Sixteen years ago, Elizabeth May, now at the helm of the federal Green Party, asked a famous Canadian writer to be the godfather of her newborn daughter.
Farley Mowat now admits he hasn't brought his spiritual charge any closer to the Lord, but he did give her some good advice: Don't be an activist.
"Your mother," he says he told the girl when she was still a toddler, "can be the activist for the entire Western world. But we need an observer in contact with her."
According to Mr. Mowat, young Victoria Cate May Burton has heeded his advice. "She became the observer. And that is what she is."
In fact, he and many others say that, although she has just had her 16th birthday, she does much more than watch her high-flying mother.
As Ms. May prepares to lead the Greens into her first federal election and personally tries to evict Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay from his Nova Scotia bastion, her daughter is playing an important - and somewhat unusual - role in her mother's life.
A close look at their relationship reveals much about both the activist (before entering politics, Ms. May spent 17 years as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and took part in almost every major environmental battle) and her observer, a remarkable young woman whom Mr. Mowat suggests has almost reversed roles with her 53-year-old mother.
"She is the one who is responsible and protective," he says from his home on Cape Breton Island. "Elizabeth is like the eye of the tornado. Everywhere she goes, everything is in a swirl, confusion and chaos. She brings it with her.
"But at the centre of this mad, whirling-dervish act there is this cool character - and that is Victoria Cate."
QUICK OFF THE MARK
Slight in stature, with dark hair and clear skin, Ms. Burton turned 16 last month. She was just two weeks old when her mother took her along while lobbying a federal cabinet minister and just two years old when she was in the Oval Office to meet then-president Bill Clinton.
Now, she possesses something that Mr. Mowat (who has known her mother since they fought the spraying of Cape Breton's spruce budworm in the 1970s) says inspired him to create a new word. "She has such a wonderful coolth," he says.
After attending private schools for most of her life, she will enter Grade 11 next month in a creative writing and literary arts program at Canterbury High, the so-called Fame school for artistic kids in Ottawa.
She is well-read (Salman Rushdie is a favourite author), recently won a provincewide public-speaking contest in French and, in her spare time, writes short fiction and poetry.
How mature is she? Unlike more rebellious teens, she has yet to come home drunk or stoned. Her only sins seem to be the mess in her room and a tendency to misplace things, such as keys and clothes.
Mr. Mowat, 85, says she has no need to rebel:
"This is one of the things that is a little bit scary about her. She seems almost unassailable. I wouldn't have the first idea of how to go about trying to seduce her - if I was that kind of guy."
For as long as Ms. Burton can remember, she and her mother have lived in a modest home on the fringe of Ottawa's posh Rockcliffe Park.
It has four storeys and five bedrooms overflowing with environmental-assessment reports, family pictures, a doll collection (belonging to Ms. May) and the odd dustball, along with Spunky, an eight-year-old Shih Tzu with attitude and a sleek white cat named Rosie Amelia Isabelle Odette.
Ms. May co-owns the home with Ms. Burton's father, Ian Burton, a climate scientist who lives in Toronto and stays out of the limelight.
Although never married, the two lived together until their daughter was 2 and still vacation together, along with the 72-year-old Mr. Burton's children and grandchildren from another relationship. (Ms. Burton has a niece and five nephews, with another en route.)
COMMUNAL LIVING
Female tenants, most of them involved in the environmental movement, help to pay the mortgage and the living arrangements are very communal. All the residents are vegetarians who take turns cooking and have dinner together in the spacious kitchen. Ms. Burton loves to cook, whipping together leftovers into one big dish.
Also, again unlike many kids her age, she has no curfew. When her mother is in town, she tends to stay home so they can spend time together. Otherwise, she can come and go as she pleases, as long as Ms. May knows where she is.
Are there no drawbacks to having a high-profile parent?
"When I was young," Ms. Burton says of her mother, "there would be times when I wished she had more time to spend with me, and there were times I was worried about her because she was stressed. But I realized early on that the work that my mom was doing was really important."
As is her new role: "With the political situation we have now, I think it's really important that she take on [Prime Minister Stephen]Harper."
Ms. Burton does her bit, helping to keep "Mommy" on schedule. She reminds Ms. May that she is about to be late for a television appearance - but can't keep from rolling her eyes because she feels that sometimes her mother is just too open when talking to the media. She follows the press coverage and also gets upset with what she considers spin and speculation.
STORMY WEATHER
And there has been no shortage of controversy of late. The deal Ms. May struck with Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who agreed not to run a candidate against her in Central Nova, provoked the New Democrats to ridicule her for being so crafty even though she claims to have a different approach to politics.
And her crack that the Conservative government's climate-change policy is worse than "Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis" also drew much fire.
More recently, she caused some grief within her own party when a media report suggested that she was going broke trying to make ends meet on the $50,000 a year the Greens pay her.
She said later that it was all a misunderstanding and she is happy with her salary. But Ms. Burton says with a laugh that her mother's financing strategy "always seems to be based on the loaves and the fishes.
"There have been times when she has been worried [about money] which is always stressful for kids."
She says they live close to the line but have never starved. Not having a car has helped - not surprisingly, she and her mother worry about their carbon footprint. But getting around far-flung Central Nova on foot is tough, so this week a brand-new, environmentally correct silver Prius arrived at their Nova Scotia home. Ms. May says the Toyota hybrid is the first car she has bought in 30 years.
Her daughter is keen to get her driver's licence so she can act as Ms. May's chauffeur, but remains cool to air travel because of the high carbon emissions. Ms. Burton and her mother flew to Nova Scotia recently only because Via Rail refused to let dog Spunky on board, and she has been researching ways to reach Europe by water, as she may do some eco-friendly travel before going to university.
A friend calls her an "environment Nazi," but she doesn't mind. She even gets on her mother's case, insisting that the two walk rather than take a cab even though Ms. May is in dire need of a hip replacement and uses a cane.
Like Mr. Mowat, she and her mother spend their summers in Cape Breton, living next door to Ms. May's father, John, and brother, Geoffrey. (The elder Mr. May is a military-history buff; a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo takes up much of his main floor, with the second floor devoted to the Confederacy's victory at Chancellorsville in the U.S. Civil War.)
This year, however, they are spending half of their time across the Strait of Canso in New Glasgow, where Ms. May recently bought a home (more creative financing) to give her a base in Central Nova.
Her daughter likes to watch her in action, knocking on doors and talking issues over cups of tea with constituents.
"The person she is in public is very similar to the person she is in private," Ms. Burton says. "She is always honest. She doesn't hide things from me, which is wonderful ...
"She doesn't ever hide her emotions. She is very confident. She loves to talk, she loves to laugh, she loves to entertain people."
As well, she says, her mother is very "connected to her faith and religion." Although not all that religious, Ms. Burton has gone to the same Ottawa church since she was 3 or 4 and "I like the fact that I have a place where everyone knows me. It's nice to have that sense of almost having a cultural connection to people."
A MOTHER'S PERSPECTIVE
For her part, Ms. May concedes that she has an unusual relationship with her daughter.
As well as reminding her of appointments, she relies on her for cooking, cleaning, fetching things when her hip acts up and now even home renovation. (She has spent the summer sprucing up their new home with environmentally correct, clay-based paints.)
Ms. Burton helps out with big decisions too. Ms. May says she would never have run for the Green Party leadership had her daughter not approved.
In fact, she was the first to check out the party website when her mother was considering the move and she was the one who noticed the Greens didn't have a youth wing, something she set about to change.
Ms. May says she has been careful not to indoctrinate her daughter or do anything else that would deny her a childhood. Then again, she has always treated her in an adult manner, and she also feels the years of constant travel have helped Ms. Burton grow up quickly.
"We've always been a super-well-organized as a team," she says, adding that Ms. Burton has developed a great memory and always exhibited "an adult level of concern for the cause."
In the final analysis, she says, their relationship is actually friendship. "Knock on wood, it's the best mother-daughter relationship."
Even so, Mr. Mowat sees things a little differently: "I think her mother believes that she is somehow in the pilot seat, but she also knows in point of fact that the person who is really keeping the plane afloat is Victoria Cate and she appreciates that, understands it and doesn't make an issue of it. She is tremendously dependent upon her daughter.
"This is just not foolish admiration of mother for child. This is a knowledge that the child is somebody rather special and has abilities that the mother doesn't have."
And where will those abilities take her?
Not long ago, when she and her mother were at his house for lunch, Mr. Mowat asked Ms. Burton what she wants to do when she grows up.
"She smiled at me that inscrutable Mona Lisa smile," he recalls, "and said, 'We'll have to see, won't we?' "
HELLO, DALAI
'Carrying a baby around with you is an excellent lobbying tool'
Victoria Cate May Burton isn't fazed by important people, having crossed paths with so many through her mother. For example, Elizabeth May has been a friend of Bill Clinton since he was a student at Yale and met the May family through her Democrat mother.
"He writes my mom nice notes from time to time," Ms. Burton says, "and she really loves him."
But the one person who has truly impressed her is the Dalai Lama. Unlike her mother, she has yet to meet him, but she did hear him speak to a group of 12 in Ottawa when she was in Grade 7.
"He has this kind of presence that is completely happy," she says. "I've never seen anyone with as meaningful a smile, if that makes sense."
Her brushes with greatness began early. When she was three months old, her mother "introduced" her to Paul McCartney. He was in Toronto for a Friends of the Earth concert and Ms. May, on the Friends board, had brought her to an intimate gathering at the Royal York Hotel. Sir Paul was, Ms. May contends, "gobsmacked" by her, declining to hold her only because it would make him "go all broody."
The next day found Ms. Burton on board the Royal Yacht Britannia with Prince Charles, who was in Toronto for a business leaders' summit. Asked to speak to the group, Ms. May quipped that only "baby steps" were being taken to fix the environment - and promptly appeared in the newspapers the next day, with babe in arms. "Carrying a baby around with you is an excellent lobbying tool," she says with a laugh.
Five years later, Ms. Burton encountered Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev at a dinner in Rio de Janeiro. Most of the comments were in English, and the former Soviet leader had a translator - but his wife did not. Instead, she drew pictures and played with a little girl who was also not that interested in what was going on.
Jane Taber
Jane Taber is a senior political writer in The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau.