Джон Р. Родригес: Канадский политик и общественный деятель

Canadian politician

John R. Rodriguez (February 12, 1937 – July 5, 2017) was a Canadian politician. He served as the mayor of Greater Sudbury, Ontario from 2006 to 2010 and previously represented the electoral district of Nickel Belt in the House of Commons of Canada from 1972 to 1980 and from 1984 to 1993 as a member of the New Democratic Party.

Rodriguez was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), and moved to Canada in 1956. He was of Portuguese descent. He attended Toronto Teachers' College, worked for a time as a teacher in St. Catharines, and moved to Coniston in Northern Ontario in 1962, where he was appointed as principal of St. Paul School. He also attended Laurentian University and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Spanish Literature. Rodriguez became president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association in 1968. The following year, he led a protest outside Queen's Park to urge the provincial government of John Robarts to extend separate school funding to grades 11, 12 and 13. He also served on the Board of Governors of the Ontario Teachers' Federation in this period and promoted greater cooperation between teachers and organized labour. Rodriguez joined the New Democratic Party upon its formation in 1961. He ran for mayor of Coniston in 1967 and by his own acknowledgement was soundly defeated by the incumbent, Michael Solski. He was elected to the Coniston town council in 1971. When Inco shut down its Coniston operations later in the year and appealed part of its municipal business tax, Rodriguez argued that the company had a moral responsibility to continue paying into a community it had helped to create. He did not seek re election when Coniston was amalgamated into the new community of Nickel Centre.

Rodriguez contested the riding of Nickel Belt in the 1972 federal election and defeated incumbent Member of Parliament (MP) Gaetan Serré of the Liberal Party. The Liberals under Pierre Trudeau won a narrow minority government in this election and governed for the next two years with unofficial parliamentary support from the NDP. Rodriguez opposed this arrangement and broke party ranks on two occasions to support non confidence motions against the government. He became identified with the left wing of the NDP, was a vocal advocate of the party's pledge to nationalize Inco, and also called for the nationalization of Bell Canada and Canadian Pacific. In 1973, Rodriguez took part in a study group on Northern Ontario that identified the region as a "social, economic and political ghetto" in relation to the rest of the province and sought to improve its status. In the same year, he led a campaign to allow Chilean refugees to resettle in Canada after the overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected government. He spoke the words, "Vive Allende, vive Chile" at the end of one parliamentary speech. Rodriguez was re elected in the 1974 election, in which the Liberals won a majority government. The following year, he participated in efforts to prevent black activist Roosevelt Douglas from being deported from Canada. On one occasion, he recommended Liberal Solicitor General Warren Allmand to Douglas' supporters as a sympathetic contact in the Trudeau government. It was later discovered that a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) informer monitored both Allmand and Rodriguez on this matter, even though Allmand was the minister responsible for the RCMP at the time. Also in 1975, Rodriguez criticized a sexist Canada Post advertisement which showed a man writing a postal code on the bottom of a thonged woman. Postmaster General Bryce Mackasey apologized for the ad. Rodriguez was one of two MPs who called for the Atomic Energy Control Board to release all its information on the health hazards posed by radiation in Elliot Lake in 1976. The following year, he engaged in a filibuster against an income tax reform package that contained financial benefits for wealthy Canadians. Although filibusters are common practice in some parliamentary assemblies and later become more common in Canada, this was the first such incident to occur in the Canadian House of Commons in several years. Rodriguez spoke on the bill for six hours and ten minutes over a period of two days, setting a contemporary record. In the late 1970s, Rodriguez argued that the federal government should purchase Inco's excess nickel stock to prevent job losses at a time when global prices were low. Prime Minister Trudeau rejected this proposal, arguing that it would depress the market even further. Rodriguez also joined with other Sudbury area NDP politicians to support the 1978 Inco Strike, arguing that the workers would have suffered massive layoffs had they not taken this action. Rodriguez broke with his party caucus when he opposed the suspension of Progressive Conservative MP Roch LaSalle from the House of Commons in 1978. LaSalle had referred to finance minister Jean Chrétien as a liar on three occasions and refused to apologize. The rest of the NDP caucus supported LaSalle's suspension. Rodriguez was re elected to a third term in the 1979 federal election, as the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark won a minority government. He was appointed as NDP Labour Critic in the parliament that followed. In late 1979, Rodriguez emerged as the most prominent member of the NDP's "Left Caucus", a successor group of sorts to The Waffle. In a The Globe and Mail interview, Rodriguez said that the new group differed from The Waffle in that its ultra left elements were minor and that it would abide by the results of NDP conventions, even if it did not agree with them. The Left Caucus was nonetheless opposed by the party leadership, which argued that it would hurt the NDP's chances of winning an election. Rodriguez spearheaded the group's only successful motion at the NDP's 1979 convention, protesting a jail sentence handed out to Jean Claude Parrot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. The Clark government lost a non confidence motion in late 1979, and Canadians returned to the polls for another election in 1980. Rodriguez was defeated in Nickel Belt by Liberal candidate Judy Erola. Some local Progressive Conservatives later indicated that they ran a deliberately weak campaign to consolidate the opposition vote around Erola. Rodriguez criticized the Liberal campaign for portraying him as a borderline Marxist. After leaving office Rodriguez returned to a high school principal position.

In 1994, Rodriguez called for provincial NDP cabinet minister Shelley Martel to resign for violating the privacy rights of an Ottawa consultant. He endorsed Svend Robinson's bid for the federal NDP leadership the following year, following Audrey McLaughlin's resignation. Robinson led on the first ballot of the party's leadership convention but gave his support to rival candidate Alexa McDonough when he realized that he did not have enough support to win. Rodriguez later became principal of St. David Catholic School in the Sudbury area and was strongly critical of his forced retirement in 2005. "I'm not ready to retire", he said, "and I do resent being discriminated against because of my age". After leaving this position, he was hired as a remunerator with Statistics Canada. He also volunteered for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario and received a commemorative medal for the Queen's jubilee in 2003. In 2005, he praised former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien for his role in supporting Canada in the 1995 Quebec referendum.