by Elizabeth May

After reading Mulcair’s Strength of Conviction and Trudeau’s Common Ground, it seemed fitting to end my excursion into political memoirs with May’s Who We Are. (It would appear as though I have a glaring omission with no Harper book, but I suppose it’s hard to read something that doesn’t exist.) Where the Mulcair and Trudeau books are easy to compare, May’s is a different beast entirely. While she does delve into personal experience to explain how she got here and why she has certain beliefs, she does so much more, offering evidence and the opinions of experts to further buttress these beliefs.

With Who We Are, May takes us on a journey through Canadian political history. She starts us off with her first forays into politics, expressing how things used to be, democratically, economically, and environmentally. She then shows how everything slowly began to fall apart, following Mulroney’s ousting, but especially after the Harper government came into being. No longer is Canada respected on an international stage; no longer do we have a robust economy; no longer do we even pretend to care about leaving a clean world with a stable climate to our children; no longer can politicians properly represent their constituents. In addition to angry-ing up the blood, May offers hopeful suggestions for us to work together to get Canada back on track, coming across as highly intelligent and by far the most genuine of the leaders.

If writing prowess was the sole factor in determining who deserves my vote the most, then May would definitely be the standout winner there. In fact, if party policy or performance in a debate were such determining factors, she’d have my vote as well. With that said, it’s sad to think that the Green Party doesn’t even have a shot in hell to win this election. There must be something fundamentally wrong with our current system in Canada when I have no possible way of delivering my favourite candidate to the PMO.