Article content continued

And he misses “the interaction I had with people in the community, which I always loved.

“I loved that before I was an MP.”

What he says he doesn’t miss is the style of politics in vogue right now, where people try to score points by knocking an opponent off their game based on dogma or talking points or, as he says, “all that stale stuff.”

A question about regrets takes him back to his international-affairs work to recall how the promise of a private-member’s bill on conflict minerals was never realized. He had travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009 and witnessed the human toll caused by the illegal mining of minerals such as coltan, a key ingredient in smart phones and other electronic gadgets.

As Dewar said in the House of Commons in June 2014: “All of us have these little devices that we carry around, and thus we carry a little piece of the conflict with us — unknowingly for many. That is really what this is about. I am tying the purchases that we make to the conflict that is happening in the Congo, which, as has been stated before, is the rape capital of the world. It is where rape is used as a weapon of war, and where 5.4 million people have died since 1998. It is a tragic war.”

“If we had passed the law that I put forward to Parliament,” Dewar says now, “we could have made a bigger difference in what has been called ‘The Femicide,’ where women are the front lines of this conflict, and I regretted that that didn’t happen.”

Photo by Tony Caldwell / Postmedia

On showing up — and why it matters

“Since I left Ottawa almost 20 years ago, I followed your career in the House from afar, but with great admiration. You did a splendid job of articulating social democratic values in politics, particularly in your role as the NDP foreign affairs critic. I think that the last time we were in each other’s presence was at an event on precarious and migrant work about a decade ago at the University of Ottawa; I spoke at a Sunday morning session, and there you were in the audience. I thought to myself that your presence there showed true commitment to, and a real heart for, the issues that matter in our society.” — Michael Lynk