“The things that make Canada great are slipping away from us and I wanted to remedy that,” Bill Blaikie said as he sat on a bench outside his alma mater, Emmanuel College.
Blaike is running for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party. For 23 years, Blaikie has served in the House of Commons, since 1988 as MP for Winnipeg-Transcona. His face is familiar—bespectacled, with a prominent beard. He looks the part of his old profession, a United Church minister.
Blaikie kicked off his campaign in an old Winnipeg United Church mission—his first job after graduating from Emmanuel. He believes that social justice is something the NDP should stand for, which means keeping the NDP a party of the left, not a Labour-style centrist party.
“The nature of a race within a party is we agree on a lot of things,” Blaikie said. He thinks that many of the candidates running for the NDP leadership believe in many of the same policies. The difference between the contestants, according to Blaikie, is his extensive experience.
“We should stand for global trade that isn’t beholden to the interests of corporations,” Blaikie said. The issues surrounding global trade are, for him, an indicator of where Canadian politics has let the average person down.
“It’s the erosion of government’s ability” to act that has created problems with many Canadian institutions, Blaike said. “Drug patents, the environment, the Wheat Board, health care.” To Blaikie, they are problems that government alone can solve.
He thinks an NDP would re-invest in areas such as housing. “We’ve been pushing the federal government to make sure we have affordable housing.”
Transport is another area where Blaikie thinks the government should spend more. “We have to break our addiction to the automobile,” he said, adding that re-investing in railways is one solution to move people and freight in an environmentally-friendly way.
To Blaikie, postsecondary education is another victim of the Liberal Party’s myopia. “It’s not even on the agenda in Ottawa,” he said. “Tuition fees are skyrocketing.”
He thinks high tuition harms society as a whole because the cost of paying off student loans means graduates might have to hold off on buying a house or starting a family.
The problem, according to Blaikie, came in 1995, when the Liberals stopped allocating the money they transfer to the provinces. That meant that the amounts specifically designated for postsecondary education got lumped in with other programmes in the Canada Health and Social Transfer.
This lump transfer meant it was up to provincial governments to decide exactly how much money would be spent on—or cut from —postsecondary education.
Blaikie said on the issue of the Kyoto Treaty, the Liberals have been a disappointment.
“They’ve actually made the Conservatives look good on the environment,” he said, adding that if it were up to him, Kyoto would be ratified straight away.
Blaikie conceded that fiscal responsibility is important to Canadians, after a decade of deficit-cutting and budget-trimming:.“They don’t want governments that run them into the hole,” he said.
But he thinks Canadians would be willing to accept a tax increase if it meant they would get better services for the money.
It’s possible Canadians will see in Blaikie the history of the NDP as the social conscience of Parliament. Whether that will translate into votes for a party struggling in the polls is another question.
Photograph by Ian Ferguson
