Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has wound down a controversial working relationship with former Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella, saying, “He’s finished whatever work he was doing with us.”

The limited-run arrangement, which seems to have involved Kinsella setting up a quick-response unit for the Greens, had drawn huge criticism inside and outside Green Party ranks.

At issue was whether May could be serious about elevating the tone of politics while simultaneously throwing in her lot with a pundit/strategist more famous for burning bridges than building them — or, as Kinsella himself boasts in the biography on his blog, who “can be useful in a stick-swinging, bench-clearing brawl.”

Kinsella didn’t reply to a request to confirm or elaborate on this development but he did post on Twitter this week about his Green involvement and he wrote in the past tense. “I was delighted to help set up the Green Party’s quick-response capacity,” Kinsella tweeted.

May is also talking now in the past tense about an alliance that lit up social media with charges that the Greens were selling out to the more cynical side of politics.

“He was setting up this room for us,” May told me in an interview on Tuesday. (The Green leader won’t use the popular parlance of “war room.”) “I’m grateful for his help in setting it up and he's wishing us well, but he’s not physically working in our shop. He’s not working for us.”

Read more:

In politics, old friendships can cost you dearly

Green rift opens over federal party’s stance on Alberta’s oilsands

Canadian voters give low marks to federal party leaders, poll finds

The Green Party’s national campaign manager, Jonathan Dickie, said Kinsella had asked him to respond to the Star on this issue, and the message was the same, up to and including the use of the past tense. “Warren was hired to set up our quick response team. He's done that. His Daisy Group colleague Tom Henheffer, who has worked on many war room campaigns with Warren, will be running the team.”

Is that the end of it then? Perhaps, with regard to that particular campaign operative, but May is going to be asked again and again in the coming election how much she is willing to compromise her principles for practical politics. That’s really what this controversy was about.

As Greens set their sights on being more than a symbolic presence in the Commons, with more than their current two MPs, seasoned voters will wonder what they’re willing to do to become real players in Parliament.

It’s an age-old story in politics, in Canada and beyond: the closer you get to power or influence, the more you have to play the game, no matter how much you insist you won’t. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he of the sunny ways and promises of sweeping electoral reform in 2015, is going to face a lot of similar questions as he campaigns for re-election.

May herself is going to be one of the people reminding Canadians of how Trudeau has changed in four years. She sat on the committee that studied electoral reform before Trudeau summarily announced in early 2017 that he couldn’t keep his promise.

“The promise was broken in a spectacularly brutal, uninformed fashion and, and was extremely cavalier,” May said, even now. On the climate-change issue, too, she added, Trudeau has been a letdown.

While it’s no excuse, really, Trudeau had only been leader for a couple of years when he was making all those promises in 2015 to do politics differently. May doesn’t have that luxury — she’s headed the Greens since 2006 and for as long as she’s been leader, she’s preached that politics doesn’t have to be a dark art. I’ve often said that her points of order raised after Question Period should be published as a handbook in the dreadful theatre of federal politics, an itemized account of the ridiculous things May witnesses from way up in the back benches.

She said to me this week that she remains sure she won’t be drawn into the dark side, that she won’t run attack ads or even fall back into the rote habit of repeating talking points — another tactic Trudeau took up after coming to power.

She reminded me that to “tell the truth all the time” was her first promise on taking up the Green leadership 13 years ago.

“That’s still my goal. I’ve not changed,” she said. But she admits that telling the truth can sometimes make things awkward for her team, especially when listeners or her rivals add their own spin to her replies. It’s happening a lot more now in 2019 than it did in any of the previous three elections in which she’s run as leader.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Still, May says she does recognize that if Greens are surging these days, gaining a foothold in provincial legislatures, gathering new support in polls and by-elections, a lot of it rests on her reputation as the non-political politician — the “none of the above” choice.

“So yes, it sometimes means I’ll say something and actually answer a question,” she said. “I will keep doing that because I think that’s what voters want.”

By the same token, the limited-term relationship with Kinsella would indicate that May is sensitive these days to what potential Green voters don’t want as well.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

Read more about: