As a young person in British Columbia in the early 1980s, I was drawn to the progressive changes that Pierre Trudeau was introducing in Canada at the time.  Many of my peers did not feel the same way, and there was a strong current of hostility in the West to the more progressive, redistribution-ist tendencies of the Liberal government of that era.  In 1982, I was very fortunate to be selected to serve as a student intern to work in Ottawa in the office of the Minister of the Environment, John Roberts, who had been the point person in the Trudeau senior’s government on the issue of acid rain, then causing considerable damage to Canada’s lakes and forests.  I stayed on the Hill for a year and eventually went back to finish a Political Studies degree at Queen’s University.  In my fourth year at Queen’s, I was president of the campus Liberal club.

I then did post graduate studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, the London School of Economics (wrote an MSc. thesis on Economic Planning) and Oxford University where I wrote a doctoral dissertation on industrial policy making in the European aerospace sector. I researched and wrote my doctorate at the same time and in the same college as our present Prime Minister, Mark Carney.  My own studies, however, led me to a more skeptical take on the benefits of allowing the unfettered ‘free market’ to determine economic outcomes for citizens, communities and regions.  By the time I returned to Canada in the mid 1990s, the Liberal Party had changed fundamentally and was now a proponent of a pro-corporate approach, advocating cutbacks and austerity.  I went to work for the Leader of the NDP, Alexa McDonough, as a researcher on Parliament Hill for a couple of years.  I was extensively involved in drafting questions for use by the leader in the daily Question Period. However, a string of exceptionally mediocre results in the federal elections of 1993, 1997 and 2000, in which the party secured an average of only 14 seats – two above the threshold to secure official party status - led me to take independent action.  Over the Christmas holiday of 2000 I wrote out five key reforms, and the accompanying rationales, that I believed would be necessary to adopt if the NDP was to claw itself back to respectability.  One of the five reforms I proposed, called for a ban on corporate and union donations to Canadian political parties.  I distilled the ideas into a letter addressed to the party membership and asked a member of caucus, Peter Stoffer MP, if he would be willing to publish it under his name.  He agreed and a lengthy article appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper in early January of 2001.  The five reforms I had put forward, went on to become part of a broader movement know as NDProgress.  A few years later in June of 2003, Prime Minister Jean Chretien changed the law in Canada to implement the ban on corporate and union money going to political parties.

At this point, with our family growing (my partner, Philippa, and I eventually had three children) and the need to earn a living, I withdrew from a more active role in politics. (I knew that the demands of politics would take away from time with my children in their formative years and could not justify that.)  During my time in association and not-for-profit management I became CEO/Senior Leader of two national organizations.  I learnt a lot about working with people, transparency, and assuming responsibility for one’s actions (leadership) in reporting to internal and external partners.  In 2018, I took some time off and led an initiative to feed the food-insecure in the Westboro area of Ottawa, run out of a local church.  We ran this breakfast program for six months providing free meals to folks every Saturday morning.  I engaged in the meal planning, shopping and cooking and worked with ten amazing volunteers on a weekly basis.  It was a hugely valuable experience.  In 2019, I got back involved in federal politics and chose to run as an Independent Candidate in the riding of Ottawa Centre in the federal election of that year.  I did so because all of Canada’s political parties, including the NDP, had morphed into centrist-right leaning parties and were now being driven by a class of public affairs consultants and lobbyists.  The focus on the concerns of ordinary folks, then and now, has been lost.  Professionally, since then, I have worked as executive director of a housing charity for low-income individuals requiring mental health supports and as the director of government relations for a national not-for-profit devoted to end-of-life rights for those enduring grievous suffering. Earlier in my working life I had stints as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris and as a writer in the Foreign Policy and Trade Communications branch of the then Department of External Affairs.