By Melissa Kosowan
In a quiet neighbourhood off Main Street, a wreath sprinkled with orange campaign buttons hangs on the door at the home of Paul Dewar, the newly elected NDP member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre. A sign in the window reads, “Our community wins with Paul Dewar.”
Inside, the former elementary school teacher sits down at a table, moving stacks of paperwork and file folders aside from a meeting held only moments before. Clusters of balloons hover nearby.
Dewar, a lean 43-year-old with brown eyes and short, curly brown hair, admits he’s still adjusting to his new role as a politician.
“This morning I went down to 180 Wellington to go through all the initiations, if you will, of Parliament. You know, parking passes, getting my access pass to the Hill, learning all the procedures of going to work,” he says.
Dewar is no stranger to politics. Born and raised in the west end of Ottawa, he grew up in a family with a passion for municipal issues. They instilled in him at an early age the need to help others, both in the local community and abroad.
Dewar, the youngest of four children born to parents Ken and Marion, was nine years old when his mother first became involved in politics. The former public health nurse and NDP activist was the mayor of Ottawa from 1978 to 1985, and later an MP in the riding of Hamilton Mountain.
He recalls how her involvement in the political scene directly affected his own life and changed how the family operated.
“It simply meant that my parents weren’t home as much. My dad was the classic nine to five kind of scenario, but with mom in the political vocation, it meant she was away a lot at meetings,” Dewar says, adding he often had to stay with neighbours when he was a young boy.
To ease his mother’s workload, Dewar and his siblings had to “chip in” around the home. His task was cooking, something he says he still enjoys today.
“It was certainly a different kind of socialization compared to my friends,” Dewar says. “As an adolescent boy that was certainly different because now I had to go home and start making dinner.”
Then there were the phone calls from people who opposed some of his mother’s initiatives, such as Project 4000, which welcomed thousands of Vietnamese refugees to Ottawa in the 1970s.
“We’d get all sorts of interesting people calling. You’d just go, ‘Oh, it’s one of those,’ ” Dewar laughs, holding his hand to his ear like a phone before motioning as though to pass it over to someone else.
He says his family’s community involvement also exposed him to a variety of different people.
They often took in those who were “down on their luck,” he recalls. At one point during the Vietnam War, their home was also a safe haven for draft dodgers from the United States.
“You know how every neighbourhood has the house where there’s always action? Well that was us,” Dewar explains. “It was very interesting. You didn’t know who was going to be living at the house.”
Paul’s mother says she agrees the family’s involvement in the community and their devotion to helping those in need made a lasting impression on her son.
“That wasn’t politics per se, but it was very much looking at the needs in the world and seeing what we could do in our own little corner and I think that shaped him,” she says.
Despite his political upbringing and what he describes as a passion for social justice, Dewar says he never imagined himself following in the footsteps of his mother and becoming a politician. Neither did she. Marion says Paul never really showed an interest in politics as a youngster, although he was later involved in student governments in high school and university.
It wasn’t until he went to Nicaragua after graduating from Carleton University in 1985 with a BA in political science that she says she saw Paul’s political side emerge.
“We always say we sent a boy to Nicaragua and a young man came back,” Marion says.
Then in his 20s, Dewar worked as a project organizer for Tools for Peace, a humanitarian organization that provided educational, medical and agricultural equipment to the people of Nicaragua during the American embargo.
“I helped to organize where the aid was going to go and then also to deliver it,” he says. “So I travelled throughout the country delivering this aid. It was very interesting. It opened your eyes to what people were suffering through, both war and poverty at the same time.”
Dewar says he also saw the importance of education while there and realized it was a career he wanted to pursue.
After completing a degree in education at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1993, Dewar taught at several schools in the Ottawa area. He later left the classroom to become vice-president of the Ottawa Carleton Elementary Teachers’ Federation, representing 3,000 teachers.
Not content to stay within the educational realm, Dewar has been involved in other community initiatives over the years. He has worked with the Coalition for a Healthy Ottawa to bring a pesticide bylaw to the city, a fight that is still ongoing.
He has also been part of campaigns to increase recognition of foreign credentials among immigrants and to secure more funding for programs that teach English as a second language.
While the running joke is that Dewar has big shoes to fill taking over from former Ottawa Centre MP Ed Broadbent (despite the fact that Dewar’s are only half a size smaller), Broadbent says he thinks Dewar is the right man for the job.
“There are two categories of people who go into politics. There are those who are driven to be somebody, and then there are others who are driven to do something. And he’s really the second,” Broadbent says. “He has a deeply internalized sense of justice that he’s working for.”
And despite Dewar’s relative inexperience in federal politics, Broadbent says Dewar can bring something to the table that he himself couldn’t when he was first elected.
“Paul has an established record of community service already, so he will bring that immediately in a way that, for me, was something I built up after I was elected. That will be a real plus for the community,” Broadbent says.
But Dewar has heard similar advice before. He says his mother always told him to “bring more to politics than politics.”
“It’s important that people bring other life experience, human experience, to politics,” Dewar explains. “Politics at its most fundamental level is about people. The more experience you have dealing with different kinds of people in different kinds of settings, at different levels, hopefully you will be better able to represent them.”
Politics aside, at the end of the day, Dewar likes to unwind like anyone else. He plays hockey with his friends on Monday nights, takes to the soccer field in the summer, and likes to listen to the grassroots tunes of Ottawa’s Kathleen Edwards.
And when all else fails, he can turn to his support team – his wife Julia Sneyd and their children: Nathaniel, 10, and Jordan, 7. Just as he says his mother tried to do for him, Dewar says he hopes to ensure his role in politics doesn’t interfere with his home life.
“I think what’s going to be really important is keeping the balance . . . that really means not only having the scheduled time, but also to be involved in their life.”