Elizabeth May, the leader of the righteous and totally unelectable Green Party, has written several books. One of them is Global Warming for Dummies. Embarrassing? Among the others is the trenchant and succinct guide to activism, How to Save the World in Your Spare Time, which provides instructions on organizing and promoting a cause. Unacademic and unpretentious, May’s book lays it out simply, with end-of-chapter tips on the elemental methods of action and activism.

Though May has been involved in or privy to an impressive amount of political action, most of the personal anecdotes read as dorky war stories, grown-up band camp tales peppered with celeb name-drops. (Sting! Gordon Lightfoot! David Suzuki!) May misses the opportunity to mine her enviable, ninja-cool professional experience for good stories. Elizabeth May is for real, though.

Jack Layton’s book Homelessness (one of three he’s published) is a complete and detailed outline of homelessness and poverty in Canada. Layton writes like he talks, for the most part. The book reads dramatic, but usefully dramatic, and is also pointedly mournful.

Layton favours a circuitous and repetitive style, so that the narrative folds in and over itself several times, until you ostensibly really understand that homelessness is bad. Layton writes, “But they didn’t stop for him. Not that night. Not ever again.” The story — of a homeless man’s winter death on the streets of downtown Toronto and how it catalyzed new policy ideas — is worth telling, but anyone cracking Homelessness by Jack Layton is probably already on board.

Stéphane Dion is a squirrelly guy with a Kermit voice, so it’s pretty great that he called his book Straight Talk. Aside from the title, I know nothing of his literary efforts, because I couldn’t find the book over a few days of searching.

There are lots of books about Stephen Harper, but nothing authored by him. Yet. Harper has been working on a book for a few years; CBC News reported that Harper’s book concerns “aspects of early professional hockey in the city of Toronto.” 

In 2006, Harper contributed an article to the Toronto Star with the headline “Long before Leafs, T.O. had a team to call its own.” Harper is the most able stylist of all the party leaders, but he writes with an icy sterility. The short, elegant and bloodless article about hockey’s early years is devoid of sports metaphors, a common habit of non-writers reaching for gravitas, but Harper indulges both cliché (“Toronto hockey fans weren’t buying the OHA line”) and accidental stylistic recurrences (like “So...” and “So...”).

Writing about sports like they matter is either a straight-up weird or laughably ironic move for the anti-arts prime minister. On Sept. 20, 2008, The Globe and Mail reported that Harper told reporters he’d need “three months of uninterrupted time” to complete the book. Any chance his literary ambitions could overtake his political ones?

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