Sharon Labchuk may be a prominent environmental activist and leader of the Green Party of PEI, but she never planned a life in the public eye. As a teenager she dreamt about living close to Nature in the Canadian wilderness. But as it became clear to her that Na ture was fast disappearing and toxic chemicals were polluting the planet, she felt compelled to do something about it.
Born in Trenton, Ontario to an Air Force father and Island mother, Sharon has lived in communities across Canada and abroad. After leaving university to pursue her dream of living off the land, Sharon worked in Alberta to save money for land. When her community was threatened with the construction of a sour gas pipeline, she was launched into the world of environmental activism.
As the single parent of two small children, Sharon returned to PEI in the late 1980s to settle down in what she thought would be a safe place to raise children. Although she had concerns about pesticide contamination of the Island’s groundwater, she imagined she could find some place “away” from it. It turned out to be bad timing.
The Liberal government of the day subsidized a massive increase in potato production, transforming the Island into an industrial monoculture. Forests and hedgerows were clearcut, and the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers skyrocketed, poisoning rivers, groundwater, air and soil.
Sharon co-founded an environmental organization and began working to raise awareness and make change. Through this work, she realized activism alone would not bring the planet back from the brink as long as the political parties espousing endless economic growth and the liquidation of Nature continued to get elected. Instead of pressuring government, it was time to BE government. With the environment a top political issue and sensing Canadians were ready to vote for a new political party, one completely different from the traditional parties, Sharon joined the Green Party of Canada and ran in the 2004 and 2006 federal elections in Malpeque. Greens were being elected to thousands of seats around the globe in local, regional, national and international parliaments.
The following years were devoted to helping elect Canada’s first Green Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May. Sharon held various positions in the federal Green Party, from environment and agriculture critic and co-chair of shadow cabinet, to campaign manager for Elizabeth May’s leadership bid and her by-election run in London North Centre in 2006. She is currently the Party’s national Director of Organizing.
Just ahead of the 2007 provincial election, Sharon and her daughter Camille collected the signatures required to found the Green Party of PEI. In that election, she led the PEI Greens to a historic third place finish, behind the Liberals and Conservatives, on a platform promoting organic agriculture and uncontaminated air and drinking water.
Over the years, Sharon has worked on campaigns involving the Charlottetown garbage incinerator, land protection, GMOs, pesticides, biofuel, clearcutting and groundwater contamination both at the local and national level. In the early 1990’s she started the first curbside blue box recycling program on the Island, organized compost programs in schools, built a compost demonstration site in Victoria Park and started community native tree nurseries.
For the past 15 years Sharon has focused on agriculture and environment issues, specifically the havoc wreaked by industrial agriculture. Her work linking agricultural pesticides and fertilizers to human and environmental health is featured in documentary films and books, including the National Film Board documentary Something in the Air, W-Five, and Secret Ingredients: The brave new world of industrial farming by Stuart Laidlaw. A controversial portrait of Sharon in a barren potato field, naked but for a gas mask and long flowing hair draping her body, was included in Womankind: Faces of change around the world, a book of photographs and essays about women activists. The stark image made its way across the country in newspapers and magazines, shining a much-needed spotlight on the most intensively sprayed province in Canada. Unknown assailants retaliated against Sharon for some years by dumping buckets of crushed beer bottles along her lane, puncturing tires, cutting trees to fall on her power lines, and cutting the ground wire to her house. Industry and government attempted to discredit her at every opportunity, but the attacks only confirmed she was successfully rocking the boat and inspired her to keep on.
In 2003, she tackled Bayer and Syngenta, two of the biggest pesticide corporations on the planet, as well as some lawn spray companies. She accused them, through the Auditor General of Canada’s environmental petition process, of breaking the law by claiming their pesticides were safe and environmentally friendly. They were found guilty and ordered to stop illegally advertising their poisons.
Sharon lives in Millvale in a solar house in the midst of an upland hardwood forest where she grows much of her own food and keeps bees. Influenced by the Deep Ecologyphilosophy that says all life on Earth has inherent value independent of its usefulness to humans, she lives simply, always aiming for a lower material standard of living coupled with an increased quality of life, stressing that, “an economic system based on greed and constant growth has brought humankind and Nature to the very brink of collapse. A steady state green economy based on equality and need, not greed, is our best chance to avert the crash we’re headed for”.
