Romeo Saganash: nowhere to go but up

Romeo Saganash with the late NDP leader Jack Layton at a campaign event held prior to the May 2 federal election. Saganash announced Sept. 12 that he will seek the job that Layton held until his Aug. 22 death by cancer. (FILE PHOTO)

Romeo Saganash, the New Democratic Party member for Abitibi-James Bay-Nunavik-Eeyou, will contest his party’s national leadership as a dark-horse candidate little known outside of Quebec.

His bid to become NDP leader, which he announced Sept. 16 in Val-d’Or, will be an uphill battle, the rookie MP acknowledged during a Sept. 19 conversation.

The NDP leadership campaign, which won’t be decided until a convention scheduled for March 24, 2012 at Exhibition Place in Toronto, will mean even longer days and more work for Saganash who says he already works 24-7 as an MP.

But that’s not a problem, he said during a brief conversation sandwiched between meetings in Ottawa.

“I may be a rookie MP, but I’m not a rookie politician,” he said, pointing out that he’s spent more than 25 years in Cree politics, often working with Quebec’s National Assembly.

A facebook group called “Romeo Saganash for NDP leader” already has more the 1,000 members, but Saganash knows he will have to do better than that to take the NDP leadership.

A Sept. 19 Leger Marketing poll produced for the Montreal Gazette and French language daily Le Devoir showed only one per cent of those polled in Quebec would support him — and none would outside the province.

The major obstacle before Saganash is that the NDP has no provincial NDP wing with members eager to support his candidacy. Of the 85,000 to 95,000 card-carrying members of the NDP, fewer than 2,000 are from Quebec.

“That’s going to be one of the challenges,” Saganash said. “We all recognize that there’s work to be done there.”

But he doesn’t think it’s insurmountable — having boosted the level of NDP support in his riding from seven per cent at that the start of last spring’s electoral campaign to 45 per cent of the vote in the May 2 federal election, defeating the incumbent Bloc Québécois MP, Yvon Lévesque.

With that win, Saganash, 49, a lawyer and long-time Grand Council of the Crees policy advisor, become one of 58 new Quebec MPs who rode the late Jack Layton’s coat-tails to a stunning electoral sweep in Quebec that reduced the once-mighty Bloc to only four seats.

As for being a stranger to many NDP supporters outside Quebec, that could be an advantage, he said.

“When someone isn’t well known, people tend to pay more attention to what you say and what you stand for so it’s up to me to show who I am and what I stand for. I’m used to these types of challenges and I’ll take it from there,” he said.

Saganash said his 84-year-old mother brought him up as a fighter — and she’s responsible for his taking on the leadership, he said: “her courage and bravery. That’s who I am today.”

Saganash said being aboriginal doesn’t define him, although people may mention it “as a fact” that he’s the first aboriginal to run for a party leadership.

“Yes, I’m a Cree,” Saganash said. But he said he always urges even his fellow Crees to vote for him, not because he’s Cree, but because of what he stands for and the NDP platform he defends.

“They should consider me on that basis,” he said.

At the moment, Saganash is developing a strategy for a winning campaign.

“The first step for me was to say yes or no and from there we’ll think about how to organize the campaign and we’ll take it from there, “ he said.

And the first poll results don’t deflate him: “I’ll work to the last minute and that’s what I intend to do.”

Saganash hopes people who support him in Quebec and all over Canada will buy NDP membership cards to support his candidacy.