May

Elizabeth May, Order of Canada recipient and prominent environmental activist, is the new leader of the Green Party of Canada. Ms. May, 52, won the leadership at the party’s convention in Ottawa on Aug. 26 and announced later that she intends to run for a Cape Breton seat in the next federal election. Ms. May, an Anglican, was executive director of the Sierra Club for 17 years; she became active in the environmental movement in the 1970s when she led the legal battle to put an end to insecticide spraying near her Cape Breton home. In 2002, she participated in a 17-day hunger strike on Parliament Hill to focus attention on the plight of residents near the contaminated coal tar ponds in Sydney, N.S.  Environmentalism, she once said, is “fundamentally a spiritual issue.”