Coast to Coast

With a week off from Parliament, I decided to collect all the invitations I had for speaking on child poverty, the environment and Darfur and spend that week travelling the country and encouraging citizen engagement on these files.  It ended up becoming a special week because I took my daughter Achan, 7 years old, and recently arrived from Darfur on the cross-country trek with me.  We started in Halifax and ended up in Whitehorse and Vancouver, with stops in between.For some of the rallies I partnered with a group called STAND, which is an acronym for Students Taking Action Now Darfur.  Made up of both high school and university students, STAND has chapters at campuses across the country and have developed a high effective advocacy and research organization.  We had taken the executive director and advocacy director from STAND on our recent trip to Sudan and I was impressed by their sheer energy for the cause.But the tour was also about poverty and the environment and in each location listeners expressed frustration that government wasn't doing more in these three key areas.  Beneath the surface, however, was this abiding feeling that the individual Canadian was powerless against such overwhelming odds and the machinery of government.  So I told them the story of my wife, Jane Roy, and I and our decade of work in Sudan, building schools, freeing slaves, starting micro-enterprises and helping a newly discovered group of Darfur refugees.  I also talked about my 22 years of involvement as the executive director of the London Food Bank and about the weekend I would be spending with Al Gore in Montreal moving ahead the cause of fighting climate change.  And, naturally, I spoke about my kids from Sudan and how Jane and I were enriched by their presence in our lives.The results were always the same.  People were moved, energized, and desirous to "get on" with the business of changing our world and making government work.  It wasn't because of my speaking ability but because I was an individual, just like they were, attempting to make a difference.  And I reminded them that there is no point in backing politicians who take such things as Darfur, climate change and poverty in a partisan fashion, seeking to promote only their party.  These three files are bigger than us all and unless political parties cooperate together, they will not be solved.  This struck a strong resonant chord in the listeners and I believe it represents a new renaissance for Canadian politics if we could just have the courage to embrace it ... and live it.The tour now over and with my daughter sleeping soundly in bed after a grueling week, I remain deeply impressed by the transcendent ability of the average Canadian to instinctively understand that a new era of non-partisanship will bring them back to the political process.  I am both humbled and inspired with that instinctive knowledge they have, knowing innately within myself that it was just such a spirit that built this great country.  I will always be in their debt.