Megan Leslie: Fighting for her Community

Josh Robin Young  //  December 15, 2011

On a plane flying from Ottawa to Halifax, Megan Leslie sits gazing out the window. She has made this trip almost every weekend since she took her place in the House of Commons as the MP for Halifax. Despite the long flight, she says that she enjoys having a little bit of time to herself to gather her thoughts. This is understandable with such a hectic schedule of caucus meetings, lobby meetings, interviews, voting and speaking in the house, not to mention committee and question period. As one of only 69 women elected to the 40^th Canadian Parliament and one of only four women under 40, Leslie is a rare breed in the House of Commons, which is exactly why she decided to run in the first place.

“There are some really good people in the House of Commons. There are also some real doofuses,” says Leslie. “So let’s replace some of the doofuses and get young people, people with different backgrounds and newcomers, people who weren’t even born here, people who come from our First Nations, people who are LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender]… There are so many voices that are not heard there, so it’s really important to change that.”

It could be argued that Leslie is helping fill the need for more diverse politicians. The Kirkland Lake, Ontario native has been fighting her whole life to try and make government responsible for looking after its citizens. As a child, Leslie’s mother was a single parent and Leslie would often stay with her uncles or grandparents while her mother worked as a nurse. It is through her exposure to this environment that Leslie says she learned the importance of community. In university she became involved in many social rights issues, including becoming an advocate for gay rights.

Leslie finished her undergraduate and moved to Halifax to take law at Dalhousie University. She says she never planned to work for a law firm but rather wished to use the degree as a tool to help her community. Once she finished university, Leslie began work at Dalhousie Legal Aid as a community legal worker. The job had two interrelated parts. The first part involved Leslie working with low-income clients in her community, representing them and helping them assert their rights under the law. This included clients on income assistance seeking legal counsel regarding the Income Assistance Act or those needing advice on Nova Scotia Power regulations because their power was being cut off.

“So half of my job was working with individuals, representing them,” says Leslie, “but the other half of my job was building responses to problems with the law, aspects of the law that were oppressive or unfair when it came to poor people”. Leslie worked with the community, demanding change through test cases, and becoming an expert on an issue to the point that the government would seek her advice when developing or changing laws. “Working with clients was interesting in itself,” says Leslie, “and it formed the basis for understanding what aspects of the law needed to change.”

It was never easy, but Leslie says it taught her to have a tough skin and to take the good with the bad, a quality that would help her once elected. It is through her work as a legal aid that the Affordability Energy Coalition was formed, an organization working to address rising energy rates through the changing of laws. Leslie worked with the Coalition on a charter challenge to the Public Utilities Act to try and create an affordability aspect to electricity rates. Leslie says the case took over her life for about six months; she ate and slept the case, putting her mind, body, and soul into it. After appealing to many different judicial levels, including the Supreme Court of Canada, they lost. Leslie says she was left drained emotionally as well as physically–and completely devastated. However, according to Leslie, those ups and downs taught her some of the most important lessons.

“It can be really frustrating, it can be demoralizing, it can be depressing, you can feel like it’s absolutely futile and there is no point in even doing this kind of work,” she says. “But then you have these victories that are so exhilarating, so motivating and inspiring that you realize that, no, this exactly where I need to be.”

A person might assume Leslie moved on to politics to make more of an impact on these types of issues. According to Leslie, however, the opposite is true. “You can stand up in the House of Commons and scream until your face is blue,” she says, “and it doesn’t matter at all unless the community is saying the same thing.” Leslie believes that there is not a single ‘better’ way to affect change in your community but that many different roles are needed. Through her work, Leslie has realized that she is not more effective as an activist, legal counsel, or politician (even if she did win best rookie MP), but that they are all necessary parts of the equation.

Leslie has transitioned from grassroots picketer, to community legal worker, to federal politician but has always had the same goal: to ensure that government is responsible for its citizens. So, what’s next for the Halifax activist?

“I will leave this role at some point and someone else will do it–hopefully an activist, and I’ll go back to finding other ways of contributing.”

For Leslie, ‘other ways of contributing’ could be anything because, as she has proven, Megan Leslie knows no boundaries when it comes to fighting for her community.