Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash redeye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. Coming up in this episode, Ian Mass talks with former union leader and politician Judy Darcy about her new memoir, Leading from the Heart.
Speaker: Judy Darcy's new book, Leading from the Heart, chronicles her battles as a feminist, a union leader, and a politician from the 1960s until today.
Speaker: Judy joins us today to talk about both those personal and political battles. Hello, Judy. Good morning. Hello, Ian. Good morning to you. Yes. Well, you start the book with a story. I've heard you say this story a couple of times, but it's a great one about how you became Miss York University and entered the Miss Canada University beauty pageant in 1970.
Speaker: Quite a role for a budding feminist. You want to tell us that story? Sure. Well, it actually is a story that ties together the women's movement at the time in British Columbia and in Ontario. So I was in the Toronto Women's Liberation Movement, and there was a very active feminist group in Vancouver called the Vancouver Women's Caucus.
Speaker: And there was a Miss Canadian University pageant coming up. in Kitchener, Waterloo, Ontario. And ah Simon Fraser University, the Students' Council, had chosen Janille Jolly, who was a feminist, a member of Women's Caucus, to be the official Miss Simon Fraser University in order to enter it and to expose what beauty pageants were about.
Speaker: But she got disqualified at the last minute. First they said, oh, you're married, you can't be a contestant. Then they said, oh, you're only a part-time student, you can't be a contestant. Finally, they just said to Janille Jolly,
Speaker: Your aims and objectives are not the same thing as the aims and objectives of the Miss Canadian University pageant. So they needed somebody to go undercover. And I was sitting in a Toronto Women's Liberation Movement meeting and they were, how do we find somebody to go undercover?
Speaker: And all of a sudden people are turning and looking at me and saying, Judy, You're on the Students' Council at York University, aren't you? Do you think you could get to be Miss York University? And I was ah appalled, absolutely appalled, because the idea, I'd always been self-conscious about my weight, and the idea of me parading on a catwalk in a beauty contest, scantily clad, was, you know, I couldn't imagine doing this, even for the cause.
Speaker: Anyway, as it turns out, they canceled the beauty bathing suit competition, and then I was stuck because I'd made this like this was my principled objection, and now I had no other objection to hang on to. So long story short, I went undercover as Miss York University.
Speaker: Well, I went to the students' council. They debated it for hours, and then they finally said, Okay, you can be Miss York University, but don't tell us what you're what you're going to be up to. So I went undercover for several days in that pageant. And well, I can tell you the outcome here, or I could leave your listeners guessing so they can read about the outcome in the book. What would you prefer, Ian?
Speaker: Well, let's just say you didn't win, but you didn't lose. How's that? Ah, that's a good way to put it. That's a very good way to put it. yeah Well, it was an excruciatingly difficult experience for a young feminist who had just recently stopped wearing gobs of dark eye makeup and tattoos.
Speaker: teasing my hair into a big beehive as was this as was the fashion in the 60s. So it was quite an excruciating experience. But yes, okay, we'll let the readers, it's the first chapter of in Leading from the Heart. So That's right. It goes right into it.
Speaker: So then you move on. You talk about your journey from being a non-union library worker to eventually becoming the national president of the country's largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Speaker: Tell us some of those stories and the triumphs and tribulations of being a woman president. Well, generally in CUPE, it was a really good place for a young feminist to be.
Speaker: We'd had the first woman leader of a union in Canada was Grace Hartman. She was president of CUPE from 1975 to 1983. And so the union had really good policies on women's equality, but it was still a very, very male-dominated union.
Speaker: But it was a union with good policies on equal pay, on childcare, on harassment, you name it. Kipi was out front on a lot of those issues. Still, when I was elected national president in 1991, I was the only woman in Canada at the time in such a position. All the other major unions were led by men. And the majority of of the senior directors, the senior staff in the organization were men and they looked at me like, you know, why would we be, how did this young feminist, I mean, I was 43, but still that was young compared to many of them.
Speaker: How did this young feminist radical get to be our boss? and And there was a lot of resistance, a lot of sexism, a lot of resistance. and in some cases, some overt bullying and just incidents of of really outrageous harassment and sexist statements and words and so on.
Speaker: Over time, we worked very, very hard to increase the number of women in leadership, to increase the number of women in staff, and to make fighting for equality issues, but also fighting more broadly for social issues, issues that affected the population at large, like Medicare, like protecting and expanding our public health care system, issues like keeping water in public hands, keeping power in public hands.
Speaker: So over time, we began to really shift the culture of Canada's largest union and and make fighting for equality issues, equality and equity issues, really central to the organization's work and also started to make coalition building in the community, broad coalitions around issues that affected every person in this country. They became increasingly part of living and breathing, not just at the national union level. It's easy to have great policies. It's another thing to actually put them in practice on the ground and have members engaged and involved in mobilizing around them. But I think we made some really important, important progress and scored some important victories around public services and the broader social good in that time period.
Speaker: You use the term in your book, social unionism. Is what you're talking about, is that what it is Working on coalition building, social issues. Tell me, social unionism. I hadn't heard it before.
Speaker: Yes, that's exactly what it is. Clearly, the role of unions, people join unions in order to protect their day-to-day interests in the workplace, whether that's health and safety, whether that's respect and dignity on the job, whether that's ah wages that allow you to keep up with inflation and provide a good life for your family. Those are the issues, obviously, that preoccupy workers and unions every day. But some unions, including CUPE,
Speaker: have taken the approach and certainly did during the time that I was national president, which was 12 years, that we were uniquely placed as public sector workers to be in a position to fight for public services and for the broader social good.
Speaker: Because who knows best? how we need to improve and expand, improve how we care for frail elderly, our seniors, than the care aides who are there at their bedside providing most of their care every day. Who better than the blue-collar workers who know firsthand about crumbling infrastructure and the size of pipes and why we need to invest in infrastructure in order to be able to both conserve water and why it's critical to keep our water in public hands. So It was issues like that that certainly were grounded in CUPE members' day-to-day experience, but they were also absolutely about playing a leadership role in the social good for Canadians as a whole, and that's why some of us refer to it as social unionism.
Speaker: So after those 12 years in CUPE, you moved to British Columbia and pretty well immediately led the Hospital Employees Unit in trying to protect public health care and workers from then-Premier Gordon Campbell's health privatization policies.
Speaker: Talk about getting out of the frying pan and jumping into the fire. What what was this all about? Well, Ian, I actually considered that very phrase that you used as a potential title for that chapter because it was very much jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Speaker: Well, ah Gordon Campbell had just inflicted the most horrible attacks and pain on healthcare workers and on public healthcare care in British Columbia, had laid off over 8,000 healthcare workers.
Speaker: the overwhelming majority of them women and racialized workers. It was the biggest layoff of women workers in Canadian history. And the union was beginning to reorganize them, which was an uphill battle. And they faced obstacles every step of the way, workers being fired, being disciplined, lots of time spent at the labor board and legal challenges and so on.
Speaker: And they asked me to come and lead the union. The provincial executive asked me to come and lead the union. in order to rebuild really after those fierce attacks and to rebuild the confidence of members because the membership was also very divided.
Speaker: And so I was there for six and a half years. And, you know, to me, those healthcare workers I represented are really the heart of healthcare. They're the unsung heroes.
Speaker: And we started after the massive layoffs and reorganizing those workers. We decided to launch a living wage campaign because we knew that we couldn't win on our own taking on those multinational contractors. You know, the work had been privatized, contracted out, and it was multinational contractors, enormous ones.
Speaker: that they were now employed by. and they earned $18 plus pension benefits before the contracting out. And after the contracting out, it was about 10 bucks an hour with really lousy benefits, no pension plans. So we needed to build this broader tent, this broader coalition both for the sake of those workers, but also for the sake of other low-paid workers across British Columbia.
Speaker: We launched a living wage campaign. The theme was, work should lift you out of poverty, not keep you there. And it began there with those healthcare workers, but it spread so rapidly. new Westminster City Council was the first to adopt a policy that any work done for that city by contractors or direct employees, people would be paid a living wage, Van City took it up, and eventually hundreds of employers across BC became living wage employers. So that was, I think, a really important contribution that hospital employees unions made that benefited their members directly, but also so many working people across BC.
Speaker: And we also won a historic case at the Supreme Court of Canada that was about a legal challenge launched before I arrived at HEU, but carried on while I was there, that was challenging the bills, Bill 29 in particular, that Gordon Campbell had introduced that allowed him to wreak havoc and privatize so widely.
Speaker: And the Supreme Court of Canada, for the very first time in legal history, in labor relations history, declared that collective bargaining rights would be charter protected rights from that point forward. And that was also ah huge victory. Wonderful.
Speaker: Not to be satisfied with that victory, you got into politics. I mean, you'd run a couple of times, but then ah you ran in New Westminster. 2017, in two thousand and seventeen Under the and NDP government, you became Canada's first Minister of Mental Health and Addiction. So let me ask you a big question. So what did you do with that appointment?
Speaker: Well, when Premier Horgan asked me to take this on, i said to him, I'd be honoured, Premier. I will throw my heart and my soul into it.
Speaker: And he said, yes, I know that. you're You're passionate. You're determined. That's why I'm asking you to take this on. he And he also said to the media, I've given Judy one of the toughest jobs in cabinet.
Speaker: And boy, was he right. i learned that very, very early on. The day of the swearing-in ceremony, we'd been at government house and then came back. The doors of the legislature were thrown wide open to symbolize this is the people's house.
Speaker: And within about half an hour, I was in a corridor going to the east wing. And all of a sudden, I was being swarmed by people saying, who needed support with mental illness or addiction, either for themselves or a loved one, some of whom had been waiting for months and months or years, or had found it impossible to navigate the system, and just closing in on me and asking me for help. Now, this is before i even had a business card or an office or staff or anybody, and it just, I remember... Afterwards, when I saw my office for the first time, thinking, woo, this this is enormous. ah this is so I knew the stats. I knew one in five people in British Columbia are struggling with with some mental health issue of some sort at any point in time. And it just reinforced for me, this is an enormous problem. We have ah we have a long ah a big, big hill to climb. And of course, we were in the midst of a toxic drug crisis.
Speaker: Four people a day were dying. So I immersed myself very, very quickly in learning everything I could about the toxic drug crisis and just reading the coroner's reports and learning where the drugs came from and why people were using toxic drugs and trying to answer all of those questions for myself that I knew that people out there in the community would be asking. And then just starting to dig in as quickly as I could to start thinking taking action in order to save more lives and in order to take the first steps towards building a comprehensive system of mental health and addictions care, because we really did not have a comprehensive system. We had a patchwork of systems, some public, some private, some not-for-profit, but not connected and badly, badly underfunded for many, many years.
Speaker: Your book is called Leading from the Heart, and you do ask yourself a number of times, how do you lead when your heart is broken? So, how do you do that? How did you do that?
Speaker: Well, Ian, i my in my own family, I had certainly experienced some of the worst of mental illness and addiction. My father was a Holocaust survivor who lost several family members in the Holocaust and kept the fact that he was Jewish a secret for 40 years, including from his kids.
Speaker: So he was an he was a tormented soul, an angry, tormented soul, and a tyrant, and he took out his anger and his bitterness and his guilt on his through psychological abuse, especially of my mother and also of his kids.
Speaker: My mother was a gentle soul, intelligent, grew up in a fishing village in Denmark, and the first in her family to go to university by working three jobs. And she was in the Danish resistance. she She hid Jews in her apartment in Copenhagen.
Speaker: Her apartment was ransacked several times. And one time they came, they never found the Jews that were hidden. And she played a role in the Danish resistance that saved that saved thousands of Jewish lives. In fact, more Jewish lives were saved in Denmark than in any other occupied country in Europe, but at great expense. And she was tortured one night by the Nazis in order to try and get her to give up names, which she did not do.
Speaker: And for many reasons, she lived with mental illness and addiction most of her adult life. Not in my early childhood, but later on. She was institutionalized several times and she ended up taking her own life. So I knew trauma.
Speaker: I knew mental illness and addiction and the impact that it has on the people affected by it and on their families. And I carried my mother with, especially my mother, the book is dedicated to her. I carried her with me every single day on that job. And it it drove me to work harder, to aim higher, to be better, to challenge people around me. You know, four people a day are dying. It's a public health emergency. We need to act like it And it made it it made it all very raw, for sure, for me.
Speaker: But overall, I think the fact that I had that direct experience meant that I didn't blame people. i I had some pretty deep understanding of how people got to that place of trauma. And so I could, rather than blaming people who were using toxic drugs, I tried to understand like how they got to that place and what we needed to do to support them and what we needed to do to prevent trauma.
Speaker: young people especially, from how we needed to get support for young people at an early age before the issues they were struggling with turned to addiction and turned to a lifelong challenge.
Speaker: Well, the book is not just political. It's very personal. I was moved in many spots with it. So thank you very much for being with us, and thank you very much for writing this very personal and political story about battling for change. Thanks, Judy.
Speaker: Thank you so much. I've been speaking with Judy Darcy about her book, Leading from the Heart, The Battles of a Feminist Union Leader and Politician. It's available all through British Columbia and beyond. Douglas and McIntyre is the publisher. And if your bookstore doesn't have it, please just ask them to order it. It's a great read.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
