A conversation with YLC presidential candidate John Lennard

Yesterday I had a conversation with John Lennard about his campaign for the Young Liberals of Canada presidency and to get his thoughts on some of the issues facing both the youth wing and the party as a whole.

I've known John for a few years now, first meeting him on the campaign trail during the last leadership race, when he was supporting Bob Rae and I was supporting a long-shot by the name of Stephane Dion, and I enjoyed his blogging as well. He's a dedicated and passionate young Liberal.

I was typing notes so these won't be exact quotes, but rather a paraphrasing of his comments.

Also, I have reached-out to the campaign of the other YLC presidential candidate, Sam Lavoie, to offer the opportunity for a similar interview if he's interested.

Jeff: I read at Scott Tribe's blog about your decision to support One Member, One Vote (OMOV) and oppose the YLC amendment for a quota for youth, so I don't want to focus on that too much. But what would you say to those that say the youth influence needs to be protected under OMOV?

John: Under the delegate system only two to five per cent of Young Liberals get to become delegates. The beauty of OMOV is every member has their voices head. I think that's important to understand and maintain. The beauty of Liberalism is every single individual gets to have an opinion and a vote. I think that's an important democratic principle to uphold, and that's why I support OMOV. Young or old, black or white, everyone would get to have a vote.

(As for protecting the youth influence) I don't accept the premise of that. We can always make sure we have a strong voice in the party and that starts with recruitment. We should go out and recruit and say this is a party that listens to youth and gives you a voice. That appeals to young people more than anything else. I don't think we should be appealing to youth with a brawn mentality, but rather to their brains, and to what they want to achieve.

Jeff: What do you say to those that worry OMOV with no quota for youth will lead to the same for the policy development process?

John: At this time I'm in favour of continuing with the idea of policy conventions, it makes sense at this time. I haven't seen anything from the party what would change that at this point. We saw something briefly happen with En Famille but I'm not sure it worked that well. A few people seemed to dominate the process, and that's not what we want. It's important to maintain a broad policy process that will lead to a policy convention where people can have their say, and where Young Liberals can maintain the representation at convention we've always had.

We should be looking to engage more people in the policy process. If it means looking at ways to do online voting we need to start looking at that. And we need to engage outside people as well. Trade associations, campus groups. I think Young Liberals can take the lead in something like this, organizing policy conferences with people from broad and diverse backgrounds.

Jeff: The YLC pulls from ages 14-25, but the bulk of the activity seems to be around the college and university demographic. While there's obviously challenges around recruiting in high schools, how can you make the YLC more relevant to that 14-19 group, which is half of your age range? Also, is 25 too old for a cutoff?

John: The YLs represent all members, age 14-25. I see in that very broad groups of young people. High school we need to do better, university and college we do well there but we could do better, we need more active campus clubs across the country. And finally, 22-25, when people start to become young professionals and graduate from college.

High school is a difficult situation. We can't go into a high school like we can a university, there's rules around political discourse and involvement. We've got to respect that, but there's nothing stopping us from touching base with student council presidents and saying we'd like you to get involved, maybe put together a group of area student council members and use them as sounding board for ideas and to get people involved.

It's identifying what's really important to each group of Young Liberals. As a young professional, at this point in my life, it's the opportunity for networking, whether its finding a job or a summer position or meeting people in more professional positions, that would be interesting to me. We've seen movement toward starting a group of young professional Liberals in Ontario, and I think that's an initiative the YLC should be promoting. We need to engage these people as well.

The diversity of the YLC needs to be promoted. We need to make events more inclusive for all ages. Not every event will be appropriate for all, but I do think it's important to maintain that respect for their different issues.

Jeff: We've touched on some youth-specific issues, but the YLC president also sits on the national executive and has a voice and a say on a lot of the renewal decisions facing the LPC. What are your thoughts on some of the wide party reform issues, and particularly the push-pull between the centre and the PTAs?

John: I'd like to see most of the administration tasks centralized in Ottawa. I think that makes sense. We spend $3 million on maintaining PTA offices and most of that is duplication of stuff we could be doing in Ottawa.

But when it comes to outreach and field staff it's essential to have offices in each province and territory across the country, so people have a connection to the party. In Alberta, the party office is the only face of the Liberal Party in the province. We have no MPs, so there's no Liberal MP offices. You need to go to Edmonton. So having that very basic connection to the party in every province makes sense, it's important for the unity of the party.

I mentioned the policy development process and that's very important to me, we need to engage more people.

Fundraising is something we need to start doing more of. I'd like to see an initiative where the Young Liberals take the lead on fundraising, and every dollar a Young Liberal can raise is matched by the party itself so we automatically double our fundraising. It would increase our outreach activities and allow us to bring new people into the party.

I'd like to see more of a focus on accountability within the party in general. I'm concerned when I hear about decisions being made behind closed doors to change things that should be done in public.

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