Metis woman takes aim at federal seat

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When the New Democrats put out the call for more women, more Natives and more visible minority candidates in the next federal election, Colleen Glenn thought they were calling her.

And they were. On April 23 23, the Metis woman was nominated as the ND candidate for the federal riding of Edmonton Southwest.

"The party really wants people like me - Native, a woman, a single parent - people who are not being heard from," Glenn said in an interview following her uncontested nomination.

The 48-year-old residential aid grew up in Calgary and Strathmore in southern Alberta. She traces her family back to John Glenn, an Irishman believed to be the second white man to come to the Calgary area, and his Cree wife from Lac La Biche. Glenn has three adult children and currently lives in Edmonton's Parkallen community.

When Glenn modestly describes herself as always having been an issues-oriented person, that's something of an under-statement.

From Native rights to women's rights, students' rights, the labor movement, the peace movement and political activity, she's covered a lot of issues territory.

"And those issues haven't gone away," said Glenn in explaining why she wants to be elected as a Member of Parliament.

Her activism included the Native Committee of Indian Rights for Indian Women, the 1970s group that hammered away at Section 12.1B of the Indian Act until the government enacted Bill C-31. That bill restored status to many dispossessed Indian women and their children.

While attending the University of Alberta law school, Glenn was founding president of the University's Native Students Club.

A sometime writer, actress and avid reader, she has also worked i radio, newspapers and theatre. With the now-defunct Alberta Native Communications Society, she performed in school broadcasts on ACCESS radio and was a newspaper columnist.

A former shop steward in the postal union, she has also been an avid worker in ND election campaigns.

On the campaign trail, Glenn plans to focus on taxes.

"The lower and middle classes are taxed to death....It really gets me fired up when people say we can't afford these Cadillac social services, said Glenn. "Do we want to be like the United States where people are turned away from (hospital) emergency services because they can't afford to pay?"

She advocates the ND philosophy of a redistribution of wealth and a fairer taxation system.

"The wealthy are very lightly taxed, or pay no taxes at all," she said.

Glenn supports Native self-government. She said the aboriginal people recognized many of the early European settlers were dispossessed people escaping the oppression of the wealthy and powerful in their own countries.

"But then they came here and set up the same system," Glenn said. And, in the process, they created another class of the dispossessed, the Native people.

"But where are we to go? There is no new territory for us to go and discover."

Native self-government is going to cost money, said Glenn, but the money is there to pay for it. The wealthy, "those who benefited the most from living in this country, the Reichmanns, the Eatons, the Irvings, the Olands," should pay for it, she believes.

Wetaskiwin Tory MP Willie Littlechild, one of only three Native MPs in Canada, recently announced that he will not seek re-election, after serving only one term. Littlechild, a classmate of Glenn's in law school, identified a conflict with the expectations of Native leaders that he should focus on Native issues and his own commitments to serve his own constituents, 94 per cent of them non-Native.

Asked if she might expect to face the same frustrations if she is elected to represent Edmonton Southwest, she said, "Because I come from Indian ancestry I don't have all the answers for every Native problem:"

She will go to Ottawa to serve the people who elected her.