A Kennedy, of Ukrainian heritage, is running in Ontario provincial elections

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - With voters set to go to the polls on June 3, the Ontario provincial election is marked by an ideological divide.

On one hand, there are the incumbent right-wing populist Progressive Conservatives (PC) led by Mike Harris, and on the other, there's everyone else.

Among the more high-profile and articulate voices on this other side is Gerard Kennedy, the boyish 38-year-old Liberal Party health critic. While his Hyannisport surname is no impediment, Mr. Kennedy proudly considers himself Ukrainian.

"My Ukrainian heritage makes it a pleasure to represent people of my background. It's been an important part of my growing up and now it can be an important part of public service," he said.

His mother, Caroline Shemanski, is a descendant of one of the first Ukrainian families to arrive in Canada in 1891, according to cover-page feature on the activist-turned-parliamentarian that ran in Zdorov magazine's Spring 1999 issue.

His campaign headquarters overlook Bloor Street next to the urban green space that gives his new riding its name, Parkdale-High Park, and sits just west of the Ukrainian enclave known as the "Selo," or Bloor Street Village.

Among his strongest supporters is Future Bakery and Café entrepreneur Borys Wrzesniewsky, a member of his campaign team who appeared on "Kontakt" television's Saturday afternoon program on May 8 to endorse Mr. Kennedy's candidacy.

Mr. Kennedy was born in The Pas, a remote community in Manitoba's northeast corner near Hudson's Bay. His Scottish father, a lumberworker and businessman, served as the town's mayor and once ran unsuccessfully as a federal Liberal candidate in the Churchill riding.

Mr. Kennedy studied political science and economics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and then at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, before returning west to establish the country's first food bank in aid of the poverty-stricken and homeless in the Alberta provincial capital in 1981.

In April 1986 he was asked to serve as the executive director of Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank (DBFB), and in a 10-year term at the post he gained a reputation as a superior organizer, an idealist able to marshall the efforts of thousands of volunteers and a pragmatist who attracted the support of Canada's largest corporations. He also served as the chairman and national spokesman for the Canadian Association of Food Banks.

The business-oriented newspaper Financial Post named him "Honorary Mention CEO of the Year" in 1995.

In May 1996 the activist ran in the provincial by-election in Toronto's York-South Weston riding after former Premier Bob Rae resigned as leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP). He defeated the NDP's Dennis Miller and claimed the riding for the Liberals for the first time since it was established in 1925.

That November, Mr. Kennedy ran for the Liberal leadership and led four ballots before the party's establishment engineered a victory for Ottawa-based Dalton McGuinty on the fifth. Since then, he has served as a member of provincial Parliament (MPP) and the official opposition's health critic.

Recent Tory legislation that reduced the number of provincial parliamentarians (particularly in the cities) forced redistricting and prompted Mr. Kennedy to switch to the neighboring Parkdale High Park riding for this year's election.

He is favored to win the seat in an odd contest that pits him against Annamarie Castrilli, who recently defected to the PCs from the Liberals, and Irene Atkinson, a Tory candidate in the past who is running for the NDP.

Reasons for politics

In an interview at his headquarters on May 17, Mr. Kennedy told The Weekly he sees politics as public service akin to that performed at the Daily Bread Food Bank,

"I'd like to see a little bit more respect brought into politics, attract people who wouldn't traditionally engage themselves to get involved," the member of parliament said, adding "I think there's a lassitude among people in Ontario that is not yet dangerous, but certainly damaging."

He pointed out that his campaign command center has "no back rooms" and said it was a symbol of how he represents constituents and hopes to govern. He said his experience at food banks taught him to be a "civic translator" for various contending groups and to bring the sense of social responsibility out of people who have become accustomed to act on their self interest.

Not surprisingly, as his party's health critic, Mr. Kennedy is harsh about the Harris government's record on health care, a publicly funded matter of pride for Canadians. On the morning of May 18, at the entrance to Queensway Hospital, he joined four local Liberal candidates in a continued string of appearances outside the province's medical facilities to highlight their plight.

Under the Harris government's austerity measures, several major hospitals in Ontario have been closed or merged, and as a result, thousands of medical and support staff have been laid off.

Funding cuts recently forced the Queensway to shut its emergency ward; it is being "closed down on the inside," Mr. Kennedy said, evidence of the Harris government's ongoing assault on the province's medical service and psychiatric hospitals. The candidate asserted that St. Joseph's Hospital, his riding's principal health care institution, is also buckling under substantial cuts.

Ontario has been rocked by increasingly effective protests from its nurses after years of dramatic downsizing, prompting the government to commit to rehiring about 2,000 province-wide.

On May 18, Mr. Kennedy launched a blistering counter-attack, charging that, based on a reading of a report prepared by the Tory-sponsored Health Services Restructuring Commission, Premier Harris intends to fire over 7,000 nurses if he is re-elected, over and above Health Minister Elizabeth Witmer's election-time conciliatory measures.

PC officials have hotly denied these charges, but offered no assurances about freezing layoffs of nurses.

Mr. Kennedy claimed Mr. Harris failed to properly allocate $1 billion in transfer payments from the federal government, and that a Liberal administration in the province would see to it that the $600 million directed elsewhere would be reapplied to health.

Mr. Kennedy said the health care regime is forcing individual doctors to make more and more decisions as to where to direct individual patients for care but increasingly excludes them from opportunities to affect how the system works as a whole because government has entirely usurped this role.

He advocated the creation of Health Quality Councils in which doctors and nurses would participate in evaluating care being provided in a particular area and making recommendations as to how it should be maintained or improved.

Mr. Kennedy claimed the Harris government is pushing the province's system towards privatization. "People who go in for surgery are being pushed out of hospitals quicker and sicker. You might get some community care, but it will almost always be less than you require.

"At that juncture, suddenly we have a different health care system," Mr. Kennedy explained, "You're not in a doctor's office, you're not in a hospital [since the services of both have been cut back], you're not covered by the Canada Health Act, and you have a choice: go without, or purchase it on your own - that is privatization."

Mr. Kennedy said that in the area of social assistance, institutions such as the Ukrainian Canadian Social Services should receive more direct government funding because of their ability to function in a specific environment.

"There are many elderly people in this riding who have paid taxes throughout their lifetime, who now need home care in their own language, for example, Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian," Mr. Kennedy said.

"We have to build what I call social entrepreneurship. We need to attract the same kind of creativity, the same kind of energy and the same kind of resources available in the private sector and delivering some of what government has to do," the candidate urged.

"It's not about throwing money at things," Mr. Kennedy said, "it's about looking around and using the civic infrastructure that's already there properly."

Heritage language instruction

Mr. Kennedy criticized both sides of the education system, the local boards and the Education Ministry, for eliminating instruction in Ukrainian in many of the city's schools. "Mike Harris is responsible because he has taken money away from the boards [Toronto Board of Education and the Toronto Separate (Catholic) School Board], but they have responded by considering heritage language instruction as a frill."

"Heritage language should be a mandated program in the schools, and it shouldn't be something the boards can pull whenever the money gets tight," the MPP said. "It belongs in the school, and it's not something that should be done catch as catch can outside of it."

"On the same basis that we support French as an official language, we should support heritage language programs as a mainstream part of the curriculum where numbers warrant," he added.

"Yes, [the Toronto Board's] hands have been tied by Mr. Harris, yes his funding formula for education is a bad idea and restrictive, but I haven't heard anybody at [any] board make it a great big issue. That advocacy should be there," Mr. Kennedy said.

The candidate explained his view of education: "It should help people become better citizens by sharpening their knowledge and critical thinking, as well as giving them a strong sense of themselves. That can only happen if we pay due respect to people reaching their potential culturally as well as in the more ordinary fashion."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 23, 1999, No. 21, Vol. LXVII

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