Vanity is a corrosive emotion that rots you from the inside out. In the pursuit of attention and importance we are capable of doing some pretty hideous things and making some pretty monstrous decisions. Say, forming an alliance with anti-semites.
As one of Elizabeth May's most consistent critics, people often share with me stories of her insatiable, incessant desire to be — as was once said of Teddy Roosevelt — "the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." How she never misses an opportunity to boast her own awards and accomplishments, how she interrupts conversations to share pearls of wisdom no one asked for, how she soaks up praise like a sponge but turns to ice at even the mildest criticism. The press has endlessly indulged all this by playing along with May's fantasy that she's a serious contender for prime minister — including her in debates and plastering her face alongside the real candidates in newspaper and television graphics — and the political class has too, affording her the dignities and privileges of a "party leader," most recently with a seat on the Prime Minister's electoral reform committee, even though she does not qualify as such by parliamentary law. It's become one of those truisms Ottawa-types repeat endlessly and thoughtlessly that May is a woman of enormous principle, a compliment delivered out of ignorant charity because she seems fringe, harmless, and needy, though much of her public life has been in the service of causes that are crankish, false, and dangerous.
In a quest for attention and power, Elizabeth May took over the useless Green Party of Canada and sought to turn it into a powerful force capable of making her prime minister. This presented a dilemma, however: the Greens were a center-left, environment-focused party and Canada already had two of those. May's solution was clever, and involved rebranding the Greens away from its boring founding mandate and into an all-purpose movement for people on the fringe of Canadian political life, those too stupid or crazy to respect the facts and boundaries that govern adult politics — paranoids, extremists, conspiracy theorists of all flavors, and yes, anti-semites. Upon election as an MP, May vowed to put even climate change aside and focus on being an advocate for "democracy" — a vague mandate upon which anyone could (and did) project their fantasies.
People of my generation know anti-semitism as a primarily liberal phenomenon, a byproduct of progressives' increasing hostility to Israel and the rise of 9/11 Trutherism on the extreme left, a conspiratorial movement that lazily draws from existing anti-Semitic tropes to flesh out its nonsense. As an underexploited resource, May has offered this faction all manner of dogwhistles in an opportunistic effort to power her ambition with their crazed energy — a candidate here, a petition to parliament there — while assuming she could ultimately control the loons. Last week headlines were made over the fact that a perennial Green Party candidate from Alberta, Monika Schaefer, was a Holocaust denier, and subsequent investigation on my part has revealed that May, despite her public claims of being "shocked," actually knew about Schaefer's anti-Semitism for years, but was apparently convinced the problem could be managed.
It now appears May's decade of strategic appeasement has simply resulted in the inmates running the asylum. Despite her wishes, the Green Party membership passed an official policy of "BDS" — boycott, disinvestment, and sanction — against the nation of Israel at their convention this week, and though not all supporters of the BDS agenda are anti-semites, the recent history of the party offers little reason to believe the motion was embraced for calm and rational reasons. The fact the party had originally been intending to debate another motion — thankfully watered down by May — to unilaterally and exclusively revoke the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund should leave little ambiguity.
I doubt Elizabeth May is personally an anti-semite. Her horror at what is unfolding within her own party seems genuine, and if she resigns her leadership over it — as reporters say she is contemplating — it will reflect well on her as a woman of at least some principle. Yet for this gothic downfall she has only the mirror to blame. Her vain quest for immediate power on nobody's terms but her own necessitated becoming the bride of convenience to some truly vile people. The death of her career should find few willing to mourn.
Written by J.J McCullough
