Getting to know Elizabeth Weir

 

In 1987, the Liberals won all 58 seats in the New Brunswick election. A year later, Elizabeth Weir became the first female leader of a political party in that province when she was elected to the top job for the New Democrats, a position she held for 16 years. Over the next four elections, she was the only member of her party to win a seat. During that time, she began her lifelong work of training parliamentarians, observing elections and promoting gender equity in dozens of new democracies such as Libya, Mozambique, Northern Ireland, Myanmar, Cambodia and Tunisia, much of it with the National Democratic Institute in Washington. Last year, she was awarded the Order of New Brunswick and named the first recipient of The Spirit of Ella Hatheway Award, which celebrates a Saint John woman who campaigned for women’s suffrage a century ago. Saltscapes spoke with Elizabeth Weir about the British class system, “Hotel California” and
the Titanic.   

 

You were born in Belfast. 

My dad served in the merchant navy during World War II. It took a very long time for the UK and especially Belfast to recover. Because my mother had family here and my father got a job working for a steel company, we moved to Canada. It took a huge leap of faith. 

 

How old were you?

I was only a year and a half. When I was doing some international travel, my mother was insistent that I don’t go to Belfast. It was still a dangerous place. You could blindly wander into the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

Where did you get your sense of social justice?

I credit my parents. They’re examples of the destructive nature of the British class system because both are intelligent people who never had opportunity. My dad was a voracious reader with a grade eight education. My mother and her sisters were very bright women who left school to work. We’d watch the news during the civil rights struggle and see Black people being beaten simply because they wanted to exercise their democratic rights. That had
a profound influence on me.

 

You moved from Fredericton to Saint John to run for office, but why have you stayed?

It’s like “Hotel California.” You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. There’s such a deep, strong sense of community here, it just embraces you.

 

Was it difficult to be the only NDP member of the legislature for four election cycles?

I wouldn’t describe it as that because what you didn’t see was the deep network of people who supported me. I realized how much supporters of the other political parties wanted the system to work. They believed in democracy. That’s something we’re missing today in the kind of acrimony we often see in our electoral system.

 

What do we need to know about democracies?

Democracies are fragile. We can’t take anything for granted. The job of an MP is virtually the same no matter what country you’re in, but many elected in post-conflict situations and new parliaments believe that somehow, we had all this training before we got elected. This is a job you learn by doing.

 

Have you revisited Belfast?

It wasn’t until 1998. I went there to do a parliamentary capacity building session with their first elected assembly after the peace agreement. It was quite striking how Belfast is like Saint John. My grandfather worked on the Titanic in Belfast, so there’s the shipbuilding tradition, but physically as well because it’s a port. It tied everything together for me.