David Peterson wanted solutions from the North.
The then Liberal premier held a conference in Thunder Bay during the mid-‘80s, looking for Northern voices for Northern problems. Little did he know, his successor Lyn McLeod would be sitting in the audience.
“That’s one of the things that drew me into provincial politics,” McLeod said.
From the small Northern riding of Fort William, which would eventually expand to become Thunder Bay-Atikokan, McLeod would spend the next decade in Queen’s Park from opposition member to cabinet minister, including a four-year term leading the Liberal Party as the province’s first female leader.
Looking for local solutions is something she learned as a trustee on the Lakehead Public School Board from a fellow trustee who lived in Pass Lake. The board was looking to fund schools on a per student basis.
“He said ‘if you only give Pass Lake enough money based on students we’ll never be able to buy a basketball’,” McLeod recollected.
That lesson would stay with her.
When she was first elected in 1987, knocking out 10-year Progressive Conservative incumbent Mickey Henessey, McLeod said getting politicians in the south to understand her riding and the North in general was always a challenge.
She even had to go so far as drawing a map to illustrate the distances between the small communities.
“There were very few maps then that even had the entire province on one page,” McLeod said.
But the challenge of getting Queen’s Park to recognize a riding is hard for any MPP, McLeod found out.
“What continues to be a challenge and will always be a challenge is working with the community to know what works for this region and these communities, because there’s no solution that’s going to be developed at Queen’s Park that’s going to be just right for our communities.
“I found the people to my surprise in Sarnia felt just as misunderstood as people in Thunder Bay did.”
The difference though, is that people in Thunder Bay-Atikokan need to find their own solutions. That’s one of the reasons the North has come up more and more in the provincial dialogue as time goes on.
McLeod uses the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre as an example. The government of the day didn’t want a new hospital for the area, but everyone from city council to labour unions came together to fight for one.
“I remember somebody associated with the hospital restructuring commission talking about this being a dying community and if you want to fire a community up just tell them there’re a dying community.”
In Thunder Bay on a trip to the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute where she sits on the board of directors, McLeod said watching the riding’s job base transform and diversify has been fascinating.
“Finding that balance between support for our traditional resource based industries, maintaining them and finding ways to invest in sustainable new economies has been a real change.”
Along with the riding growing, to include places like Kakabeka Falls and Atikokan, under her watch McLeod said even the way an MPP works has changed. As a cabinet minister, she would go home at the end of the day with binders full of letters to answer.
“Can you even imagine people writing those letters now?” she asked. “I think the notion of writing letters has virtually disappeared in that period of time.”
What took its place was hundreds and hundreds of emails per day by the time she left politics in 2003. And while it may have made some things easier, it has made it more difficult to respond to people in a meaningful way because of the expectation of a quick response.
The province had a history of centralized decision making that has eroded in the past few decades to make way for more regional decision-making, something McLeod believes is key.
“The more the government is centralized in its decision making and top-down, the more frustrated people are.”
