Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 04/02) - Suzette Montreuil was in university when a Lutheran minister said something she could not forget.

Lecturing at exam time, the minister drew a biblical comparison between approaching exams as Jacob's Ladder or Sarah's Circle.

Suzette Montreuil has been called "one of the strongest minds and clear thinkers in the North today." She was named one of the NWT Status of Women Council's wise women for 2002. - Nathan VanderKlippe/NNSL photo

The difference was between viewing exams -- and life -- as a great competition, or as an opportunity for moving forward by co-operation.

The idea of the circle intrigued her.

"You can see it as we're in this together, in a circle," she says. "That's always stayed with me as an idea. I don't think it's each person on their own. I think there has to be some level of community ownership of the problems. If you lose that, you lose what makes living in community worthwhile."

Montreuil is the 2002 Yellowknife recipient of the Status of Women Council's Wise Woman Award. A mother and political activist, in the words of council president Barb Saunders, she is one of the North's clearest thinkers.

"She provides a good critique of social and economic policies," said Saunders. "She works in the public interest and brings forward an alternative perspective to the status quo."

A member of numerous organizations -- including, most visibly, Alternatives North -- Montreuil is a constant voice calling on society to remember one of its most basic building blocks: community.

More circle, less ladder

In a way, Montreuil is a paradox. She thinks we need both Jacob's Ladder and Sarah's Circle. It's just that, she says, there's far too much of the ladder in modern-day life and not enough of the circle.

But she isn't so much a paradox as she is capable of reading both sides of the coin at once. On one hand, she focuses on structures, on big-picture issues. She constructs models of the world, anchored by a few fundamental pillars designed to produce equity and justice.

On the other hand, she defines "hands-on." She has spent years overseeing a day care, sits on the francophone school board and spent half a year working in a Catholic mission hospital in Ethiopia.

One day she is talking money with the territory's finance minister. The next she is shouting through a microphone at a social justice rally, or acting as president of her union local.

A self-professed student of economics, she is now working to organize public education seminars on international trade agreements, particularly as they relate to the upcoming G8 summit in Kananaskis, Alta. She has participated in a forum on the Tobin tax, an initiative on taxing foreign currency exchange that digs into highly-complex financial concepts, but which has heavy consequences for the fiscal stability of third-world nations.

She comes by her global perspective honestly.

In the late 1980s, she and husband, Kevin O'Reilly, spent six months working with adults and children with physical disabilities in Ethiopia.

It was there, Montreuil says, that she met a young girl who altered her view of the world. The girl had TB of the spine, which left her back contorted into an L-shape. But somehow, the muscles and nerves remained connected, so the girl could move -- though she couldn't walk.

Montreuil is an occupational therapist. She worked with the girl, progressing to the point where the girl attained some mobility. They constructed a walker entirely out of wood -- including the wheels -- to help her get around.

"She was trying it out in the hospital, and I was totally excited because she was taking a few steps," Montreuil recalls. "But her mom just wasn't getting into it, and I was like 'what's going on?'"

Humbling experience

Curious to find out why, Montreuil embarked on a 12-hour 200 kilometre bus ride to the girl's home, accompanied by the mother. When she arrived at the family tukul (hut), she discovered that the entire surrounding terrain was hilly. Without a flat surface, the walker was useless.

"And I'm thinking, no wonder the mother is not getting into this walker thing," said Montreuil. "I just felt immensely humbled."

Before flying to Ethiopia, Montreuil had done some international development education, and had judged global problems as fairly simple -- and fairly simply solved.

"When I went to Ethiopia I realized it's so much more complex than that, because of issues of culture and history and power dynamics," she says.

She has developed a strong notion of social responsibility, a notion that has been reinforced by the teachings of the Catholic church on people and development, human rights, peace and the definition of a just economy.

The crux of those teachings can be contained in one sentence, she says: "the preferential option for the poor."

"It's a very powerful statement and it's one of the guiding ideologies in the way I approach issues of justice," she says.

"My philosophy is that we're a communal group. And I think in large measure societies are judged by how they deal with people who are marginalized."

In that regard, she says, Canadian society has been much better in the past.

"We spent many years in the '60s and '70s building a social safety net," she says.

"Ever since then we've been gradually tearing it down. Right now in Canada we've got three provincial governments that have taken a draconian approach to cutting and slashing social programs, in quite a mean-spirited way."

But, though she once ran in a federal election on an NDP ticket, Montreuil says the solution to the country's problems does not lie in a particular party.

A woman's touch

Instead, what she hopes for in politics is a greater presence of women. Women can add a balance to the modern political sphere in the way they govern, she says.

In a woman's governing style, she says, "there's more attention paid to what I would call nurturing issues, and issues of welfare, concern for the family, concern for the public."

That constant effort to orient politics to its effects on flesh-and-blood humans defines Montreuil's approach to politics. It is the reason she analyzes and criticizes modern political structures.

"You want structures that will support people," she says. "That's the whole point."

But if she appears to be an idealist -- she fits the definition almost perfectly -- Montreuil is not naive.

"My saying has always been, 'I have nothing in my life,' " she says.

"I've been working at this for 20 years and I've been losing ground here. But so what; I'm going to stop? No, I can't stop. I believe this is what is needed to make a just world."