Paul Dewar, the New Democratic Party (NDP) incumbent for Ottawa Centre, is running once again to be an MP, but said becoming one wasn’t his childhood aspiration.
“I never planned at an early age to run for office,” the 52-year-old Ottawa native said. “[But] I can say that growing up with my mother involved in politics, I saw the importance . . . of making a difference in politics.”
The son of a prominent NDP politician who served as Ottawa’s mayor from 1978-85, Dewar has been through three federal elections. He was first elected in 2006, when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives formed its first government.
“Elections are like job interviews,” he said. “You go up to the electors and they decide if they’re going to hire you, and you put forward your ideas, your experience—just like you would a CV before a perspective employer.”
More jobs is what the NDP is proposing for students. The party wants to spend $200 million on creating more jobs for students. Dewar said he wants to see students coming out of university with real job opportunities.
Dewar pointed to more public paid internships for youth and halting the contracting out of casual work.
“We want to see more of a commitment from government as a responsible employer . . . to pay for internships and also to hire people more long-term so that people can actually have a career,” he said.
The NDP is proposing to get rid of interest on federal student loans while spending $250 million over four years to create around 74,000 new grants. Dewar said students are finishing post-secondary education with lots of debt.
“We need to see more grants and we need to take a look at debt forgiveness or a better way of dealing with debt for students,” he said.
According to Dewar, the NDP’s plan for accessible and affordable child care is something they are working towards now for it to be in place for young people when they decide to have families down the road. Dewar said young people, especially women, must often decide between work and families because they can’t afford child care.
Dewar said it is perverse that Canada does not have a national housing strategy and more affordable housing should be built.
“It’s also a crisis that we see right across the board, but particularly for young people and particularly here in Ottawa Centre,” he said. “We’ve seen a saturation of condos. They’re not affordable, they’re just not affordable for families, for young people, so we need to see building of affordable housing.”
On top of expanding the public sector for young Canadians, Dewar said his party would deal with precarious work and provide more support for mental health. Dewar said the public sector will “model good behaviour as an employer for young people.”
Dewar attended Carleton and earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science and economics in 1985. Dewar said he was involved in campus activism at the time, notably with the anti-apartheid movement that swept universities across the world in the 1980s to boycott South African products. Before he became involved in politics, Dewar was a school teacher, union officer, and social activist.
Dewar unsuccessfully ran to be NDP leader in 2011.
His mother, Marion Dewar, pushed for the federal government to accept 4,000 refugees in 1979, when hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were fleeing the communist regime.
“That particular event in 1979 was one that really seared into my memory,” he said.
Dewar, who was the NDP’s critic for foreign affairs, has been among the most vocal MPs about the government’s handling of the Syrian refugee crisis.
“If we had our government leading by example instead of putting question marks out about security . . . we could have leveraged so much goodwill from Canadians that’s already there,” he said.
Dewar said he has a strong track record with issues affecting Ottawa Centre. He also mentions cycling safety and accessibility, and work in the foreign affairs file among his contributions.
“We’ve done a lot of work here on cleaning up the Ottawa River . . . that’s something I’ve been very proud of,” Dewar said. “I’ve got a record to run on.”
