Megan Mitton, MLA for the Memramcook-Tantramar riding, was re-elected in September with 41.6% of the votes.
Mitton has been MLA through 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a snap election, and the near closure of overnight services at the Sackville Memorial Hospital.
CHMA news called Mitton to review the ups and downs of this year.
Listen to the full interview here:
Meg Cunningham: Back to the beginning of the year, which feels like forever ago, [was] the threat of closure of the Sackville Memorial Hospital. I was curious to know where we are at with that, or where the government is at with that in terms of the security of the Sackville Memorial Hospital.
Megan Mitton: Yeah, it is hard to remember. Everything pre-pandemic does feel very long ago. But that is one of the major things that happened in our riding, and then in several areas in the province earlier this year. We were successful in getting the government to at least promise that they weren’t going to be shutting down our ERs [emergency rooms] overnight… we asked them to say that in the house. They have maintained that, that is true. However, we still don’t have a very clear picture of what’s going to happen. So bringing us up to right now, I know that the Minister of Health has requested visions, the vision for health care, from some different groups. Including municipalities, workers within the healthcare system, and reaching out to fellow MLAs. So that is where we’re at right now. It’s very unclear what the next step is in terms of consultation. I held a community meeting, and then we put together a committee. Some of the people that have been leading that, for example, Chief Rebecca from Fort Folly and, and the acting Mayor Ron Akin. Some of the calls coming from those groups that exist in the six rural areas, it was that they wanted to help shape the consultation process. I haven’t seen evidence of that so far. So that’s what I’m pushing on right now is, what does that consultation process look like? If it’s just being asked for visions in letter form, that’s certainly not going to be enough.
MC: I’ve heard a lot of concerns [that were] expressed to me and to others about the fact that we now have a Conservative majority government. The concern has to do with the fate of the hospital. So does a Conservative majority have any impact on the fate of the hospital or are they unrelated?
MM: That’s a good question. I do think that having a minority government did slow the government down earlier this year. The other thing that slowed them down though, was that organizations, healthcare providers, and other organizations like Ambulance New Brunswick, were coming out and saying “We weren’t consulted, you’re planning to do this in a month? That’s not enough time. This is just unacceptable.” There was pushback all across our communities and I think that that really slowed them down too. There was solidarity between the communities across the province saying “No, you’re not doing this.” I do think that a Conservative majority government …we know that one of the main things that is in Premier Higgs’s head is “Focus on GDP, focus on getting the debt down, focus on not spending one more penny,” and that is worrisome. They want to go into negotiations with the nurses who have a contract right now, and have a year where they don’t get any increase. We hear CUPE coming out saying, “You don’t give zeros to heroes.” We have health care providers who’ve been working through the pandemic looking at having a year without any raise. This type of approach is absolutely unacceptable. We need to fight back against that.
I don’t think the fight is over. It was on pause, and we’ll need to just make sure we’re really coordinated and be proactive about it. Saying what we want to happen for our communities and understanding their rural health care, it looks different than what’s happening in an urban area. What do we need? One of the limitations of our healthcare system for a long time, I think has been…and the way governments think about it is only thinking about it as acute care. While that’s very important, we need an ambulance to show up, we need an ER there when we need it in an emergency and an urgent situation, there needs to be a focus on some preventative health care. We need to be making sure people have primary health care providers, whether that’s a nurse practitioner or a family doctor. We need to be looking at the whole system to make sure that people are getting different types of care, earlier interventions, mental health needs to be properly funded. Some of this requires spending, some of it requires recruitment and retention of workers.
Then, I guess to add into that, is looking at stepping back and looking at all of society. If we’re letting people live in poverty, people [don’t] have the food they need, have the mental stress. These are the social determinants of health that also have major impacts on other things like the healthcare system. So we’ve really been missing that holistic thinking, that big picture thinking, when it comes to healthcare. I think there’s an opportunity to talk about that, and to make sure that that’s part of the system going forward. I could always talk a lot about health care, but we can move on if you’d like.
MC: Shifting topic from health care… to something that I haven’t heard about in a while, and that’s the Aboriginal Languages Bill. I’m wondering where you’re at with that. Maybe I just missed something, but the last time I remember reading would have been… it was much warmer the last time I read about it.
MM: Another thing that happened this year, is there was a snap election in the middle of a pandemic. What happens when there’s an election, is that everything on the order paper dies. So all the bills that were going to whatever level stage of reading or committee, they go away. The government had several bills that were on the order paper that died, that we’re actually redoing right now, because of the election. That was one of them, the Indigenous language education. I want to make the point that this is meant to ensure that the languages… we’re on the unceded territory, in the Sackville area we’re in Mi’kma’ki, the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. Here in Fredericton, where I am right now, we’re on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik. It’s [the languages bill] to ensure that there’s some sort of understanding of the languages that have been spoken here for for centuries and centuries, and to draw attention to the fact that there’s not many native speakers left.
The other thing is that when it comes to the the Indigenous languages, the priority and what government really needs to do is work with the federal government to ensure that there’s teacher training for for the the Mi’kmaq Wolastoqey speakers, and to ensure that students in these communities do have access to being able to learn in their languages. Those languages are at risk of being lost. All that to say, the Minister of Education, Minister Cardy, has said that he is looking at bringing that type of thing into the curriculum. So, what I think will likely happen is that it will be brought in by government and that’s something that happens a lot of the time when you have green members in the house. We bring ideas and then government may adopt them.
MC: The COVID-19 Task Force here in the region was a big project that I believe started with you. What does your involvement look like right now? Is it hand-off or hands-on?
MM: Well, I think there’s been a lot of transformation as the pandemic has progressed, as things have evolved. Right now, I am attending meetings, and I’m helping contribute to the vision of where things need to go next. While vaccines are being rolled out, this week in fact, we know that we’re not out of the woods, yet. There are still some ramifications of the pandemic that are being felt or have yet to be felt. Really, the rollout of the vaccinations won’t be till next fall, maybe up to a year that we’re still seeing that. So I think there still is a role for the COVID-19 Task Force. That’s really where things are at right now, is figuring out what are the major needs in the community, because the whole purpose of it was to help respond at a local level.
MC: During the pandemic, the climate crisis has kind of been put on the back burner. It’s not so much in the spotlight just because there’s so much immediate crisis going on. I wanted to ask you, because you’re very passionate about climate change, if there are any climate change initiatives that folks might have just missed in the news since it’s been such a wild and COVID- focused time.
MM: I feel like in terms of climate initiatives, right now is the time to look at what the federal government is doing. They’ve been bringing out a bit of information. They released their plan on Friday. I haven’t had a chance to check through exactly what they’re talking about. In New Brunswick, though, not really unfortunately, with the majority Conservative government. We’ve seen government after government just drag their heels on this. I know that they just don’t understand what it means, what we’re facing and what’s going to happen. But we’re already seeing impacts, we’ve seen people even just in our riding, whose wells have run dry. We’re not talking about just one person, we’re talking dozens of people who lost water this year. We’re seeing now that it’s not just the pandemic that’s going to cause food prices to spike, it’s also climate change. Even when the impact isn’t here, we didn’t have a ton of forest fires here, but other places like California did. That impacts the price of food. We’re seeing more and more impacts, but we were also seeing that sometimes governments just move so slowly on things.
What gives me a bit of hope is, governments were able to move really quickly on the pandemic. So that means it can be done. We can, if we agree that we have a problem and we need to pull out all the stops to deal with it, we can do that. However, it’s clear that there’s not an understanding of how serious the problem is yet. So I’m still raising it in the legislature, I had a statement last week where I was trying to appeal to the economic part of this because I know that’s maybe where the conservative government’s brains are that. This is a major economic threat. The World Economic Forum is saying that climate change is the biggest threat for businesses and for the economy. So even if you only care about the economy, you better care about climate change.
MC: You mentioned food, and I’m glad because my next question is about food. I spoke with Kevin Arsenau over the summer about what he would like to see in terms of food security sovereignty, and he’s a farmer himself, which is why I decided to speak with him. But I’m curious to know what you would like to see for your riding, and maybe for New Brunswick in terms of food security in the future.
MM: Oh, there’s so many things that need to be done. Which also means there’s so much that we can do, which is great. There’s opportunities, and there’s things that are big and small. Longer term, there’s a lot that can be done. I think one of the urgent things right now though, is that going back to talking about that drought, there’s a hay shortage. Farmers right now are facing a really difficult situation trying to figure out, “What are we going to do? Do we reduce the number of cattle that we have? Or do we keep them, and how do we get hay? Is it too expensive?” That’s one of the urgent things that needs to be dealt with. We’ve been calling on government to intervene, because here’s a precedent that’s been set for provincial governments helping to buy hay from another part of the country, that doesn’t have a shortage at that time. We need to see some interventions like that.
I think that governments have been woefully inactive on supporting agriculture, and especially sort of smaller farms. It seems that you need to get quite big in order to survive under the current conditions. There needs to be some support, there needs to be different programs. We grow so little of our own food. The focus of this government, we saw in the throne speech, [and] previous governments as well is to focus on exporting things. We’re trying to get as many blueberries shipped out as we can, when we don’t have the means to grow our own food here. That’s really where the shift needs to be, to growing our own food and feeding New Brunswickers. I think there’s real opportunities there. There’s people that want to do it and the government needs to participate and cooperate.
MC: Your riding, I noticed, is quite large in the sense that it represents a lot of very different cultures and people. We have a Fort Folly First Nation, Sackville, which is for the most part Anglophone, we have Port Elgin, which is exceptionally rural, and Memramcook, which is mostly Francophone. I’m wondering how you dealt with this year, or past years as well, representing so many vastly different communities?
MM: One of the starting points is really to try to talk to people, and try to understand what’s happening in the different communities. I almost think of it as having multiple parts to the riding because there are different needs in the different parts of the riding. Yet, there are some things that cross the whole riding. The need for better rural internet, the need for mowing and brush cutting, for roads to have yellow lines and be patched properly or repaved. Even though some parts are more rural than others, there are parts that sort of cross the riding.
I do speak French, which is absolutely an asset to be able to represent the people of Memramcook. There are French-speaking constituents across the riding. I have taken French lessons, all MLAs are able to take French or English, depending on their native tongue. I have taken French lessons to ensure that I improved my ability to listen and to speak and represent people Memramcook. I’ve had meetings with the different leaders in different communities. I think the Tantramar COVID-19 Task Force helped bring quite a few people together, as well as the hospital committee. Even though we didn’t want to be brought together by these things, it did help improve communication and understanding of what’s needed in the riding this year. I was glad to build those relationships with the different municipal leaders, including Chief Rebecca from Fort Folly First Nation as well, and she agreed to co-chair the hospital committee. I think the more that we can work together, rather than seeing ourselves as separate, especially in rural areas… there’s more power in that. I think one of the gaps that exists sometimes is that people living in LSDs, or local service districts, don’t have that level of municipal representation. Technically, their mayor would be the Minister of local government. That’s a real gap that exists in our current system. That means that the province is responsible for a lot of things or, or local committees, but that’s it. That’s a real gap of representation for these folks.
In terms of accomplishments from this year, Mitton had the following to say:
MM: I was proud to have advocated for everyone in New Brunswick to get free flu shots. This was not happening, some people had to pay for flu shots out of pocket. So I was advocating for that earlier in the year, pre-pandemic, and the government included it in their budget in the spring. So now, everyone gets free flu shots. I’m really proud to have advocated for that, and that it happened. I think that’s great, and exciting, that everyone should be able to get free healthcare. We have quite a system where a lot of our health care actually isn’t free, from mental health to medication to medical supplies. It’s good that those at least are free now.
I tabled a conversion therapy bill last winter, so pre-pandemic. The federal government has committed to including in the Criminal Code, and so things are advancing on that. It would still be great for the province to step up and do something about it. I don’t know if they will, but it looks like things are moving forward at the federal level, which is a positive step. I’m glad to have helped advocate and move move forward to ban conversion therapy. There’s still so much more to be done to be able to support 2LGBTQ+ youth, and making sure that that we have proper mental health supports that are inclusive in our communities and in our schools.
MC: 2020 spawned one of the largest civil rights movements in our history. I’m wondering if you can talk about the anti-racism movement, that is worldwide at the moment, and how that’s impacted you as an MP.
MM: I would say there’s two parts to this. So in New Brunswick, Chantel Moore and Rodney Levi were killed by police, an Indigenous woman and an Indigenous man, within about a week of each other. That has spurred a call for there to be an Indigenous-led independent inquiry into systemic racism in our justice and policing systems. I fully support this call. I am very disheartened and disappointed, and these words aren’t even strong enough, probably, that the government refuses to listen to what all the Chiefs in the province have been asking for months. There have been calls from Black Lives Matter in New Brunswick for some similar looking into systemic racism across many systems, because that’s the thing, it’s built into our society. It’s in our healthcare system, it’s in our education system. One of the things that I tried to do is focus on bringing the voices of those who are making those calls to the legislature, especially because Indigenous people, people of color, and Black people are unrepresented in our legislature. I brought their voices and read their calls to action in the legislature. We’re continuing to push for that. I think there may be some opportunities for where I think this government might make some changes in terms of the curriculum. So on an educational level, which I think is positive. I think there were hints either in their platform of throne speech, I can’t recall right now. So I think there’s a tiny bit of hope there, because it is important to be talking about anti-racism at a young age and teaching that through school. However, we can see that there’s going to be dragging of heels and resistance to listening to what these communities are calling for. We only saw that last week, especially where the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs was the one who made an amendment to gut a bill or a motion rather, that was calling for an inquiry. I don’t understand why they’re digging in their heels, but they are.
This year, Mitton says, has emphasized pre-existing issues in her riding.
Stress levels are high, and Mitton is adamant that the closing of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia border is contributing to that stress.
MM: I do think that mental health issues and really any issues that existed before the pandemic have been exacerbated. I do have some concerns about burnout and some mental health issues with what’s happening in our schools. Basically, in our society, most people are expected to keep going as if we’re not living in a pandemic, with high levels of productivity. Yet, there’s a high level of stress on everyone. I know that students and parents and teachers and staff are feeling that, so I know the holiday break, at least, is coming up. But I know that that’s very difficult, and I know that some changes need to be made. I have met with the teachers associations, and I’m pushing for some of their calls. But I think people are feeling pretty worn down by this time of the year. It’s been a long year.
The other thing that’s happened more recently is that the Atlantic Bubble burst, which has meant a lot of strain on people living near the border. There’s a theme, whether it’s with schools or hospitals or the border. Sometimes it’s people making decisions in Fredericton who don’t understand what’s happening in our communities. I’ve been working on being a voice for our community and at the same time, we’re being painted with this same brush, as the Maine border and the Quebec border, whereas our border is different. The ones that go to Nova Scotia just to go to Amherst and people from Amherst to be able to come to Tantramar. Some families have been separated. I know it’s been hard on people who even don’t have to cross the border, but there’s an extra strain that exists in our community. That’s something that I’m still working on, especially with the Bubble bursting. There’s more work to be done to make sure if we’re in this situation for another year, there are things that people cannot continue to do or not be able to do for another year. Small businesses are being affected, workers are being affected, families, healthcare, patients and workers. I’m not going to let that one go.
MM: I talked about a shortage of healthcare workers earlier. There’s more that could be done with recruitment and retention, and then talk about the strain on some of the care workers. We’ve seen care workers in [the] long term care sector, healthcare sector, and transition homes continue to be undervalued, and yet their work is so important. We’ve seen calls for pay equity, which I’ve been calling for and supporting, especially in those like the transition to homes and long term care, and home care. We need to ensure that this work that’s traditionally been done by women, and therefore done for free or been undervalued, that it’s been adequately compensated. This year we said some people were essential workers, but their compensation does not always reflect that, and I think we really need to reflect on that and then ensure that their wages reflect their value in our society.
