed to second my amendments. Timing was tight and the PMO was unclear how good the wi-fi would be on board. So, literally, as we taxied down the runway, I was logged into Parliament, and held my breath as all my amendments were tabled and seconded. I then had the floor and could only say, that “due to circumstance” I was forgoing my speech to urge members to pass these critical amendments. And as the plane climbed, the wi-fi cut out. At least I got the amendments on the record and knew I was slowing down any attempt by the Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc to get Bill C-14 pushed through on Friday.

Imagine my shock when hours later my staff sent me this bizarre, and in my experience, unprecedented statement from the Speaker:

Assistant Deputy Speaker (John Nater): I would like to make a brief statement for the benefit of all members. The member in whose name the report stage motion is standing is not in a position to indicate that it should be adopted. No other members have indicated that it should be either adopted or negativized. Our own practice is silent as to what to do in such a situation. However, the issue has come up in the British House of Commons. Erskine May, 25th edition, in paragraph 20.56, states the following, “When, on the question being put, no member has said either ‘aye’ or ‘no’, the Deputy Speaker has declared the question negatived”.

He then ruled all my amendments were defeated, and the big parties rushed through a vote that C-14 was carried at all stages and was now off to the Senate.

Later that day, by unanimous consent putting forward a fast-tracking of the Budget Implementation Bill, C-15. I still have a chance to try to stop erosion of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and new powers to any minister to exempt any person or corporation from any federal law, (except the criminal code). I have mentioned this in my Sunday letter before, but now we are getting some attention and push back, The C-15 amendments to exempt “entities” from federal law are amendments to the Red Tape Reduction Act. The government witnesses in committee have downplayed this outrageous extension of power to an individual cabinet member, describing it is a routine part of something, they claim is quite routine, called a “regulatory sandbox.” I have been searching in other countries for anything as broad as what C-15 asserts – “A minister may make an order under subsection (1) only if the minister is of the opinion that

• (a) the exemption is in the public interest;
• (b) the exemption would enable the testing of, among other things, a product, service, process, procedure or regulatory measure with the aim of facilitating the design, modification or administration of a regulatory regime to encourage innovation, competitiveness or economic growth;
• (c) the benefits associated with the exemption outweigh the risks…”

It turns out this “regulatory sandbox” concept comes from the UK under Tory governments and was intended to innovate in financial matters. Yet as you can see from the above excerpt, exemptions from health and environmental regulation for any product or process. And who will promote the benefits? The entity wanting to be exempt from the law. And who will bear the risks? The public that knows nothing of the pending exemption.

Finally, even the Conservatives think this is a reach too far.

As rumours swirl of a snap election, I am hoping the Liberals may be open to amending the over 600-page bill. Today is the first day on which the Prime Minister can call for the by-elections for University Rosedale, left vacant by Chrystia Freeland, and Scarborough Southwest, vacant due to Bill Blair’s appointment to be our High Commissioner to the UK. As betting and early indicators may foreshadow, if Carney calls those by-elections soon, that means a spring election is less likely. But there are no sure bets. Just a nagging sense that the Liberal desire for a majority, even with the Conservatives and Bloc supporting most of their legislative agenda, may overcome the public desire to avoid an unnecessary election.

On board for the flight to Tumbler Ridge, I knew nothing of what was transpiring unexpectedly in Parliament.

The jet was remarkably quiet and were able to talk. It would have been great to sort out C-14, C-15 and climate policy, but we talked about why we were together and what we had heard of news from Tumbler Ridge. It was clear the Prime Minister had studied the file. He knew the names and something of the background of each of those killed. We stuck to non-controversial topics. The closest we got to any discussion of policy was the problem of what to do with 24 Sussex Drive. None of my colleagues had heard Margaret Trudeau’s great line that “24 Sussex Drive is the Crown jewel in Canada’s penitentiary system.” We landed in Dawson Creek, the closest airstrip to Tumbler Ridge. From there, we were loaded into different cars, a convoy, Don Davies and Yves Francois Blanchet and I rode with some PMO staffers, with lots of RCMP, for the hour and a half drive to Tumbler Ridge,

Arriving on an inappropriately brilliantly sunny day to a town in mourning, I quickly learned that you did not even have to ask, “Would you like a hug?” The reply was always, “Tumbler Ridge is all about hugging.”

I spoke with parents and grandparents – those who lost children and those who felt the narrowest of escapes. “My grandson stayed home on Wednesday… I took my 12-year-old out of school last month or she would have been in that library with all her friends…” and some so shell-shocked it felt an intrusion to do more than wipe away my own tears.

There will be many questions and painful details to be debated, uncovered on a mobius loop of pain. Somehow this shooting – horrifically killing nine people – has touched leaders who have lost hundreds and thousands of innocents. President Zelensky sent condolences. Parents everywhere felt the brush with the fear of losing children.

After last week’s Sunday letter, one reader asked that I share this, and it feels right to do so now.

Feb. 7, 2026.  The Long Ukrainian Winter  by Timothy Snyder

Dear Friends,

Russia’s full-scale of invasion began four years ago. It began in winter, and so this winter is the fifth. And, for civilians, the worst.

The Russian war effort is struggling in the field. Territorial gains are minimal and come at huge cost. What Russia can do is launch ballistic missiles and drones at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in order to force Ukrainians to endure the freezing cold. Russia also simply targets Ukrainian workers at their factories and Ukrainians generally in their homes.

Sadly, we in North America and Europe share some responsibility in this. The Ukrainians are fighting well enough that we do not have to fight. And so it is all too easy to accept this war, the bloodiest since 1945, as simply part of the status quo.

A year ago, during the fourth winter of the war, celebrating the opening of an underground (physically underground) school in Zaporizhzhiia, Ukraine. An underground school can operate during wartime, because the children are safe from Russian attacks. The children here had been away from physical school for five years, because of covid and then because of Russian invasion. They were very happy to be in school

And so we – the EU and the US alike – have taken far too long to cut off Russian gas and oil from world markets. The US government has stopped all military aid to Ukraine – what continues are shipments of US arms to Ukraine that are purchased by Europeans, as well as European arms shipments. Even though the Ukrainian need is great and the Europeans are paying for everything, the United States has been slow to make deliveries.

We are not sending the Ukrainians the air defense they need to protect themselves. This is one reason millions of people are in the cold, and why civilians die almost every day.

The major policy of the Trump administration has been to use the word “peace.” Peace comes when an aggressor ceases to aggress and the country that is attacked can rebuild. But Trump has been unable to muster a policy that would change Russia’s incentives. He has difficulty even presenting the war as a war, rather than as a misunderstanding about real estate; his administration issues official statements that praise Russia for its desire for peace, even as the offensives continue missiles fall. Trump has put pressure on Ukrainians, who, unlike the Russians, have to fight. For Russia, this is an ego war, a war by a dictator for his own legacy. For Ukraine, this is a war of national sovereignty and physical survival.

Fortunately, there is something that we as individuals can do. There are non-governmental organizations, in Ukraine and abroad, that support Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. There is a Ukrainian government platform, United24, that enables donations to specific areas of need. I will share a few ways that you can help. I hope that many of you will do so, thinking of this fifth winter of the war, and of the people who have no choice but to fight and to endure.

United24 is the official fundraising platform of the Ukrainian state, organized by the president’s office. Again here you can find a number of ongoing initiatives that are worthy of support. One of these is Sky Sentinel, a Ukrainian-designed system that destroys Russian drones.

Come Back Alive is a major, respected, and trusted Ukrainian NGO. They have a number of ongoing projects. One in particular helps to equip Ukrainian air defense units to follow and destroy Russian missiles and drones that have bypassed the first line of protection. They also engage in important training projects.

Help99 is an Estonian NGO (with whom I have worked with great outcomes) that delivers trucks and other gear to specific Ukrainian units. They work hard and are hands-on. If you do a bit of scrolling you can find a way to make your donation US-tax deductible

The other night I gave a lecture to help fundraise for the Canada-Ukraine Foundation. They are running programs to assist Ukrainian veterans and to provide humanitarian aid.

In the United States, Razom does important advocacy work, as well as coordinating important aid programs in Ukraine, including for Ukrainian tactical medicine. It is a US 501(c)3.

I want to acknowledge and thank all of you who have already supported the work of these institutions and who have already taken part in fundraisers where I was involved these last four years. Most recently we equipped the Ukrainian National Guard with automobiles that can jam Russian drones, enabling the rescue of the wounded. In United24 fundraisers we have enabled the Ukrainian government to purchase armored ambulances, mine-clearing robots, robots that rescue the wounded, and systems to detect Russian drones. All of this has made a difference, all of this has saved lives.

Sadly, the war continues, as does our own responsibility. Thank you for whatever you can do. Please share this message with others who might want to support Ukraine during this long winter.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-long-ukrainian-winter

—————————————————————————————————-

Thank you all for support in these difficult times.

Much love,

Elizabeth

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #306 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

I start writing Good Sunday Morning in my sleep. Well, not literally, but Friday night to Saturday morning, when I roll over from time to time, briefly awake, I start composing Good Sunday Morning. As John can attest, it is one of life’s great blessings and a reason I am able to work long days and keep on trucking, that I sleep like a rock, deeply and well (thank you Lord). I wake up thinking, “I’ll just double check this or that factoid online,” before I start writing Good Sunday Morning. But today, dammit, once again my memory is better than Google!

So, I will tell you the story of the misidentified Brown Spruce Longhorn beetle. I know it is true and if anyone can help me find old newspaper clippings that would be grand. But first, why I am trying to verify the mystery of the misidentified beetle!

Last week, I was contacted by Dr. Art Borkent, a retired scientist living in Salmon Arm. He is very concerned that Agriculture Canada’s cuts will have disastrous consequences. He sent me a briefing note, which I sent it to the Minister of Agriculture, the Hon. Heath MacDonald with my own letter expressing alarm. The crux of the matter is that Ag Canada is eliminating the entire group of experts in the taxonomy of Diptera (flies). Here is how Dr. Borkent set out his background: “I am an insect taxonomist who specializes in midges.” Not a sentence to ring alarm bells in the PMO.

Through Zoom, Dr. Borkent and I have become friends. Art and I agreed that the “Build Canada Strong” crowd was unlikely to think the taxonomy of Diptera was anywhere on their list of footnotes, much less priorities. Below is an excerpt from Dr. Borkent’s letter to the minister:

“Reducing bureaucracy in the federal government should not result in a loss of vital scientific capacity. A mistake has been made that must be reversed, as explained below. The Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes is a world-class and world-famous collection of insects that includes more than 18 million specimens…recent cuts to staffing within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada include the scientists and their support staff working on flies (Diptera Unit). This gutting of a whole unit will leave a substantial gap in our capacity to identify flies in Canada. …What is at stake here is the continued existence of a core scientific capability: the ability to document, identify, curate, and interpret insect biodiversity in support of agriculture, biosecurity, conservation, and environmental policy. At the same time, biodiversity loss is consistently ranked among the top global risks for the coming decade, making the erosion of this capacity particularly difficult to justify.”

Art and I agreed that without an economic risk it would be hard to get government’s attention. For many years, the field of taxonomy has been losing resources, and respect. But then I remembered and started telling Art a story he had not heard. “Don’t you remember that time when…”

As a former resident of Halifax, I remember the devastation of the trees of Point Pleasant Park. For years, and if memory serves, starting in the 1990s, trees were dying in this amazing urban park. There was news coverage of Canadian Forest Service experts who said the trees were diseased, but the municipal parks workers contested that explanation. They pointed out that when trees were felled, they were healthy and solid to the core. These were healthy spruce that were dying. No sign of inner rot or disease. And still the trees died. Federal scientists outranked the men who for years had cared for the trees. Friends of Point Pleasant Park protested the plans to fell thousands of trees. As they were cut, they went to local sawmills, well out of Halifax.

It was not until a bit of serendipity that the cause of the death of Point Pleasant’s trees was discovered. A British expert in beetle taxonomy visited Ottawa. Piecing together from what can be found online of the loss of trees in Point Pleasant Park, I am guessing he visited in 1999. Our visiting expert spent time at the Ottawa Experimental Farm, repository of the vast collections of insects. In examining the collection he noted, “Ah, this one is misidentified. This is not a [whatever] beetle, this is a brown spruce longhorn beetle (Tetropium fuscum). This one is quite nasty”–or some such observation. The Brown Spruce Longhorn beetle is native to parts of Europe and Asia–not Canada. It likely arrived in the wood of a shipping container. And then the key and alarming fact, the misidentified beetle had been collected in Point Pleasant Park nearly a decade earlier! Oh dear. For the lack of an expert taxonomist, the Brown Spruce Longhorn beetle had become established in Point Pleasant Park, and at high concentrations, able to kill healthy trees. The parks woods workers were right. And those trees, with their attached beetles had been sent to other parts of Nova Scotia. Risking further infestation.

The cost is large and has never been properly calculated. Point Pleasant Park has since been hit with other disasters–Hurricane Juan in 2003 and much more recently, the invasive Emerald Ash Borer has been discovered. How many trees might have survived Hurricane Juan if established in healthy stands of strong spruce? We will never know.

The point is that science matters. We paid tribute in Parliament on Friday to one of the only MPs who was a serious scientist. I am heartbroken that my friend Kirsty Duncan has died, at only 59 years old. She was Canada’s first Minister for Science, appointed by Trudeau in 2015. As it stands, she will be the last. After the Trudeau Liberals’ re-election in 2019, Dr. Duncan was moved from Minister of Science to Minister for Sport, and science was no longer a stand-alone portfolio, merged with Industry and Innovation.

Kirsty was an amazing person, with too many talents and accomplishments for me to do justice to even listing them here. I first got to know her before either of us were in politics when she was a climate scientist working in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was among the number that shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She was first elected as an MP one year later.

In preparing remarks to honour her memory, I contacted some other IPCC scientists, one of whom is a regular reader of GSM: Dr. Ian Burton, Officer of the Order of Canada and one of the world’s leading experts in climate adaptation.

I made a bit of a botch of my speech in her memory. I got too emotional and messed up my timing. As the Speaker cut me off, (not her fault) I lost track of the hard stop I had at five minutes, a dear friend sitting near the Speaker, Ontario Conservative MP Scott Reid (Lanark-Frontenac) (not audible as not recognized by the speaker and was not heard on his microphone) asked the Speaker if, by unanimous consent, I could please be allowed to complete my eulogy. And all colleagues agreed. Tribute to Kirsty Duncan. I had to shorten remarks from scientists quite a bit. Thanks to friends Dr. Gordon McBean and Ian for sending tributes.

I should mention that one of this week’s major news items was that the Prime Minister has scrapped the mandate for new car sales to be EVs. In its place he is restoring the $5,000 rebate to Canadians who wish to buy EVs, and pledges to use the regulatory approach under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) to reduce pollution from all passenger vehicles through something called the CAFE standard–-corporate average fuel economy. This will apply to internal combustion engines of passenger vehicles. In a media interview, I pressed for the government to extend these standards to the bulk of the new car market–-SUVs and trucks. If they did that, without crunching the numbers, my hunch is that emissions reductions could be even better than the EV mandate. Thus far it is unclear if they will.

As a near throw-away line at the end of the press conference, the Prime Minister mentioned significantly improving Canada’s electricity grid, with details to be announced soon. That would be good news indeed. It is a long-sought goal of the Green Party and the key major project to allow Canada to move off fossil fuels, by electrifying more and using 100% renewable electricity from wind, solar, run-of-the-river hydro, tidal and geothermal. It is possible. It will not be easy nor inexpensive, but as Liberals are prepared to waste billions in subsidies to fossil fuels, carbon capture and storage (unlikely to ever make a dent in our climate challenge) and fanciful investments in small modular reactors, we need to press for a cross-country, north-south-east-west electricity grid.

Speaking of doling out billions to Big Oil in fossil fuel subsidies, on Tuesday evening, I had a debate at what is called “adjournment proceedings” or colloquially “late show.” In these debates, opposition MPs are allowed to follow up on questions from Question Period in the House – often months later. The government sends out their parliamentary secretaries for such debates.

I was following up on my question to the Minister of Finance from December 4^th. The question was simple: Now that the government has broken its budget commitment not to provide subsidies for enhanced oil recovery, how much larger is the deficit? Instead of an answer from Finance, on December 4^th, the Minister of Environment, Julie DaBrusin, rose and gave a non-answer from the Liberal pre-prepared crib sheet extolling the Canada-Alberta MOU. So, I had hoped that in the February 3^rd late show there might be a reply–if not an answer–from the ballpark of the subject matter of my question. No luck.

Instead of anyone from Finance–or Environment–this time, the Parliamentary Secretary for Housing was given the script. Once again, no answer and a pile of hooey about the great and wonderful Build Canada Strong plan. Ah well. Here is the clip (10 minutes) Late Show.

I will write more soon about the bogus claims of great reductions in greenhouse gases (GHG) to be expected from the billions we are spending on the “Pathways Project.” The Pathways Project is the key prize in the Canada-Alberta MOU, claiming to make Alberta’s bitumen carbon neutral. With promises to back up the assertion I made in the House that the only thing Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has ever captured is government money, I will include an annex to deep and detailed analysis should you want to dive into them. You will find it in the P.S. to today’s letter.

To all who signed the petition calling for Zain Haq to be brought home—he was the the first-ever climate activist to be deported from Canada–thank you for being one of the over 4,000 people who supported his case. I presented the Petition for Zain on Friday. The government now has 45 days to respond to the petitioners’ demand that Zain be united with his Canadian born wife Sophia Papp so they can return to their home in Vancouver.

And finally, some really good news for salmon–a win in Federal Court and a reprieve from the BC Ministry of Transport! Thanks to Ecojustice for great work for wild salmon in our courts!

And lastly, deep thanks to all who have been protesting, weekly, the threat to Goldstream, with inspiring leadership from Tsartlip elder Carl Olsen. It is a “pause” not a full victory so try to join Carl in the on-going protests if you can !

From snowy and chilly Ottawa, sending love and thanks!

Elizabeth

P.S. Annex of background on CCS, with thanks to my wonderful intern Michelle Angksara for pulling these together for me!:

International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

• There are seven CCS projects currently operating in Canada, mostly in the oil and gas sector, capturing about 0.5% of national emissions. CCS in oil and gas production does not address emissions from downstream uses of those fuels. Captured carbon is used predominantly for enhanced oil recovery to facilitate additional oil extraction. 
• CCS in the oil and gas sector is expensive—as much as CAD $200 per tonne for currently operating projects—as well as energy intensive, slow to implement, and unproven at scale, making it a poor strategy for decarbonizing oil and gas production, as evidenced by the track record of the technology in Canada and globally.
• Despite this, the federal government provides substantial support for CCS, having committed at least CAD 9.1 billion public dollars to date, alongside CAD 3.8 billion from the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Industry is seeking further public funding.

International Energy Agency

• The report also notes that carbon capture, currently the linchpin of many firms’ transition strategies, cannot be used to maintain the status quo. If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as projected under today’s policy settings, limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 °C would require an entirely inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilization or storage by 2050, including 23 billion tonnes via direct air capture. Theamount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than the entire world’s electricity demand today.

Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)

• For gas companies, CCS means removing the CO2 contained in the gas field; this is known as Scope One emissions and often represents well under 10% of the total emissions associated with each gas project.
• Global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 410 million tonnes (mt) to reach a new high of 37.4 billion tonnes in 2023. Meanwhile, after 50 years of trying, the capacity of CCS dedicated to the geological storage of CO2 was only 11.33 million tonnes per annum (mtpa), and the amount of CO2 injected was below capacity levels.
• Given that it has taken around 50 years to capture less than 10mtpa of CO2, it is going to take a heroic technical effort to meaningfully reduce the 37 billion tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere each year, and a gargantuan sum of money to build the CCS facilities. Chevron and its Gorgon CCS partners have invested more than AU$3.2 billion in the Gorgon CCS project to bury a total of around 9.5mt of CO2, which equates to a cost of AU$336.8 to bury a tonne of CO2. Apply that to the 37 billion tonnes of CO2 of energy-related emissions each year, and the cost is in the trillions.

2025 Stanford study: “Energy, Health, and Climate Costs of Carbon-Capture and Direct-Air Capture versus 100%-Wind-Water-Solar Climate Policies in 149 Countries”

• Summary article here
• The carbon capture scenario does not produce the same energy savings and health benefits. Old, dirty combustion infrastructure is inefficient, expensive, and causes harmful air pollution. Carbon capture and direct air capture, even if deployed safely across the world, would help lower carbon emissions but would not address those secondary issues.
• The authors’ conclusion is striking. Policy promoting carbon capture as a climate solution “should be abandoned.” Even when carbon capture is powered by 100% renewable energy, they argue, there is an opportunity cost to not using that same clean energy to just replace fossil fuel generators.
  • From the article’s conclusion: “Given the speed and magnitude of changes needed for an energy transition, all-of-the-above policies promoting carbon capture (CC) and direct air capture (DAC) may, in the limit, cause millions of unnecessary air pollution deaths each year and substantial climate damage in both the short-term (by slowing the elimination of black and brown carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane) and long-term (by slowing the elimination of CO2). As such, policies promoting CC and synthetic DAC should be abandoned.”

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #305 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

I love to share good news! So, in case you missed it, a stunning climate decision was issued in the Netherlands by a Hague district court. It is one of the first to test climate obligations on a national level. Other strong climate rulings have come from international courts, such as the landmark 2024 European climate ruling and last year’s influential World Court advisory opinion. In this case, due to the colonial history of these low-lying islands, Bonaire, along with two other islands, St. Eustatius and Saba, became special Dutch municipalities in 2010, and their 20,000 residents are Dutch citizens.

The court ruled that the government of the Netherlands had not acted with sufficient urgency to cut CO2 to protect the Caribbean island of Bonaire. The court has given the government 18 months to set up a legally binding plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The people of Bonaire, with the support of Greenpeace, brought the court challenge.

And in other good news, public pressure has worked to reverse a business deal–the purchase of a Florida warehouse by ICE from BC billionaire Jimmy Pattison.

The news coverage of Canadian businesses dealing with ICE prompted this news release from the Green Party on Tuesday:

January 27, 2026

The Green Party of Canada urges Canada’s government to take steps to act in response to the brutal excesses of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ottawa

Canadians from coast to coast to coast are horrified by excessive violence, including the killing of law-abiding, non-violent bystanders and protesters, U.S. citizens, and others by the U.S. force known as ICE. In recent weeks, masked federal agents have carried out aggressive operations in public spaces, resulting in the killing of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both in Minnesota. The Green Party is also deeply concerned by reports of kidnappings, detentions, and the violent targeting of civilians, including the detention of a five-year-old child.

We recognize that the increasing violence and escalation, while deeply disturbing, is primarily outside Canadian jurisdiction. However, there are concrete things our government must do to defend the rights, life, liberty, and security of our neighbours.

The Green Party of Canada calls for the government to:

1. Immediately cancel the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., which requires Canada to turn away refugee claimants if they enter Canada from the U.S. It cannot be said that the U.S. is a “safe country” for those seeking protection and refuge.
2. Issue a travel advisory for Canadians who may travel to the United States, especially given recent reports from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) based on warnings from the Assembly of First Nations. These warnings are that Indigenous peoples may be targeted by ICE agents who are poorly trained and more than prepared to arrest and assault people without any evidence. Indigenous people could be endangered by ICE.
3. Take action to ensure Canadian private sector enterprises are not aiding and abetting this para-military threat to public safety in the United States. Given recent reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has moved to obtain Canadian-made armoured vehicles built by Ontario manufacturer Roshel, Canada must not supply equipment that supports or normalizes abusive enforcement operations.

Similarly, recent B.C. news reports indicate that B.C.’s Pattison Group may be willing to sell property in its real estate holdings to be used by ICE as detention centres.

The federal government must act to stop any transfers, exports, or procurement pathways that equip ICE with the tools used to violate human rights, including weapons, real estate, and tactical gear.

Greens believe that private-sector Canadian companies cannot support or deal with ICE while it represents a threat to the peace and security of our neighbours. Just as, by law, Canadians cannot support named foreign terrorist organizations, we should explore a law to place ICE and, potentially, similar foreign law enforcement organizations with a serious record of human rights abuses on a list of entities with which Canadians must not engage.

“Canada has an out-sized role in the world—as a democracy that defends human rights and fairness. We must protect vulnerable people, not turn them away, and not profit from systems that brutalize the innocent and non-violent,” said Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

—————————————————————————–

On Wednesday, there was a remarkable protest across the street from the US Embassy in Ottawa. What made it remarkable was that it was organized by one concerned citizen. A nurse himself, and the same age as Alex Pretti, he emailed others–nurses and nurses’ unions, the Canadian Labour Congress, the local Ottawa South Green party and me, asking people to join him at noon for a vigil. Marlene Wells, director of the political hub for the Green Party phoned him to get the details for the daily news advisory of my public events. She told me, “I don’t think he has ever organized anything. I think we are going to be the only media to notice, God bless his heart, he’s just doing it.” John and I joined the group in the freezing cold and light snow. It had been a long time since I joined in singing “We Shall Overcome.” Young nursing students showed up, almost shy. And said they had never done anything like this and could not stay long. They were holding flowers and rolled up posters. I asked if I could see their posters. They were so sweet, and said, “They are not very good…” Handwritten calls for Freedom and Justice. And they came to stand in the cold. Another woman brought homemade chocolate chip cookies. And thanks to Marlene’s notice, a few reporters showed up too.

I am including this 17-minute podcast interviewing me about our calls for action, thanks to Energimedia and host Markham Hislop.

BC Green leader Emily Lowan’s call for a boycott against Pattison Group made it to CBC TV The National!

By Friday, Pattison announced the sale was off!

B.C. billionaire won’t sell an industrial building in Virginia that was proposed to become an ICE facility

It is always good news when public pressure works. In the scheme of things, this may be a small win, but a win nonetheless!

In other news this week the Prime Minister met with the premiers. Although Alberta separatists being encouraged by Trump officials to break up Canada was not a main topic of discussion among the premiers, it dominated the media coverage.

It was reported last week by BBC News that “US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has weighed in on a separatist movement in Alberta, saying the western Canadian province is a ‘natural partner for the US’.

“Alberta has a wealth of natural resources, but they won’t let them build a pipeline to the Pacific,” Bessent told an American right wing commentator in an interview on Thursday.

“I think we should let them come down into the US, and Alberta is a natural partner for the US. They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people.”

Following that unprecedented intervention into Canadian domestic affairs by senior US government officials, it was confirmed that representatives of the “Alberta Prosperity Project” had been in touch with US government representatives, pursuing the possibility of a $500 billion line of credit for an independent Alberta.

BC Premier David Eby did not mince words, calling such efforts “treason.”

… “to go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada. There’s an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is treason,” said Eby.

That ramped up the heat in the media questions. Premier Smith did “mince” words as did the Prime Minister. Neither would criticize the Alberta separatists, but they would not criticize the Trump administration either. Smith framed her response as trusting in the US government to respect Canadian sovereignty. And Carney completely agreed with Premier Smith. Very good Boy Scout responses. But this is still the bully Carney called out in Davos. After calling our Prime Minister “Governor Carney”, draping the US flag over Canada in his social media graphics, I really doubt we can count on the US to respect Canada’s sovereignty. It is certainly a good example of the winning entry when, years ago, CBC Morningside and Peter Gzowski asked us to complete the phrase “as Canadian as…” And the winner was “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”

As to whether the word “treason” is appropriate,

The Criminal Code,

s 46, 2) defines treason as “Every one commits treason who, in Canada,

• (a) uses force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province;
• (b) without lawful authority, communicates or makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada, military or scientific information or any sketch, plan, model, article, note or document of a military or scientific character that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada;
• (c) conspires with any person to commit high treason or to do anything mentioned in paragraph (a);
• (d) forms an intention to do anything that is high treason or that is mentioned in paragraph (a) and manifests that intention by an overt act; or
• (e) conspires with any person to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) or forms an intention to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) and manifests that intention by an overt act.

So, clearly going to Washington to beg for billions to break up the country is not Criminal Code treason.

On the other hand, it is certainly anti-Canadian, treacherous and to be condemned. But whose example were they following?

It surprises me that no one in the media has raised Danielle Smith’s conduct in going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the Emperor’s ring before his inauguration. As documented in this CBC story, while the rest of us, federal party leaders across party lines, had signed up for “Team Canada,” Premier Smith visited Trump to try to cut a better deal for Alberta, and the devil take the hindmost for the other provinces.

In these circumstances, I think it unwise, as Danielle Smith says, to demonize any element within Alberta. But that does not apply to tempering our language toward the Trump administration. Imagine if in the Quebec referendum debate, separatists had been encouraged by the French government. Canada’s prime minister would have rightly denounced foreign interference.

The 1967 breach of protocol by Charles deGaulle when he proclaimed “Vive le Quebec Libre” in Montreal was immediately and strenuously rebuked by prime minister Lester B. Pearson.

The Quebec separation referendum was nearly 40 years later, in 1995. But imagine such a breach when the prospect of a separation referendum was live and current, as it is now, with an Alberta petition campaign underway. A senior Trump official is suggesting Alberta would be a great part of the US! It deserves a much stronger response from Canada. We can ignore the Alberta Prosperity folks and work harder to make the case that “My Canada includes Alberta” just as we did across Canada that Canada loves Quebec. Where are voices of Alberta MPs in response to this very real threat?

Danielle Smith may not be a separatist, but she sure is playing footsie with them. She reminds me of hapless former UK prime minister David Cameron. He thought he could mollify the small anti-EU fringe within his party by promising a referendum. He was confident, based on the polling, that the UK would stay within the EU. We all know what happened. The forces for Brexit were ground zero for the use of social media and algorithms to drive a campaign of disinformation and lies that misled UK voters into voting for Brexit.

Two films help us remember and learn from that history.

Netflix produced a great film, part documentary and satirical dramatic re-creation, with Benedict Cumberbatch as chief architect Dominic Cummings–Brexit:The Uncivil War.

it is no longer on Netflix, but is so good, I found it on YouTube for you.

And then there is a broader look across many countries–pure documentary–Netflix’s The Great Hack. It is well worth watching. Educational and terrifying.

We need to be informed and demand that any and all elections–including referendums at the provincial level–have strong controls against foreign interference and on-line manipulation. This is not a moment to look away, cross our fingers, and hope everything in Alberta just works out fine.

As I leave you to face tomorrow and Groundhog Day, I have included some links to my work this week in Ottawa.

Have a great week! Many thanks for all you do, in all the ways, big and small, to stand up for what’s right, for Canada and for the planet where we live!

Love,

Elizabeth

Here’s a summary of my work in Parliament this week:

January 26 Press Conference:

Speech on Canada-Indonesia trade deal, C-18:

Question about laying off emergency oil spill response workers in Question Period:

And sharing a brilliant new ad from the UK Greens, Enjoy!

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #304 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The cross Canada train trip was fantastic – as ever. One of the things about train travel is that you meet so many people and talk about things with people you would never have met otherwise. On our trip we met tourists from New Zealand, Australia, Austria, the UK, Japan and from all over Canada and the United States. For the first time in my travels, every American we met started by apologizing, making sure they let every Canadian they met on Via Rail know that they were appalled by the US President. One visitor from Chicago, a bit older than me, has been working with a group, a movement I had not heard of before. She goes out in the street with her cell phone camera to monitor ICE activities. I thought her very brave. And now I do know the name of the group – Indivisible Movement.

I am so shaken by the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. At least one newscast I heard mentioned Indivisible, a legal and non-violent group. It relies on using rights under the US Constitution. And if I knew how to contact the lovely Chicago senior on the train I would urge her to stop being brave. It is too dangerous. An ICE agent has killed a 37 year old mother, an American citizen, whose last words were “I am not mad at you” to the man who then killed her. As George Floyd’s last words in that same city were “I can’t breathe.” Against the odds, the police who killed George Floyd were arrested, charged, tried and convicted. The White House is doing everything it can to shield the ICE agent who claimed lethal force was justified in killing Renee Nicole Good. The Minnesota government does not accept the claim by US Vice President JD Vance that the ICE agent has “absolute immunity.”

We will be seeing numerous versions of slow motion reviews of cell phone videos of Nicole Good’s murder. But it it now clear that the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good had not been run over by her car as President Trump claimed. It is clear that she met no known definition of terrorist. For Canadians, the increased violence and lawlessness of police and federal officers in the US is not something we can simply ignore; No more than we can ignore the brutal Iranian regime, increasing anti-semitism or the ongoing violence in Gaza. But as neighbours, what do we do for justice in Minnesota? The basic precepts, the fundamental pillars of US democracy are under assault.

Trump is undeterred by the US Constitution. He does not wait for the US Senate to sanction military assaults, as in Venezuela. He has unilaterally pulled the US out of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, itself ratified by two-thirds of the US Senate. It remains a debate in the US as to whether he can do so legally without engaging the Senate in the process.

But claiming for the US the resources of another country is a reach too far for many. Trump says he can “run Venezuela.”

First, I want to dig into Trump’s actions and claims of the vast riches of Venezuelan oil and then to the opportunistic use of these events to try to push pipelines across British Columbia.

The first piece I want to share is from US economist, Nobel Prize recipient, Paul Krugman. What Krugman sets out is that the Chavez administration vastly inflated the value of its reserves. Somewhat like, but not identical to oil sands bitumen, Venezuela’s heavy crude is not prized. It is low value, requiring expensive steps in refining. Hence, Krugman’s title “sticky fantasy”.

The Emperor’s New Oil Wealth – The truth behind Trump’s black, sticky fantasy

Paul Krugman   Jan 07, 2026

“When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he claimed that the goal was to establish a democratic regime. Some members of his administration may even have believed that. But many leftist critics insisted that it was all about seizing Iraq’s oil.

Although I was an outspoken opponent of that war, and deeply cynical about the Bush administration’s motives, I never believed the “war for oil” story. The principal motivation for the war, I still believe, was to wag the dog — to use a showy military victory to secure Bush’s reelection. According to some political scientists, that was a mission the war did, in fact, accomplish.

Donald Trump’s Venezuela venture is a very different story. During his triumphalist press conference after the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Trump never used the word “democracy.” He did, however, say “oil” 27 times, declaring, “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”

Even so, whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.

…..

On Monday, Trump suggested that he might reimburse oil companies for investment in the nation he claims — with no basis in reality — to control, reimbursing them for their outlays there. That is, we’ve gone in a matter of days from big talk about huge money-making opportunities to a proposal to, in effect, subsidize oil-industry investments in Venezuela at U.S. taxpayers’ expense….

Which is not to say that nobody has profited from the abduction of Maduro. A few months ago Trumpist billionaire Paul Singer bought Citgo, the former U.S.-based arm of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Citgo owns three Gulf Coast refineries custom-built to process Venezuelan crude, refineries that have suffered from the U.S. embargo on imports of that crude. If Trump lifts that embargo, Singer will receive a huge windfall. But this windfall will have nothing to do with reviving Venezuelan production.

Singer has made huge political donations to Trump, raising questions about how much he has influenced policy. His purchase of Citgo was also remarkably well-timed. What did he know?

At a deeper level, Trump’s apparent belief that oil in the ground is a precious asset is decades out of date.

These days oil is cheap by historical standards. …. [current prices] $62 a barrel wouldn’t be high enough to make investing in [Venezuela’s] Orinoco Belt, where the estimated breakeven is more than $80, profitable even if there were no political risks.

In short, Trump’s belief that he has captured a lucrative prize in Venezuela’s oil fields would be an unrealistic fantasy even if he really were in control of a nation that is, in practice, still controlled by the same thugs who controlled it before Maduro was abducted.”

And now to the Canadian perspective. Does Trump claiming to own Venezuela’s oil have any impact on the oil sands?

This analysis is helpful. It is pure opportunism by Alberta to claim that the situation in Venezuela means we need more pipelines in Canada:

“The United States intervention in Venezuela and seizure of the country’s president immediately raised questions about what impact American stewardship of the oil-rich nation could have on demand for Canadian bitumen.

But Werner Antweiler, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and expert on international oil economics, argues it won’t make a new pipeline from Alberta to B.C.’s coast any more necessary, or economically viable. He called the arguments otherwise “opportunistic.” “They will find any reason to make their political case, but that is not the same as making an economic case,” Antweiler said. Shifts in the market reflect future expectations, but Antweiler says the circumstances on the ground in terms of oil production haven’t changed. That will take years and require a much larger political transformation.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had said earlier in the week she thought the situation increases the urgency of expediting projects to diversify and expand oil exports — including a new pipeline to the West Coast, according to the Canadian Press. Smith signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal government in November to explore a possible pipeline project.

Premier David Eby opposes this push and responded to Smith’s latest comments on Tuesday by arguing that no private proponent has stepped up to pay for a pipeline, and the only way to make one happen would be with massive public subsidies. Eby called for promoting energy independence, but suggested it would be better to spend public funds to increase Canadian refining capacity. He said this could satisfy domestic and demand and be shipped abroad. “It’s something we should be talking about,” Eby said. “As opposed to shipping raw resources out as quickly as possible.” But Antweiler takes issue with this plan as well. He said Eby is “misunderstanding” how refinery economics works, and that it is a lot easier to ship crude oil than gasoline. “You build refineries to satisfy our local demand,” Antweiler said. “If the local demand isn’t there, it’s not going to pay off.

The last major Canadian refinery to come online — Canada has 17 total — was the Sturgeon facility built north of Edmonton. This was built with substantial public investment, but has turned into a financial boondoggle. Anweiler says a better option would be to upgrade the current Trans Mountain pipeline and dredge Burrard Inlet to allow more oil to be loaded onto ships, lowering costs. Eby is supportive of these types of plans. Real impact of Venezuela situation on global oil markets a long way off. The idea behind building a new pipeline is to transport oil to tidewaters more cheaply. This would diversify trade and make Alberta oil more competitive, particularly important if the market was suddenly flooded with Venezuelan oil. But Antweiler said it is unlikely Venezuela’s oil industry can ramp up production and push the price down any time soon. He said the country’s oil infrastructure has been “ruined” by years of corruption and mismanagement. Experts estimate this could require as much as $100 billion to fix.

President Donald Trump met with oil executives at the White House on Friday to try to drum up that investment, according to U.S. news outlets. But Antweiler said companies will likely be reluctant to make an investment when the next U.S. administration could lose interest. And even if that investment is made, it may be years before the gains are realized. Antweiler said Venezuela produces fewer than 1 million barrels per day, down from a peak of more than 3 million 30 years ago. “Anyone who’s suggesting you could just flip the switch and crank up the production from 1 million to 3 million barrels today, that’s completely unrealistic,” Antweiler said. This is also a small fraction of global oil production, currently about 100 million barrels per day.

Another problem facing long-term investors is that “peak oil” is likely already reached amid flattening worldwide population and decarbonization efforts in major economies such as China. “In China, every second car that is now being sold is either electric or hybrid electric,” Antweiler said. But Smith continues to push for a new pipeline. Antweiler says this is partly because Alberta has a “chip on its shoulder” that dates back to Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Plan. ‘They want this pipeline no matter what,’ he said. ‘Even though it doesn’t make economic sense.’”

Speaking of people who seem to want a pipeline built and will grab any argument to promote it, we come to the latest arguments from our prime minister. Mark Carney was reported by anonymous Liberal MPs to be quite emotional when speaking to his caucus in defence of the MOU with Alberta. He urged his caucus to support the MOU, suppress objections to the pipeline, to keep Alberta in Canada; to blunt the separatist movement within Alberta.

So far, in 2026, it is hard to see how we get to the Happy part of “Happy New Year.” But we will, because we must. I am so grateful to be Canadian. I am doubly grateful to be a Canadian parliamentarian. And I feel a strong sense of responsibility to share what I learn and stand up for democracy. This little letter is one avenue. The community meetings are another.

Please use your voices, letters to the editor, etc to point out the fallacies of the unjustified notion that there is any reason to build more pipelines, much less any reason for urgency. The calls to move and move FAST are calls to ignore planning and thinking.

There is one very HAPPY bit of news to share, with a big thank you!! The Green Party succeeded in year-end fundraising and has totally paid off all debt! Finishing with a surplus going into 2026 is very encouraging! Thanks to all who chipped in!

Until next week, many thanks!! and please sign the Peace Charter petition. Tomorrow is the deadline to add your name!! So please do it now.

Love and thanks.

Elizabeth

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #301 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

2026 is off with a bang, pun intended, with Trump’s illegal assault on Venezuela.

Here is our press release from yesterday:

Green Party of Canada Condemns U.S. Actions in Venezuela as Violation of International Law

January 3, 2026

“Ottawa — The Green Party of Canada, in solidarity with the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas (FPVA), strongly condemns all military actions, including the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, carried out by the United States government on Venezuelan territory on January 3, 2026.

“In an increasingly destabilized world, our North Star must remain respect for international law,” said Green Party of Canada Leader Elizabeth May.

Violation of International Law

We denounce this action as a flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the fundamental principles of national sovereignty. The unilateral use of military force contravenes international law and undermines the global rules-based order.

Threat to Continental Stability

An attack against Venezuela constitutes an act of aggression that threatens the peace, security, and territorial integrity of the region as a whole.

Defence of Life Over Politics

The FPVA emphasizes that, while Green Party members in Venezuela oppose the current government, they equally reject armed intervention. The protection of life and territory must transcend partisan political differences. Violence will never be a pathway to representative democracy or respect for human rights.

Call to the Global Community

As an integral part of the Global Greens, we call for decisive action from the international community and from human rights organizations worldwide.

We urge world leaders to condemn this dangerous precedent, which sacrifices the future of coming generations and jeopardizes planetary security. In this context, Canadian Greens call on the federal government of Canada to denounce the illegal actions of the United States government.

“We can’t stand by while one man’s insatiable and violent thirst for oil makes an already perilous time in the world even less safe and even more unstable,” said Green Party of Canada Deputy Leader Mike Morrice.”

If not for the US aggression in not only deposing the Venezuelan leader but announcing Trump’s intention to “run Venezuela,” this morning’s letter would have focused on the issue of floor crossings.

Over the last month, we have had significant shifts in the relative balance between parties in the current minority Parliament. So far, two Conservative MPs have crossed the floor to join the Liberal ranks (Nova Scotian Chris D’Entremont and Ontario MP Michael Ma) while a third, Matt Jeneroux, who was in serious talks with the Liberals about crossing the floor and apparently had such disturbing threats from his party’s leader’s office that he has announced he will quit parliament altogether. Whenever he finally does leave the House, a by-election will be required in Jeneroux’s seat of Edmonton Riverbend. Matt Jeneroux is well liked across party lines. The various rumours I have heard should, like most Ottawa gossip, be taken with a grain of salt. The most credible version involve the Conservatives’ former campaign manager, senior advisor to Stephen Harper and Pierre Poilievre, Jenni Byrne. She has a well earned reputation for nasty, bare-knuckled politics. Whatever occurred has not increased affection for PP in his own caucus.

There are many hints of more defections to come. Currently, the Liberals are one MP shy of a majority.

These moves are hugely consequential for our country. With a majority, no matter whether from First Past the Post distortions or defections after the election, with 43.8% of the popular vote Mr. Carney will have 100% of the power. In Westminster parliamentary democracy there is no such thing as the “checks and balances” built in to the US Constitution after the former British colonies won the Revolutionary War of 1776 and set up a new system within a Republic. (Now, obviously, the famous checks and balances of US democracy are on the rocks).

For many reasons, I prefer our system of Westminster parliamentary democracy. One reason Canada urgently needs electoral reform is this feature of our system: Any party leader with the majority of the seats has total control over the Executive (PM and Cabinet) and Legislative (Parliament) branches of government.

In reviewing the history of floor-crossing in Westminster parliamentary democracies, perhaps none was as memorable as Winston Churchill, who famously crossed the floor twice! Churchill left the Conservatives in 1904 over free trade policy, joining the Liberals, only to return to the Tories in 1924.

He famously quipped, “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”

Not mentioned in the recent spate of news articles about floor crossings in Canadian politics, the most consequential was that of Lucien Bouchard in 1990. I will always be grateful to Lucien Bouchard as an outstanding Minister of the Environment. In fact, and I owe this personal reflection to the late NDP MP Jim Fulton, (a dear friend who went on to be the first Executive Director of the David Suzuki Foundation,) both Bouchard and Fulton were at the 1990 climate negotiations in Bergen, Norway. The Bergen climate conference was a key milestone on the way to the 1992 Earth Summit and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Bouchard was one of 34 environment ministers in attendance. He committed Canada to our first international goal – to ensure that emissions in 2000 would not exceed our 1990 levels. It was a fateful time for Bouchard to be out of the country as the Meech Lake discussions moved in a direction he believed had betrayed his old friend Brian Mulroney’s commitments to Quebec. He left the Conservative ranks, bringing four other Conservative Quebec MPs and two Quebec Liberal MPs to eventually form the Bloc Quebecois. Incredibly, within three years, the Bloc had become the Official Opposition.

There have been other stunning defections. Some created a wave of public revulsion, such as in 2006 when former Liberal member of Paul Martin’s Cabinet, David Emerson, crossed over and directly into Stephen Harper’s Cabinet.

Overwhelmingly the 80 MPs who crossed the floor over the last 25 years represented personal decisions. Whether momentarily breathtaking, like Belinda Stronach’s move from Stephen Harper to Paul Martin, or accepted as principled, as Scott Brison who shifted to the Liberals as a former Progressive Conservative. He felt his party had left him. Most of floor crossings have been one at a time, small moves; personal and individual, and non-consequential to the parliament as a whole.

That is why I think of the Bloc. Lucien Bouchard’s move shifted Canadian politics in consequential ways over decades. Not since that shift has something as profound been moved by floor crossings as those Mr Carney is engineering. I believe we will see more. They are in keeping with Mr.Carney’s style. As our first CEO prime minister he needs total control and total power. He has been acting as though he had it since the April election. If he does get a majority in the House, it is unlikely there will be another election before 2029.

Floor crossing is an unusual process. Unlike gaining approval to stand as a candidate for a particular party by winning a nomination, an MP can join another party by writing the Speaker a letter. The MP merely instructs the Speaker to list that MP as a member of party X. During trials and tribulations of Bloc leadership after the 2011 election, variously a number of Bloc MPs described themselves in their letters to the Speaker as members of “Quebec Debout” or of “Force et Democracie”. These parties did not exist under Elections Canada rules, yet they had sitting members of Parliament. The rules allow for more creativity than is generally known.

One hope is for MPs from other parties who feel betrayed by their own leadership (whether Conservative or Liberal or NDP) to either form a new progressive party, or a coalition?, or best hope, join the Greens. The benefit of joining Greens is that MPs who do so can always vote their conscience, as they feel their own constituents want. No whipped votes means more democracy.

The reality of Mark Carney’s shifting positions, aligning with Trump in anti-refugee policies and with Poilievre on climate, creates the need for a review of this Parliament, not seat by seat, but at a 40,000 foot level. Canadians voted for MPs to keep “elbows up” in dealing with Trump. Not dropping the Digital Services Tax because Trump demanded it. Nor to drop retaliatory tariffs and invite foreign corporations to benefit from lower tax rates than in the US, leaving us once, as forever, a raw resource colony for other countries.

We have 343 MPs. In theory, we are all equal. We have huge challenges as a nation. Maybe Mark Carney is the best hope for our time. I am not sure, but I am sure that working together and finding cooperative parliamentary arrangements will bring better results than trusting Goldman Sachs to figure it out for us.

And with that I leave you for this week. John and I are on board the famed train the “Canadian” heading to Vancouver. We arrive on January 8th. Until then I am working on New Year’s Resolution numero uno! Take better care of myself!! We are without wifi on board, hooray! So thanks once again to my volunteer team in sending this out.

All my love and THANKS!! To everyone who sent along a donation, we finished 2025 in good shape! Details to come, but many thanks are in order!!

love,

Elizabeth

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #300 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

And happy Third day of Christmas! Three French hens! If you want to count down the twelve days of Christmas, the FIRST day is Boxing Day. And tradition, and church calendar say, your tree should come down by Epiphany – January 6. So relax. It is still Christmas! I hope you are enjoying the season!

As I write this, I am enjoying it! And I do not want this weekly letter to bring bad news. Today I want to celebrate GOOD news.

Starting with good news from California.

Officials stunned by impacts of US region’s dominance in global industry: ‘Biggest transformation… in a century’

“Outside of China, [it’s the] only one other jurisdiction in the world … that has as much.”

by Kim LaCapria December 22, 2025

Last month at COP30, Governor Newsom (the highest ranking US official in attendance) announced that California’s economy was powered by clean energy for an astonishing “nine out of 10 days” in 2025. 

“Outside of China, there’s only one other jurisdiction in the world – California – that has as much battery storage implemented,” he added. In addition to utility-scale battery backups, home solar paired with sufficient storage keeps the lights on during widespread power outages.

According to The Guardian, California’s stunning clean energy evolution did not happen spontaneously; the state has invested “heavily in solar, wind, and battery storage” to meet its “ambitious targets”.

Installing solar panels is the ultimate home energy hack, in part because battery storage makes homes more resilient. They’re becoming increasingly sought after as electric bills continue to soar, because solar panels can bring monthly costs down to $0 or even less.

California offers significant subsidies for solar power, which is undoubtedly a factor in the state’s impressive growth in clean energy in 2025. Solar panels can involve upfront costs, but Solar Explorer also offers $0 down subscription options, like Palmetto’s LightReach. 

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/california-solar-program-gov-newsom-brazil/

This video is long, but worth watching: “Top Ten Good News Stories for 2025” from a clean energy expert – Angry Clean Energy Guy.

I was surprised that it starts out with Mark Carney, unveiled for the way-beyond-Canada audience for this podcast as someone who has betrayed his climate reputation. Razzouk has the benefit of clarity in the way he calls out the lies. Assaad W. Razzouk is a graduate of Syracuse University, has an MBA from Columbia University and a PhD in Climate Change, Sustainable Development and International Cooperation from Teri University in India. As well, he has worked in renewables for years. The video is about 30 minutes long.

He answers the un-answered question – often un-asked – Why are we continually told that renewables are not able to replace fossil fuels? In this video he makes it clear that the fossil fuel lobby flat out lies. Those lies continue to drown out the truth, The writing is on the wall for fossil fuels. Their day is done. Good news!

To fast forward, here are his highlights among the Angry Clean Energy Guy’s top ten good news climate stories:

Around the world EV sales are soaring. Hitting the global EV tipping point. Nepal has dramatically reduced importing gas; cars are increasingly running on clean electricity.

In 2025, solar overtook coal as an electricity source for all of Germany – not renewables alone. Solar power alone overtook coal!

To get a quick and authoritative review – once again confirming that investments in renewables have far out-paced fossil fuels –- here are ten charts from the World Resources Institute: https://www.wri.org/insights/state-clean-energy-charted

Please notice none of these even mention nuclear. It is neither “clean” nor playing a role in the energy transformation now underway. If you live in Saanich-Gulf Islands, my winter 2026 newsletter (mailed and hard copy) will be in your mail box in early January. This issue’s theme is nuclear energy and why it is a bad choice.

Lastly the news that really matters – the climate equivalent of the “proof is in the pudding” – Are climate warming emissions finally going down??

We know they are going up in Canada, after briefly going down a titch under Trudeau’s policies. We remain the worst performer of all G7 countries. Yes, even worse than the US with our current emissions 18% above 1990 levels and the USA 3% below 1990. On to the global trends…

This excellent article from Science magazine explains how scientists try to get a real-time measurement of emissions. We know, without a doubt, that the concentration of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide equivalents in our planet’s atmosphere has never been as high as they are now – at least when human beings were able to live here. (Note: try to keep the concepts of emissions and concentrations distinct.)

For example, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, millions of years ago, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were off the charts – as high as 6,000 ppm (ppm= parts per million). No mammals lived on Earth, reptiles did fine.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/09/20/you-asked-dinosaurs-survived-when-co2-was-extremely-high-why-cant-humans/

But once humans were established, for the entire time that human civilization has flourished, up until the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide concentrations stayed below 280 ppm. Today CO2 is measured at 428 ppm. Unlike emissions, that go up or down, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is long term and has only gone up in our lifetimes. That is because the concentration of CO2 is the result of a number of factors. The earth’s systems include actions that pull carbon out of the atmosphere – as green leafy things use CO2 for photosynthesis to make oxygen. Oceans and forests generally absorb carbon. So concentration measurements of CO2 are more stable and do not turn on a dime. Concentrations tell us what remains after all the netting out actions of natural sequestration. I watch the concentration and the emissions numbers. Emissions must drop dramatically and soon to avoid the worst case scenarios of unstoppable, irreversible, self-accelerating global warming. That is why the Paris Agreement targets keeping global average temperature on Earth to as far below 2 degrees C as possible. No scientist knows exactly where the global atmospheric trip wires are that could plunge us into runaway global warming. Runaway global warming could push climate systems, ocean currents and climate regimes to an unendurable climate. We do not know if we have crossed those thresholds or not. We only know that the more we increase burning fossil fuels and removing forests the more bullets we put in the chambers of a civilization-scale game of Russian Roulette. As the Earth warms due to human actions, that warming creates feedback loops that unleash more warming. Such positive feedback loops include warming that thaws Arctic permafrost that releases methane-hastening warming. OR when forests burn, unleashing more carbon, or when the Arctic ocean warms, thawing more Arctic ice at the pole, undoing the albedo effect that kept the planet cooler by bouncing the sun’s rays back out to space. As dark ocean water absorbs more heat, the warmer waters melt more ice, to create more heat, to melt more ice. All what are called ‘positive feedback loops’. The impact is anything but positive.

So we must fight to avoid every fraction of a degree warming. We have no idea if it is too late. The more important question is ‘too late for what?’ It is too late for the dodo. It is not too late for the Marbled murrelet. It is too late for my granddaughter Lily to experience the more predictable climate of my lifetime. In 1954, when I was born, the CO2 concentration on Earth was about 313 ppm. Lily was born in a world with a CO2 concentration of 423.9 ppm. It is NOT too late for Lily to glory in a wonderful biosphere. But I cannot tell myself, or more accurately, I cannot fool myself into thinking there is any guarantee that when Lily is my age, human civilization will thrive. I know that with really hard work, NOW, we can. These studies help see that pathway to a planet whose climatic extremes have increased, but to which, we can as a civilization adapt.

What is remarkable about this article is the extent to which scientists can see the climate-hostile political actions of a President Trump or Prime Minister Carney can slow down healthy trends reducing emissions.

Turning Point: Global greenhouse emissions will soon flatten or decline – a historic moment driven by China’s surge in renewable energy

https://www.science.org/content/article/global-carbon-emissions-will-soon-flatten-or-decline

It is very good news that we are seeing the global proof in the pudding. It is very late, but not too late. Getting emissions to stabilize and then go sharply down is possible. Those watching the disruptive and irresistible pull to cheaper renewables might say ‘inevitable’.

But certainly POSSIBLE. Now to get the banker billionaires of the world, the offensive Mr. Trump and the charming Mr. Carney to take their foot off the firehose of disruption. Time to stop boosting fossil fuels and far-fetched techno-fantasies like carbon capture and nuclear. Carney is still talking about ‘decarbonized oil’. Talk about an oxymoron!

Let’s end 2025 with a raised glass of cheer to 2026. Let us cheer the rise in renewables, not as future fantasy but as current reality. And, never forget that as we work harder than ever for the survival of human civilization that no culture can be called civilized that practices Ecocide. We seem hell-bent on ‘build baby build’, murdering our own Mother Earth, while allowing the deep unfairness of a society that allows injustice and inequality.

I hope you and those you love were able to be near this season. I am deeply grateful for all my many blessings. And to be a Canadian in this world of turmoil is a deep blessing indeed.

Here’s to 2026!

much love,
Elizabeth

P.S. It is NOT TOO LATE to make a 2025 donation to the Green Party. Please do!

https://www.greenparty.ca/en/civicrm/contribute/transact?id=1?id=1&source=NC.W.MABU&id=1

And if you are near by, please come to one of my non-partisan community meetings in January 2026:

https://elizabethmaymp.ca/events/

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #299 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The great thing about winter solstice with all that it embodies of deep cultural religious and pagan significance, is that from today on our days get longer.

We will have more light. And, even though we experience it every year, I never fail to be cheered by longer days and the late evening summer sun, as we approach June 21 and summer solstice. From shortest to longest day of the year, our moods are affected by our place as the Earth revolves around the sun. Our home on this planet is worth fighting for.

This week I have been reflecting on the number of things that are simply pure nonsense embraced by the pro-fossil fuel crowd.

I was set in this direction by this truly appalling bit of news:

An Alberta oil advocate has withdrawn a campaign to rename the never-built Northern Gateway pipeline the “Spirit Bear” pipeline. Robbie Picard launched the campaign earlier this month. He has formally withdrawn the effort.

He says he was not aware that “Spirit Bear” is a legally protected sacred symbol of the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation. The name, also known in the Nation’s language as Mooksgm’ol, represents a sacred white bear, also called the Kermode bear (a black bear species with a genetic anomoly giving it white fur), found in the Great Bear Rainforest and carries spiritual, historical and ecological significance. Picard said he was unaware of the name’s legal and cultural significance when the petition launched.

Read more at: https://northernsentinel.com/

This is right up there, in terms of cultural sensitivity, with Minister of Energy Tim Hodgson saying a couple of weeks ago that he should consult with First Nations leaders and elders on Zoom. Where do these people come from?  What did they learn there?

I feel compelled to cut and paste, repeating, this one sentence for its astonishing ignorance. “the Spirit Bear as a powerful regional emblem symbolizing harmony between nature and industry.”

Profound ignorance underlies why most Canadians now think a pipeline across British Columbia is a good idea. We are good neighbours. We are also Canadians first and foremost. With Trump taking aim at our economy, we are more prepared to compromise in the national interest.

Public opinion has been conditioned to accept the idea that more pipelines make sense through steady repetition of things that are not true.

The process of shifting public opinion started the moment that Justin Trudeau’s government bought the pipeline from Kinder Morgan of Texas. More effectively than I could have imagined, public familiarity with the arguments against pipelines was forgotten as the federal Crown corporation, TMX, wasted $34 billion in public funds to build it. Our protests more or less stopped, with full respect to Burnaby area protests, from tree-sitting medical doctor and SFU professor, Dr. Tim Takaro and fellow tree-sitter and Green Party candidate Maureen Curran who refused to accept that the dangers of the pipeline were no longer worth opposing. The weight of inevitability ended up silencing our voices in ways I had not imagined.

The rhetoric and rhyming slogans of Pierre Poilievre started being accepted as if they were grounded in reality. Topping the hit parade of falsehoods, now accepted by Liberal Mark Carney, driving new “anti-red tape” laws are these doozies:

1. That Kinder Morgan faced a tangle of multiple environmental assessments at provincial and federal levels, frustrating the aims of the private sector proponent.

Truth: BC Premier Christy Clark, as a favour to Stephen Harper, decided NOT to have a BC government review of Kinder Morgan.

Truth: Stephen Harper, through his spring 2012 omnibus budget bill, C-38, repealed the Mulroney-era federal environmental assessment law, replacing it with a more discretionary assessment, fast-tracking reviews, time limited and rushed to do the whole review ASAP. Plus Harper’s C-38 removed the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency from conducting the review and put the (then) National Energy Board (NEB) in charge.

As ever “haste makes waste” and the NEB, having never run an EA, made so many mistakes that the permit to allow the TMX pipeline was quashed by the Federal Court in August 2018.

2. Meanwhile Kinder Morgan decided against building the pipeline, as was transparent in the winter 2018 shareholders’ meeting where former CEO Richard Kinder (formerly a senior executive of Enron) announced KM was liquidating the few billion dollars raised to secure capital to build the pipeline and was, instead, using it to pay down HQ debt. That, and the KM decision to re-organize its assets, setting up a separate Canadian affiliate, holding most, but not all, of KM Canadian assets, making it easier to carve it up and walk away.

One non-factual building block for the public’s shifting opinion on pipelines is the notion that Alberta has been unfairly blocked from getting its resources to market (and this of course is buttressed by the invented and false argument that development has been stalled).

The reality is that the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, and now under Mark Carney, are doing far more than Harper ever did to boost production of one of the planet’s dirtiest forms of oil. As the price of oil has dropped, if left to market forces, oil sands production would be declining. But thanks to the tax payers of Canada footing the bill for the TMX pipeline, the production of oil sands bitumen has increased,

This is a recent assessment from Standard and Poors:

Canadian Oil Sands Production Expected to Reach All-time Highs this Year Despite Lower Oil Prices–  Standard and Poors outlook… “The latest forecast expects oil sands production to reach a record annual average production of 3.5 million b/d in 2025 (5% higher than 2024) and exceed 3.9 million b/d by 2030—half a million barrels per day higher than 2024. The 2030 projection is 100,000 barrels per day (or nearly 3%) higher than the previous outlook.”

The looney idea that China wants our oil for energy is at least dented when one realizes that of the dilbit we are now shipping to China through the TMX pipeline a third is not used for energy at all. Once the diluent is removed (as it is only added to get the solid tarry substance—bitumen—to flow through a pipeline) about one-third of what we are shipping doesn’t end up in Chinese refineries but is used to pave roads in China. That is one small blessing; at least that much is not burned to throw more fuel on the planet-warming fire.
.
I am highly motivated as should be all climate-concerned fellow citizens. Our government is pulling against market forces. It is committed to fossil fuels even when we could electrify our economy and rely on cheaper and available renewable energy.

Canada is the right G7 county to start doing the right things. Despite rhetoric, as you likely know, we remain the worst. I never stopped using 1990 as the base year and reference point for climate action, as was first decided in negotiating the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Remember it was Harper in 2006 who shifted Canada to using 2006, And later, shifting again to 2005, each time weakening our ambition. But it is stunning that the EU is on average 38% below 1990 levels, the UK more than 50% below 1990 levels, the USA, even after one Trump term and into the second is 3% below 1990 levels. What of Canada’s emissions? 18% above 1990…

Canadians simply assume we must be better than the US. Tragically we are going in the wrong direction, and faster under Carney than under Trudeau. We need to confront rather directly the lie that Alberta has been unfairly treated. Canada has wasted $34 billion and trespassed on Indigenous lands to build a pipeline carrying a highly dangerous substance threatening our coasts and marine environment. Who is being treated unfairly here?? And the BC NDP government wants more fracking and more LNG pipelines, with Energy Minister Adrian Dix, without consulting First Nations, offering up his solution: Pump a million more barrels of dilbit through the existing pipeline, dredge Vancouver Harbour to run bigger tankers navigating through Burrard Inlet and the Second Narrows. As British Columbians unwillingly having these increased risks thrust upon us, we have been manipulated into thinking we need to do more to help Alberta.

Please do explain to friends and family – around the family table over the holidays, that we have an obligation to protect our salmon, our whales, our coastal waters. That while Alberta claims its economy is at risk, as it grows with federal subsidies, the multi-billion dollar industries of coastal BC, in fisheries, recreation and tourism, are at risk every single day without an ounce of benefit coming our way.

If you live in a district with a Liberal MP, ask them to explain.

In the meantime, we are all shifting to focusing on the joy of the season. Christmas is Thursday! Make your homemade treats. Try to avoid consumer culture Christmas. Wrap your friends in hugs!
Sing as much and as loudly as you can. This is, forever, my favourite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpsXNlarAk8

Meanwhile, sharing for those who are inclined, today’s global effort to shift consciousness through meditation.

Best to all and will be back in your in-box next week!

Love
Elizabeth

Sunday, December 21
World Meditation Day morning group meditation followed by group practice of the TM-Sidhi program
• Sunday, December 21
• Victoria TM Centre
• Arrive by 7:45 am
• TM promptly at 8 am
• Full 20 minute meditation
• TM-Sidhas are invited to stay after TM for the TM-Sidhi program
• For TM practitioners and anyone who practices any silent meditation technique
Please RSVP by December 19 by clicking here

World Meditation Day afternoon group meditation followed by candle lighting and cake
• Sunday, December 21
• Victoria TM Centre
• Arrive by 4:45 pm
• TM promptly at 5 pm
• For TM practitioners and anyone who practices any silent meditation technique
• Please note that there will not be TM-Sidhi group program in the afternoon

After the group meditation, we will each have the opportunity to light a candle and make a wish, an intention, a sankalpa for the coming season, either silently or aloud. Then we will have cake!
Please RSVP by December 19 by clicking here

Please join us for either or both events and let’s bring inner and outer light to Victoria and the world on this shortest of days in the Northern Hemisphere!
If you are not able to join in person, you can join the worldwide events on YouTube Livestream.

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GSM from December 14, 2025 – IGNORE if yours came through last week.. we had some gremlins interfering with the software we use.

Hello all.  John Kidder here, Elizabeth’s husband and occasional co-writer! Elizabeth has finally hit the wall of exhaustion from the crush of parliamentary work that hit its peak before Thursday’s adjournment. So I am back as a guest writer!

We’ve been talking about the enigma of Prime Minister Carney, who just last year was seen as one the world’s great champions for action on climate change.  Now his Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Alberta, calling for a new pipeline, eliminating policies and programs intended to reduce carbon emissions, all intending to make Canada a “conventional energy superpower” have given the lie to that impression.  Elizabeth has asked me to write this week to her faithful readers. 

I hope this does not bore you to tears.

I believe Mr. Carney is a smart right-thinking accomplished man.  I believe he intends right action with every decision. I want to believe he’ll be able to guide the country through perilous times.  But after the last month or so, I’m not so optimistic.

First, his approach to government concerns me.

We see legislation that permits cabinet ministers to override any existing law (except the Criminal Code), more to permit government to simply decide that projects it thinks are in “the national interest” will not be subject to ordinary due diligence, enormous “omnibus” bills that affect all sorts of established law, on and on it goes.  These are driven through the House in just a few hours consideration by procedural manipulations that don’t permit debate.  You’ve read about this in Elizabeth’s letters.  This is all supposedly because of the threat of Mr. Trump’s smashing through every established principle and practice of the United States and posing a grave economic threat to Canada.

We need a whole new strategy, they say, so government must have near-emergency powers.  We need to act big and bold and fast, so let’s get those pesky economic and environmental assessments and that time-wasting parliamentary nonsense out of the way.  It seems to me that Mr. Carney thinks of Parliament the way a hard-charging CEO might think of a particularly useless board of directors – a talking shop that does nothing real, an ugly angry Question Period shouting match show for the faithful (he’s right about that), way too many people, impossible procedures (the newest book on Parliamentary procedures is 1400 pages long), impossible to make timely business decisions, such a waste of time, etc.  It would be better, thinks the Prime Minister, if they just asked for routine quarterly summary reports and otherwise got out of the way.

Mr. Carney is an enormously experienced senior bureaucrat.  Now he’s Prime Minister of a complaisant parliament largely ignorant of its duties.  So he’s rewriting the rules.   And since none, NONE, of the MPs (except Elizabeth, who reads every single word) ever read let alone dissect proposed legislation – their whips tell them what to think, personal investigation is discouraged – the changes Mr. Carney is making to the basic structures of Canadian governance are sliding through without meaningful discussion.

This allows a sort of “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley approach.  When I was running technology startups, we were always mindful of the “90-90 rule” – the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time and money; the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time and money. The famous Norwegian project manager Bent Flyvbjerg wrote a book “How Big Things Get Done” based on his extensive experience being called in to rescue enormous projects that had gone awry, and a database of 160,000 other big projects around the world.  He observes that democratic governments are particularly prone to acting quickly without enough planning, in part of course because of the short-term transactional nature of electoral politics.  Flyvbjerg’s extensive data shows with no room for doubt that acting quickly without enough planning leads to failure.    Mr. Carney invited Flyvbjerg to brief his cabinet – I see no sign that his advice stuck.  We are about to embark on large long-lasting “projects of national significance” with much reduced analysis and planning, not more.

Elizabeth has pointed out that Mr. Ford in Ontario and Mr. Eby in BC have passed similar legislation greatly expanding their powers to act precipitously because of so-called “emergencies”.  And of course we see the prime example south of the line, where the orange ogre declares an emergency whenever he sees something he doesn’t like and issues “executive orders” to use whole-of-government power as he sees fit.

These are not signs of a healthy democracy.  I don’t like it.

Second, I have been confused by Mr. Carney’s approach to “climate finance” since I first saw him at the Glasgow Climate COP in 2021.  He announced that he and some banking colleagues had agreed to put up $126 trillion to fund the transition away from fossil fuels.  Whoa, I thought, that’s a lot of money – enough to meet the “loss and damage” needs of the poorest countries so badly affected by changes to the climate caused by us the richest countries, and enough to drive rapid deployment of renewable energy everywhere.  Then I remembered that Mr. Carney is first and foremost a banker.  Bankers always, always want the money back, with interest (or that much better word used by loan sharks, the “vigorish”).  Loss and damage payments given to poor countries are not intended to be paid back.  And deployment of abundant low marginal cost renewables can’t make the big fat profits that scarce high-cost fossils or nuclear plants do.  As an example, Chinese solar panels are so inexpensive farmers in Germany are buying them to use as fencing – power output is a side benefit.  No way to make big money from such cheap commodities.  So perhaps one might have some caution.

Two years later in Dubai at COP 28, I watched Mr. Carney headline a panel of private equity investors.  Private equity types (like Mr. Carney’s expected appointment for Ambassador to the US, Mark Wiseman, ex-BlackRock) are famously rapacious.  Now the talk was of “hundreds of trillions”, and of the eagerness of said investors to push money out the door to “get things done fast”.  No talk of funding things that wouldn’t make a lot of money back.  So who did one see at that meeting?  All sorts of nuclear energy people – they’re always ready to soak up a few hundreds of billions of dollars to pursue their fantasies.  Bent Flyvbjerg’s database (see above) shows that big projects’ risks of failure are not evenly distributed  like a bell curve around their initial estimates, “plus or minus 25%” or the like.  The curve is not normally distributed at all, and failures are mostly way out in what he calls the “fat tail” off to the right – over 90% of nuclear power projects in his database are many multiples of original cost estimates and take many years more than expected.  This is good stuff for the big money folks, especially if the power the nukes eventually provide is through a public utility that sets prices to cover costs.  Cheap widely distributed power, solar cells on roofs, micro-grids, and the like, are the very opposite – almost all come in on time and on budget because the technology now is like Lego, proven plug-and-play, quick and cheap to deploy, that can produce electrical power at very low marginal cost, with the potential for very low prices.  No wonder the money doesn’t want them.

Mr. Carney’s right hand man, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson, by coincidence another Goldman Sachs banker, seems to be the government’s chief promoter of nuclear energy – the MOU contains an astonishing agreement that Alberta will produce nuclear power (not wind or solar, with which Alberta is hugely endowed) to feed into the BC grid, all to be in place by 2050.  At least, 25 years could be a realistic assessment of how long it might take to actually get power from the much-hyped hypothetical “small”, “modular”, reactors, that are neither small nor modular nor existent anywhere in the world.

Third, the MOU with Alberta is an astonishing backtrack on any number of initiatives designed to reduce Canada’s emissions just a little, enough so that we could credibly pretend that we were serious about climate change.  That’s all gone.   Clean electricity and a move to renewables, the tanker ban, etc., by the board.  Add to that elimination of programs to retrofit housing stock for energy efficiency, incentives for electric vehicles, even repealing laws against the oil companies’ continuing campaigns of misinformation and greenwashing – gone with the wind.   And, to top it all off, a brand new pipeline to sell bitumen to Asia, to boost Canada’s GDP and reduce dependency on American markets.  Bovine fecal matter, the lot of it.

So – Mr. Carney

• knows climate science but acts against its indications and implications,
• understands that world markets are moving away from fossil fuels, but acts like a short term commodities trader,
• understands democracy but acts like a chief executive.

I see three key factors leading to these seemingly contrary positions. All are influenced by Mr. Carney’s training and experiences as a banker, that seem to have eclipsed his advanced training in economics.  Without going too deep into the weeds of jargon, these factors are the discount rate, questions about fixed or variable costs, and inclusion of non-monetary values in estimates.

The  ”discount rate” is used to compare the values of events that happen at different times.  People prefer benefits now to benefits in the future, and we all like to put off costs.  The amount by which we reduce the perceived value of future benefits is called the discount rate.  If the discount rate is low, we value the future relatively highly compared to the present.  If the discount rate is high, the present is seen as much more important.

Fixed costs are costs that don’t vary when uses or output change.  The fixed cost of the TransMountain pipeline, for example, is the $34 billion cost to build it and related infrastructure.  That will not change whether the pipeline is not used at all or is used to maximum capacity.  It’s on the government’s books as an asset, purchased with long-term debt.  But the cost to operate the pipeline depends on how much it used and for what products, hence “variable”.  Businesses and government are stuck with the fixed costs, so decisions in the short and medium term consider only variable costs.  Once built and the debt loaded onto the public books, industry will carry on for years pumping gas and oil as long as the price exceeds the variable costs – building pipelines and LNG infrastructure guarantees that they’ll be used even as demand drops and prices decline, way into the future, far past the point that the investment as a whole would be considered feasible.  Hence the bogus claims that Transmountain is “making money” .  Not on your life – it’s making no contribution at all to paying down the debt for the fixed costs of construction.

“Non-monetary values” include many environmental matters, values like safety and security, the costs of social inequities, the immensely distressing way we’re loading more and more of today’s failures on our descendants, etc.  Because things like this do not have clear costs or prices established in a market, various tools are used to estimate them so that, if relevant, they can be included in an evaluation.

OK?  Clearer (I hope) than mud so far?

Here’s how I think these affect Mr. Carney.

I think he calculates like a good banker – short-term, transactional, and all about money.   His banker’s mindset is necessary for political decision-making – it enables rational calculation of monetary costs and benefits, in a short time frame that lines up with election reality.  That means a relatively high “bank” discount rate, so costs and benefits are counted in the near term; calling fixed costs “public investments” without much thought about how the increased debt should be paid for over the long term;  non-monetary values excluded from consideration.

The banker’s point of view may be necessary, but it is nowhere near sufficient[1].

I wish he would think more like a good economist – a low “social” discount rate, all costs fixed and variable included, and a lot of thinking about social effects. That requires, at least, a longer time horizon to include effects on people who are not only not this term’s voters, but people generations hence; all costs fixed and variable in every assessment; calculations including numerous costs and benefits that are non-monetary and difficult to quantify.

I do think Mr. Carney and Danielle Smith of Alberta are making bad decisions that will generate undesirable consequences.  That does not mean I accuse them of acting immorally or unethically.  I think each is trapped by circumstances only partly of their own making, constrained by their training (as a banker or as a talk-show host), pinned in the unnatural short electoral cycle of party politics, and trying to do their best for the people who support them.

I do wish they and other politicians could break out of those boxes to consider a longer time frame, a more inclusive accounting, and a much broader set of interests.  Then, perhaps, they might properly be able to see climate change and financial and inter-generational inequities as problems to be solved to the benefit of all, not just troublesome factors that interfere with the pursuit of ever-growing wealth for their allies and supporters.

And I do wish they would listen just a little more to Elizabeth May.  I’m obviously biased, but I have observed a lot of Canadian politicians for a lot of years, and there is simply no one like her – profoundly concerned for the public good, immensely knowledgeable about how parliament is supposed to operate, amazingly diligent and so smart in her work on legislation, a valued colleague to so many in the House, and the most accurate repository of knowledge about the past fifteen years of Canadian government.  She is the best asset Parliament has.  More power to her, says I.

[1] Aristotle was on to this, 2300 years ago.

He thought of “oikonomia”, our “economics”, as the art and science of acquiring the necessary elements for the needs of the people and the state.  The word “eco-nomics” comes from “ecos” meaning “home”, and “nomos” meaning “management”.  Likewise, the word “eco-logy” comes from “ecos” and “logos” meaning “logic, or rules”.  So economics and ecology are simply different aspects of the necessary work to live well in our home the earth.  Not opposed, but complementary.  I believe this to be economics in the truest and best sense.

On the other hand, Aristotle despised the mere accumulation of wealth for its own sake. For instance, an ever-growing GDP as a goal into and of itself.  This he considered unnatural, unlimited, and opposed to the good of the people and the polis.  Perhaps we might think of this as banking at its crudest.

signing off, John Kidder

WOW.. imagine that my husband says such complimentary things (lucky me to have such support!) .. and I have to say I end up being so upset with Mark Carney that I do use words like unethical. But John is right. This insight that he is a banker first and not a very good economist makes sense to me. and I hope to you. As he creeps ever closer to a majority government, recruiting Conservatives to join his increasingly conservative LiberaIs, I hope and pray we can hold him to the minority parliament decided in the last election.

In the meantime, I hope to see many Green friends at 4 pm today for “it’s a Wonderful Life!” at the Star cinema… in which the moral man of principle, played by Jimmy Stewart, trying to hold body and soul together running a small credit union,  takes on the greedy banker, played by Lionel Barrymore.

In closing, I have added some of my work this week found in links in the P.S. and another call for signatures for the Peace Charter petition,

Many thanks for all you support, until next Sunday!

love
Elizabeth

P.S.

Press Conference: Press Conference: Elizabeth May Provides End-of-Session Update on Key Legislation, Federal Budget Developments, and Emerging U.S. Security Policy | Elizabeth May

Explainer on Bitumen and Dilbit: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSIY5X8kRJu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Peace Charter: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-6869

The post Good Sunday Morning! Issue #298 appeared first on Elizabeth May.