standing feature
last word
SINCE being elected to Parliament on June 28, life’s pace has… quickened.
The summer was a flurry of preparing for all the work ahead. Half a dozen times, I bounced off to Ottawa, immersing myself in parliamentary procedure, strategizing with the NDP caucus. Back home, I continued criss-crossing our region, ranging as widely as Klemtu and Atlin. Of course, there was also the business of launching offices in Ottawa, Terrace and Smithers.
When I could finally take a week off this September, it seemed natural to hit the road again. My bearing: north (up the Cassiar). Destination: calm (rustic cabin on mountain-framed lake). The sheer grandeur of our natural spaces, I am convinced, has healing powers.
Fall was just announcing its arrival. Notice how that’s something you smell first? That first whiff of the season’s change pressed me to reflect on all these changes in my own life.
In July, I was named the NDP’s national critic for both Youth and Environment. Pundits quickly took note, agreeing that Youth was an easy fit. But the Environment portfolio had some of them buzzing. Why hand the “green file” to an MP from an economically struggling, resource-based region? Isn’t this guy all about bringing jobs back to the northwest?
Thinking back, sitting by the lakeside, their reaction struck me again. It’s really an expression of a tired old assumption—the idea that economy and environment must be competing priorities. Like two forces locked in battle; winner takes it all.
Such thinking hasn’t served us well in the northwest. It divides us into camps—pro-development vs. pro-environment—each seeking to win over the other. Instead, what we need and deserve are strategies that serve both priorities. We need a language that lets us express both in one breath.
Economic development and environmental conservation can both be means to an end. And that shared end, in my mind, is a better quality of life.
So much goes into defining our quality of life. Stable and fulfilling jobs top any list. No less important are caring and engaged communities offering us support, a sense of place, health care, personal safety, education opportunities. And no question, healthy, sustainable surroundings are a must.
Northerners have a special view on how our environment feeds our unique quality of life. For us, vast wilderness is a reality, not an abstraction. And that reality has many dimensions. It’s a source of natural resources, a place to make a living. It’s a place to venture, to play and to recharge (as I keep rediscovering).
It’s a world-class attraction drawing tourists to our doorstep. It’s a source of food, often tied to cherished ritual. It can be integral to our local cultures, and to our sense of self.
Our closeness to the wild can also make us realists. We’re not urbanites with dreams of restoring untouched paradise. And shifting our way of thinking from environment to quality of life, connects with our realism. If we want to defend a threatened watershed, we’re less likely to be driven by an abstract sense of preservationism, and more likely by seeing how it fuels real communities’ quality of life.
For some years, I worked in community development in Central and South America, with a shorter stint in West Africa. These communities faced extraordinary challenges: poverty, scarce education opportunities, and poor health. What I learned in those years was a simple equation; as a community expanded its choices for the future, so too did it boost its quality of life.
That’s my dream for the North: to see a proliferation of new choices; options that don’t make us choose starkly between environment and development; strategies that are grounded in that goal of boosting our region’s quality of life.
A second lesson I learned abroad is that satisfying new choices seldom came from the outside—say, from big industry promising a quick fix. Instead, they were driven by local passion, pride and creativity.
Our path forward can blend a diversity of advances—in tourism development, a nimble service sector, new secondary manufacturing, bold entrepreneurship, greener technology, more sustainable harvesting—all grounded in community development.
We live in a land of opportunity and resilient hope. Today, I am filled with a sense of the possible. With proper support, I have faith that people here can work together to create the strong communities that will also be stewards of this land.
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