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megram - 55GTA - Index

Broadbent Calendar
March 21, 1936 - John Edward is
born to Percy and Mary Broadbent of
Oshawa, Ontario. He has a sister of
five and will have a brother six years
later.
1955 - Ed begins studying philosophy
at the University of Toronto’s
Trinity College. He is the first member
of his family to attend university.
1959 - He completes his bachelor’s
degree and begins work on his master’s.
1961 - He completes his M.A. and
marries Yvonne Yamaoka.
1962 - He studies with Michael
Oakeshott at the London School of
Economics for a year. Professor
Oakeshott (1901 to 1990) is now
widely regarded as one of the most
significant conservative intellectuals
of the 20th century.
1965 - Ed begins teaching political
science at York University. He refuses
an invitation from the local NDP riding
association to run in the next federal
election.
1966 - He completes his doctorate
with a dissertation on John Stuart
Mill’s political thought.
1967 - He and Yvonne Yamaoka are
divorced.
1968 - He runs for parliament for the
first time. He will serve as the MP for
Oshawa-Whitby (the riding is later
renamed Oshawa) for the next 21
years. He meets one of his campaign
workers, Lucille Munroe, who will
become his wife three years later.
1971 - Ed and Lucille are married. Ed
adopts Lucille’s young son, Paul, now
a defence specialist in Great Britain.
1973 - Ed and Lucille adopt one-yearold
Christine.
1975 - Ed is the NDP House Leader.
He is elected to succeed David Lewis
as party leader.
1978 - Ed becomes vice president of
Socialist International, an organization
that links social democratic parties
around the world.
1980 - The NDP wins 20 per cent of
the popular vote in the federal election,
but has only 32 seats in the
House of Commons.
1988 - The NDP wins 43 seats.
1989 - Ed steps down as leader of the
NDP. He gives up his Oshawa seat at
the end of December.
1990 - Ed begins work as the head of
the International Centre for Human
Rights and Democratic Development
in Montreal. He holds the position
until 1996.
1993 - Ed is made a Member of the
Order of Canada.
2001 - He is made a Companion of
the Order of Canada.
2003 - He announces that he will be
a candidate in the 2004 election in
his home riding of Ottawa Centre.
2004 - He returns to the House of
Commons as the MP for Ottawa
Centre, having beaten his nearest
rival (Liberal candidate Richard
Mahoney) by more than 6,000 votes.
2005 - Ed announces that he will not
run in the next federal election
because of Lucille’s worsening
health.
2006 - Lucille loses her battle with
breast cancer.
2007 - Ed joins forces with Ellen
Wood, the widow of one of his old
friends.
May 2008 • 16 • Fifty-Five Plus Magazine
“Definitely not memoirs, however,”
he says emphatically. “I have no
intention of getting into the game of
proving how I was right about everything
and how others were wrong. I
find it monumentally boring to read
such books myself, especially the contemporary
ones, as I’ve lived through
the events.I’m not interested in doing
that kind of self-serving writing. I
want to think and write about social
policy, what Canada is doing and
could be doing.”
“We have become a more
unequal society in the last 15 years,”
continues Ed, who served as vice
president of Socialist International
from 1978 to 1982. “A growing percentage
of the wealth is accumulating
with the top 10 per cent of
Canadians, while the rest, in terms of
their share of income, are still where
they were 20 years ago.”
He points out that when he led the
NDP, he and the other two major party
leaders, Pierre Elliott Trudeau for the
Liberals and Robert Stanfield for the
Tories, shared “the common assumption
that we would build a Canada with
more equality. We differed about how
we would achieve it, but we all shared
the same goal. Now the goal itself has
changed and that is regrettable.”
“My last speech in the House of
Commons in 1989 was on child
poverty. The motion to eliminate
child poverty by the turn of the century
was unanimous. That wasn’t a
Utopian ideal. It was a realistic
thought. We had a sense that we
could do this, but in the 1990s, things
got worse instead of better in
Canada. During the same period,
Sweden,Norway,the Netherlands and
Germany almost eliminated child
poverty.Why didn’t we?”
At 72, he remains as concerned
about human rights at home and
abroad as he always has been. His
recent speaking engagements have
dealt with such topics as housing as a
social right and democratic development
abroad. (“How do democratic