Canada Green Party staff photoshop image of leader holding reusable cup
Canada’s Green Party leader is “shocked” that her team altered an image to remove a compostable disposable cup from her hands and replace it with a reusable plastic one featuring the party’s logo.
In a statement, Elizabeth May said despite the “misstep by well-meaning” staff, she hopes that “people can believe that in the original photo there is nothing I would have hidden”.
The original image shows Ms May posing for a photograph at a market while holding a compostable cup. The doctored image replaces the cup with a plastic one, with the Green Party logo across the front, and topped with a metal straw.
Ms May said: “My personal daily practice is to avoid single use plastic items 100 per cent of the time. I never drink from plastic water bottles. I always carry my own reusable coffee cup. I carry my own bamboo utensils. I walk the talk every day.”
The party launched its 2019 election platform earlier this month with an emphasis on progressive ecological and social change, including combatting climate change, “the lens through which every policy envelope in the platform is viewed”, Ms May said in a statement.
Party officials also have pushed the government to ban single-use plastics. Less than 10 per cent of plastic used in the country is recycled, according to a government statement, and Canadians will have tossed an estimated $11 billion worth of plastics every year by 2030.
In June, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to ban most single-use plastics by 2021, which he called a “problem we simply can’t afford to ignore”. Later that month, Mr Trudeau was photographed with plastic utensils scattered on a table during a meeting.
Political airbrushing and photo manipulation have long been used to change the meaning of seemingly benign or controversial images, from Stalin's infamous removal of Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev by Soviet censors from a Lenin speech in 1920, to the contemporary rise in deepfakes and hoax images used as political propaganda on social media.
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