MONCTON – While Federal Progressive Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer held his town hall in Fredericton Monday night, Green Party leader Elizabeth May had hers in Moncton, and she struck a very different tone on energy development and job creation issues.

“As the federal elections loom, we wanted to get out and hear the concerns of Canadians from coast to coast,” May said in an interview with Huddle before the town hall. “And kind of remind people that the Green Party really is, this time around, going to elect a lot of MPs, and you might want to consider us.”

More than 60 people attended the town hall at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre Monday night. May was accompanied on stage by Kent North MLA Kevin Arseneau, who was elected in 2018.

The Green Party has been gaining ground in the Maritimes. It won three seats in New Brunswick’s 2018 election and Corporate Research Associates’ polling numbers from December show nearly as many P.E.I. voters would choose a Green party candidate as a Liberal candidate.

“I feel really strongly that we can elect Greens in all the Maritime provinces for sure. So, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I. will be a focus of attention in the 2019 campaign,” May said. “We haven’t had a provincial breakthrough in Nova Scotia yet, but I feel that we really have enough momentum from P.E.I and New Brunswick that we can elect people in Nova Scotia. I’m really hoping for a breakthrough in Quebec.”

She said voters are slowly getting out of the perception that voting Green would be a waste. And May said her own election in 2011 had opened the door for other Greens to get into the legislatures – in British Columbia, New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Ontario.

“The more that Greens get elected, the more that Greens will get elected,” she said.

With both the Tories and Liberals having leaders that aren’t as “polarizing” as Stephen Harper, and the likelihood that new parties like Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada would split the conservative vote, May said people will have the opportunity to vote for what they want; not just to oust the current leader as many did in 2015. Meanwhile, she says the NDP has been having a tough time transitioning from Thomas Mulcair’s leadership to that of Jagmeet Singh.

“The stars are aligning really nicely for people to be able to vote Green and elect Green and feel good about it,” May said. “I’m really hoping that we’ll have more Green seats across the country, but I definitely see Greens federally come from the Maritimes.”

Town Hall Discussions

At the town hall, members of the public expressed “panic” about the state of the world’s environment today.

Climate change has been more prominent as an issue globally, with teenagers’ protests in Europe grabbing headlines. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s speech at a UN climate change conference last year, where she called out world leaders for their weak climate leadership, went viral.

But some attendees of the town hall said conveying climate science has been difficult and May agreed, saying she’s trying to find the best way to spread the message on climate change.

May also took questions on other issues, including jobs, American politics, arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the BDS movement.

When it comes to economic development, fracking is a “no go” and fossil fuels should stay in the ground, May said. Instead, Maritime provinces should focus on building the tourism industry, which is made up of mostly small businesses, she said.

She’ll continue pushing for bill C-258, which would require the government to analyze the impact of policies and regulations on small businesses.

“Small business is Canada’s biggest employer by far. And small, independently owned businesses create the jobs and pay the taxes and really sometimes get overlooked by big policy shifts,” she said.

May also said the “social cohesion in communities that holds us together” is highly valuable, but often left out of economic equations. She said the government can either get out of the way or provide support to communities that want to localize their power sources and food.

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May said her party also plans to develop a strategy to allow people to work in their own communities if they choose to do so. As the economy shifts away from fossil fuels, she said workers would need the support to transition to a greener economy, which would include more electric vehicles.

“The employment generator is going to be the retrofitting of all our buildings to have high energy efficiency standards, better insulations and democratizing our sources of energy through communities, individual homes, with their own solar panels in their roofs, their own windmill nearby,” she said.

The Green Party is also pushing for a national pharmacare programming, ending tuition for post-secondary education, guaranteed livable income, and reconciliation.

May held a closed session with students at Mt. Allison University in Sackville on Monday afternoon. She continues her tour with stops in Charlottetown, Fredericton, Pictou and Halifax.