Liberal catch Weil "not a policy wonk"

(photo: Robert Galbraith)

Adam Desaulniers

NDG Liberal anointee Kathleen Weil is an expert’s expert – a self-confessed fan of policy wonks who insists she’s not one herself, thrice courted by senior officials before accepting her express ticket to the National Assembly and a virtually guaranteed cabinet post.

A walking encyclopedia of civic demographics after eight years at the head of the Foundation of Greater Montreal and three years publishing Vital Signs – an annual statistical analysis of each of the region’s neighbourhoods – her grasp of the city’s changing composition is clearly unrivaled, and no political novice ever brought to the table more compelling expertise in the intricacies of healthcare funding and social service delivery on the ground.

“Certainly being at the Foundation, you look at a community in a very integrated way,” she says. “Your transport plan, your environmental plan, your healthcare plan, your economic plan – you see them all as interrelated.” The FGM, created with a strategic $20-million pooled investment fund between the Montreal YMCA, Centraide and Red Feather, networks with charities and funds community projects, “getting to know what kind of initiatives the community is proposing and supporting those initiatives” with grants and other resources.

Foundations, she explains, don’t do fundraising – they create endowment funds that allocate investment returns to various charitable causes, a sort of “permanent nest egg for the community.” In her time at the FGM, she brought a rigorously scientific approach to measuring the needs of communities and defining metrics for the social returns on their investments – the genesis of her exhaustive Vital Signs compendium. “What are the numbers you have to look at?” she asks. “What’s the socioeconomic breakdown, the age breakdown, the number of immigrants? I always start with learning about a community, whether it’s the greater Montreal community, or NDG – I like looking in depth,” taking statistics from various Ministries, crunching the numbers, and looking at social trends – “and then you have a better sense of whether the programs that exist are adapted to their needs… because the needs change, the data constantly change, populations change.” And are they adapting? “Well,” she says with serene self-assurance, “that’s what I’m going to find out, obviously.”

Not much of a political animal on first impression, she’s never taken a run at public office before. “This is my first, and I actually have never been involved in political organization, I’ve always been more on the policy side,” she admits, though she denies being a textbook policy wonk: “Well, I’m not a policy wonk, really – I like policy wonks, but I’m not one. No, there’s another caliber of person that’s a policy wonk, really – because I really love people, and I love hearing their stories and what their challenges are, and then making the connection with the policy wonks, with the planners.”

The previously reluctant candidate explains her prior refusal as mostly a question of timing. “When your kids are young – especially four of them – jumping into politics would be a little irresponsible,” she says. “And the career choices I made at that time were too interesting for me to abandon.”

Now things have changed for her family and her career. “This time around the youngest is 13 and the oldest is 22,” and the experience she’s accumulated in the meantime, she contends, has made her more formidable as a candidate. “I’ve been building the Foundation now for 8 years, and previous to that I was the chair of the Regional Health Board, and very involved in healthcare reform.” By very involved, she means where the rubber hits the road, not just compiling reports. She becomes passionately animated talking about future developments in healthcare, having seen, she says, the cutting edge of innovation right here in Montreal.

“I see some interesting changes. You now have these CSSSs (Centres de Santé et de Services Sociaux), to better organize your primary healthcare structures in your communities. They do planning [based on] data that StatsCan puts together: What’s the poverty level? How many seniors do you have? How many do you have over 75? And what’s coming up – how many baby boomers do you have? So they do that kind of planning, and emergency care, and connecting with the hospitals in their particular area. The other big change I’ve seen is that there now are these Groupes de Médecine de Famille, and the idea behind GMFs is you have doctors working in collaboration with other healthcare professionals, where once a patient is admitted to a GMF, on a permanent basis they have their family doctor in that group. It’s about one third of Montrealers who don’t have family physicians, so the idea behind GMFs is that they’re given some resources and money, and access to information technology and diagnostic technology.”

The GMFs, she says, “clearly are part of the solution in recruiting new doctors,” admitting that “obviously in the medical schools, there’s a lot of work to be done, in terms of making it known that this kind of medicine can be very attractive, with more tools at their disposal and better results.”

“My father was a doctor before the days of Medicare,” she recalls. “He’d say, ‘Okay kids, hop in the car,’ and we’d go down to Verdun and the whole Southwest,” where she and her siblings would wait patiently during his housecalls.

“We saw a lot of poverty. They’d come out with whatever gifts the family could muster because they didn’t have the money to pay – and he was always making us aware of poverty issues.”

It shaped her perspective, she maintains, and it’s a reassuring one to hear from the kind of person who isn’t always thought of as putting faces on the numbers. “I have a strong social justice background,” she says. “Most people know me as that, and my parents were the same. I think I’ll be very enthusiastic about any mandates I’m given – whatever commissions I’d be asked to sit on,” she muses, leaving aside any further speculation. With her predecessor enjoying a 61-to-16 percent victory over Green candidate Peter McQueen, she can be forgiven a bit of complacency.

“There’s a meet-the-candidates night next week, so that’ll be my first time meeting Mr. McQueen,” she says at the time of her interview, mere weeks after accepting the invitation to run, and literally minutes before her inaugural door-to-door canvassing trip. “I’m just starting up. I’m getting our pamphlets today. That’s how quick this is…” – they in fact arrive as she speaks – “…I guess it’s been about three weeks or so since I made the decision, and everything then happened so fast.” A compelling moment to witness in the infancy of this assuredly high-profile political career, it’s greeted with the same air of quiet competence as the rest of the bustle around her freshly-minted campaign office. If any of her upcoming itinerary is giving her nerves, it doesn’t show as she makes her way outside to pound the pavement.

“I’m looking forward to it!”

Voting takes place 9:30 am – 8 pm Sunday, December 8. Polling station info: 888-ELECTION or monvote.qc.ca