Jean Yip was a political spouse for a little over three years, right up until last month, when her husband, Liberal MP Arnold Chan, died far too young of cancer at age 50.

Now Yip has decided to take the full plunge into political life, moving from the sidelines to centre stage. After talking it over with Chan during his final few months, Yip, 49, has decided she would like to be the next MP for Scarborough-Agincourt.

“It feels right,” Yip said in an interview with me this week.

Yip doesn’t think many people will be surprised. Right after “how are you?” it was the number one question asked of her during the visitation and funeral for her husband in late September, when hundreds of people were lining up to shake hands with the family.

“People would say: ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’ and offer their condolences — then they’d wait two seconds and they’d say: ‘Are you running?’ ”

Many of those people would be Scarborough residents who became accustomed to seeing Yip standing in for her ailing husband over the past year, doing a lot of the canvassing and riding duties Chan was simply too ill to handle as his health deteriorated. Initially diagnosed with a rare form of nasopharyngeal cancer months after becoming an MP in a 2014 byelection, Chan recovered long enough to be elected again in 2015, but succumbed in September to the cancer’s recurrence.

His final speech to the House in June, in which he implored colleagues to throw away talking points and listen more to each other, was a remarkable moment in the Commons.

Yip, who was in the spectator seats that day with the couple’s three teenaged sons, says Chan urged everyone to “carry on” after he died. So this is how she’s decided to carry on.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, also a family friend, spoke at Chan’s funeral and sat beside Yip throughout the service. But she says they haven’t discussed this succession plan, either then or since. She has been consulting with lots of Liberal friends, including some sitting MPs.

It will be up to Trudeau to declare a byelection date for Scarborough-Agincourt — and before then, a date for the Liberal nomination meeting.

“No nomination date has been determined as of yet in Scarborough-Agincourt,” said Liberal party spokesperson Braeden Caley, when I asked him this week about the vacancy.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a spouse has picked up the political torch for a departed MP. The most recent example would be Dona Cadman, who ran and won for the Conservatives in 2008, a few years after the death of her MP husband, Chuck Cadman.

But being the spouse of the late MP doesn’t always guarantee victory, even in the nomination race. When Liberal MP Shaughnessy Cohen died in 1998, her husband, Jerry, was unsuccessful in his subsequent run for the Liberal nomination in that Windsor-area riding.

In recent years, Yip’s main work has revolved around the family: working as a Sunday school teacher, a school-lunch supervisor and, of course, at Chan’s side after he became an MP.

Apparently there are other Liberals interested in taking the seat that Chan once occupied.

“The Liberal Party of Canada has been approached by a variety of talented potential candidates for Scarborough-Agincourt,” Caley said.

“All possible supporters in this riding have been emailed to notify them about the vacancy and to encourage them to register new friends, family members and neighbours to participate in the upcoming nomination process.”

Yip, who was married to Chan for 19 years — she joked that she always knew she came after his first love, politics — said she won’t be a carbon copy of her husband. Chan, who had served as the Liberals’ deputy house leader, had loved the parliamentary aspect of the job, all the procedure and the tradition.

Yip said that she’s more interested in the constituency work, particularly some projects in Scarborough-Agincourt, such as the Bridletwone Community Hub, and housing issues in general. She was born in Scarborough and has worked and lived in or near the riding in the almost five decades since then. Thanks to her marriage and partnership with Chan, she now sees the riding through a more political lens.

“I did represent him in the riding a lot, especially in the end,” Yip said. This past summer, as she and her son were knocking on doors, she learned a bit more about the size of shoes she aspires to fill.

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“People really appreciated his work and especially his speech of June 12,” Yip said. “So I guess when I hear the accolades, I feel reassured.”

She’s pretty sure that Chan would approve of this step she’s taking. “He felt I could do this job and he was willing to support anything I decided.”

sdelacourt@bell.net

Correction, Oct. 28, 2017: This article was updated from a previous version that misstated the name of the Bridletowne Community Hub and incorrectly stated that Jean Yip had worked at Queen’s Park.

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