“I have not written him off, like a lot of my friends in the environmental community, but his government is doing a lousy job on a lot of files.”

The words are directed at Justin Trudeau. They come from the Queen of Green, Elizabeth May. Their meaning is clear: It may not be Hurricane Irma, but Trudeau will be facing a storm surge of his own when Parliament resumes in a week’s time. The Liberal clothesline is beginning to sag under the weight of two years of, if not dirty, then decidedly unfinished, laundry.

But becoming disappointed in someone takes time. That is especially true when your strong inclination is to like them. And that, in a nutshell, describes May’s complicated relationship with the prime minister. May likes Trudeau. She also wants him to be successful — though in a direct way, that is against her own party’s political interest.

Where other political rivals and former supporters have denounced the prime minister as an outright liar for broken promises, people like David Suzuki and Grand Chief Phillip Stewart, May understates her disenchantment: “I remain confident that he could be better.”

A lovely euphemism, spoken like the girl who once attended Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Someone devoid of schadenfreude, with charity in her heart, a soul who lives in hope. So for a time, May attributed to others Trudeau’s ostensible dishonesty on policy matters, that growing gulf between promises and performance.

Topping the list of people who may have “misguided” Trudeau are the Harper-era bureaucrats — Canada’s very own ‘dark government.’ Many of them remain embedded in the public service that Trudeau inherited. May thinks some of these remaindering bureaucrats are still wedded to Harper policies and advise Trudeau’s ministers accordingly. Making the influence of these Harper holdovers even greater, Trudeau made a priority of restoring the public service’s lost independence under Harper.

And there is also the issue for the Green Party leader of individual cabinet ministers, rather than the PM, who may be taking the government off track. May believes that Trudeau is also trying to restore cabinet government, as opposed to the master-puppeteering from the PMO that characterized the Harper regime.

That means ministers are empowered and make decisions that the PM later wears. I asked May to rate some of these independent ministers, environment minister Catherine McKenna, and Transportation minister Marc Garneau.

Both are dealing with the file May has mastered like no one else. The Trudeau government put out a discussion paper this past summer to publicly consult on a wide range of issues touching the environment. With May, it went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Her report card on McKenna and Garneau is telling.

“Well Catherine’s gotta…it depends on the file, overall I’d give her, oh boy, her performance in Paris was an A, her performance since, a C.

As for Garneau, he supported my 400 amendments to Harper’s omnibus legislation and the 24-hours of non-stop voting that triggered. But if they go forward with their discussion paper proposals on many environmental files — liquified natural gas, navigable waters, the NEB, it would be an F for Marc.

“I honestly do not understand how they can legislate along the lines of the discussion paper.”

The discussion paper itself seems bogus to May, though it clearly demonstrates the government’s obsession with marketing.

“I’m pretty sophisticated as an environmental lawyer. I had to read it several times over to recognize how bad it is — all arrows, and bullets and bull. It was a branding exercise. It talked about ‘lifecycle agencies’. There are no such things. It was all bogus marketing language — more creative than Harper, but used to defend Harper policies.”

May has noticed two other things with mounting concern. First, the Trudeau government seems to be governing by consultation, which is what it promised to do. But the Green Party leader thinks it is not necessarily consulting in good faith.

Indeed, scratch a little deeper and May will tell you she thinks Trudeau is offering a mere show of inclusiveness before his government does whatever it wants — which is all to often to retain Harper-era policies. The proof? The government has repeatedly disregarded the advice of the very expert panels it established, nullifying months of work.

Is it all window-dressing?

“I have to say, I was part of massive consultations on electoral reform, and on Day One of our report, it was spectacularly trashed by the government. We’ve seen a sea of consultations in which their promises are sinking below the consultations. I have deep concern there is a pattern here. Baffle people through the consultation process, this meat-grinder consultation process of theirs. By not doing things like restoring protections to Canada’s inland waterways that were removed by Harper, they are saying, in big letters, ‘We are not what you thought we were. We are Harper Light.’ ”

Nowhere is that charge more convincingly made than in the way the Trudeau government has rejected the advice of its expert panel to get the National Energy Board out of the business of doing environmental assessments. While campaigning, Trudeau promised that no project would go forward under the old assessment process. That was because the Harper government had turned the NEB into a creature of the energy industry. The new PM quickly broke his word in a string of decisions.

“There can’t be any public trust after that. If you don’t have a proper environmental assessment agency, you turn the NEB into a corporate escort service. None of what the Liberals have done here is consistent with their previous votes in Opposition. I’m still hoping that Trudeau’s own cabinet ministers will ask this question: who let this lousy discussion paper out there in June. ‘Let’s go back and give Canadians what they want, and what got us elected.’”

And if they don’t?

May thinks that key elements of the coalition that swept the Liberals into power, youth voters, First Nations peoples, Harper-weary NDPers, and environmentalists will begin to unravel.

The fraying is already underway on the West Coast. Pipelines and Paris don’t wash with a lot of British Columbians. It’s one or other. Neither does Ottawa’s continuing support, through DFO, of fish-farming that endangers wild salmon. This position flies in the face of the promise to follow the recommendations of the $36-million Cohen Report that looked into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River. Nor a string of dubious Trudeau-government endorsements of mega-projects that assault the environment: the ruinous Site C Dam on the Peace River, Kinder Morgan, and two massive LNG projects that were green-lighted under Harper-era assessment rules. This despite Trudeau’s campaign promise to do otherwise.

Petronas has since withdrawn from its Pacific Northwest LNG project, which would have been the largest climate polluter in Canadian history according to Aaron Hill, executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. But Woodfibre LNG is still in the works, thanks to a 40-year export permit granted by the NEB under the Trudeau Liberals. May has personally witnessed the public rage from her perch as the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands.

“There is powerful anger in British Columbia over these betrayals. There is also powerful anger over breaking their promise on electoral reform. In electoral terms they will definitely suffer for all that. They will pay and pay dearly in the loss of BC seats.”

At one point, May believed the Liberals were “pretty receptive” to her advice. She still does, but with an important qualifier.

“Yes, receptive still, but much more at the very beginning. It is indiscreet to say, but there is now a diminishing return on the investment.”

It is to be expected that the remains of the Harper Party under Andrew Scheer will batter the government at every opportunity, fuelled by issues like Bill Morneau’s dubious tax reforms, and the payout to Omar Khadr. The Conservatives don’t want the Trudeau government to succeed. And they are the Official Opposition. That’s understood.

Also understood is the continuing spell cast by Trudeau over most Canadians, though his next two years will not be nearly as easy as the first two, when both opposition parties have struggled through leadership races.

It’s when the people who want you to shine begin to seriously question your path and your principles, the last thing you want to do is shrug.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.