For a party with no seats in Parliament, we sure do hear a lot about the Greens.
The latest story is that a "secret" post-mortem memo written by party leader Elizabeth May has leaked and contains some pretty nasty and damning stuff. (Before I even get to the content, this party has nearly as many leaks as the erstwhile McCain campaign, which is, again, astounding considering that they won 6% of the national vote. I had not seen this story from mid-September until I googled "Green Party memo" today.)
In the memo, May says the party was "cearly unprepared" for the federal election campaign and that it felt like she was "flying by the seat of her pants" a lot of the time. She also claims (shockingly) that there was no campaign strategy document beforehand and that there were no campaign strategy calls during the campaign. However, she does manage to credit what success the party had to herself, writing: "We dominated the first week in the protest over my exclusion from the debates. The second wave was our national leaders ‘whistle-stop' (train) tour." Maybe most galling in its naked self-congratulation, she writes, "My personal popularity with the Canadian electorate is something, speaking as objectively as possible, that the Green party needs."
I'd say, speaking as objectively as possible, that this memo proves, if nothing else, that Elizabeth May is a windbag and certainly not fit to be the leader of a national party (or a local neighbourhood group). If there was no campaign strategy, whose responsibility should it be to make sure one is created (even belatedly), if not the leader's? If she couldn't win a seat in Central Nova (at one point in the memo she laments, "Can we have any kind of decision that the leader winning in her seat is a top priority?"), whose responsibility is it to make sure that she's in a winnable riding, if not the leader's? Leadership can be many things, and certainly no party leader in modern politics can do everything themselves and be successful, but leadership is certainly about fostering an environment for success. And leadership is certainly not throwing the team under the bus when things have gone awry with no sense of responsbility. What an astounding lack of humilty, thoughtfulness and grace.
I was once told by someone who worked with May at Sierra that she was pretty awful to work for at times - full of ego and not prepared to take responsibility for failure, only success. Looks like she hasn't learned much from her foray into politics just yet.
