Interview with Matthew Rowlinson, NDP candidate for London West

Rowlinson: I think so, and I hope so. I hope so not just because I've noticed that, in canvassing, young people seem to skew New Democratic, but also because youth have been underrepresented in our politics for a long time now.

Whether under Stephen Harper, under Paul Martin, under Jean Chretien, I can't remember when youth issues have formed an important part of our politics.

And I think that's why young people seem to take a longer view on politics. I'm a teacher, and so I spend a lot of time interacting with people between the ages of 17 and 25. And I learn as much as I teach.

And youth take a long view on politics, which is one of the reasons why climate change is a huge issue for young people, and it's an issue that's been virtually absent from our politics. This is mind-boggling, and when I talk to youth, they're furious about it, and I think that may be one of the reasons why they're going to vote in this election. People are thinking about climate change, and when I talk to them about the NDP's cap-and-trade plan – the idea that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by putting a cost on them – that's not hard to understand, people get that.

And young people in particular think 10, 20, 50 years ahead and they see the predictions. The IPCC talks about how a rise in global temperatures of two degrees Celsius will threaten our civilization, and that's something that could very well happen 50 years from now. So young people are very concerned about that issue, in ways that most people who I talk to on the doorstep who are my age, unfortunately are not.

Young Canadians are also concerned about their civil liberties. I think that's partly because they live more of their lives online (than older Canadians), and so they're more attuned to issues of surveillance, government snooping, and information sharing – for instance, the ways in which your tax filings can leak into other areas of your life – and they know that's what happens when you put things online.

Hurley: Speaking of which, are you encountering a lot of opposition to Bill C-51 in your riding?

Rowlinson: Yes, it's huge, and the activists around this issue are largely young people. I was involved in some rallies against Bill C-51 well before the election campaign started, and those rallies were primarily organized by youth, and some of the stalwarts of the Occupy movement, and they were great. And theirs are the voices that we need to be listening to on this issue.

Hurley: Well, that's encouraging to hear. Moving on, this election campaign is the longest in Canadian history, and the parties have now been campaigning for almost eleven weeks.

Based on your discussions with voters over the last two and a half months, what are voters in London West most concerned about in this election? 

Rowlinson: That's an easy one, and every politician who gets asked this question – whether national or local – gives the same answer, and it's jobs. Because it's true.

Here in London, the issue of jobs is particularly acute. The unemployment numbers came out a couple days ago, and overall they weren't great, but in London we lost 2,700 jobs in the last month.

And the economy here is sort of bumping along, but we're not back to where we were before 2008 in terms of total employment. The global economic crash cost us an enormous number of jobs, and in terms of the total number of people at work, we're still not back to where we were before the crash.

In terms of good manufacturing jobs, we've been hemorrhaging jobs for a decade or more, but most of the damage has been done since about 2005, and Southwestern Ontario has lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs since then.

So there are a lot of people here who are hurting. Plenty of people have jobs, but the jobs that have been created since 2008 are mostly minimum wage, and a lot of people are working contract jobs, or working two contracts without benefits. It's very tough to support your family and pay your mortgage with a job like that.