A Filipino leader in Canada's Cabinet

By Annie Gorra Rago
Inquirer News Service

DR. REY Pagtakhan, the first Filipino-Canadian in the federal Cabinet of Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien and the Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Winnipeg North-St. Paul electoral district in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is his own kind of a man in politics. He's honest and forthright, well-liked and well-respected by his constituents and colleagues. His quiet ways of getting things done have prompted Prime Minister Chretien to tell the Winnipeg Free Press in 1997 that he likes Pagtakhan because he is not a "showboat. He's the kind of MP who has never gotten carried away with the trappings of the office."

In a hotel room in Richmond, British Columbia last July, it was hard to pick out the Minister of Veterans Affairs, one of the positions he holds in the Chretien Cabinet, among the Korean War veterans celebrating the 50th year of the Korean War armistice. Standing at about five feet with a receding hairline, a kindly face, the medical doctor-turned-politician looks more of a grandfather than a four-time elected MP and a Cabinet member.

"I don't do things for publicity," Pagtakhan says. His quiet ways have worked to his advantage. He doesn't come across as a threat. A political opponent told Maclean's, a national newsmagazine in Canada, that "Rey is a well-meaning fellow but naive." Pagtakhan won the elections and has been representing his riding since.

"It's a big job," says Paul Thomas, political scientist and The Duff Roblin Professor of Government at the University of Manitoba, of Pagtakhan's many roles in the Chretien Cabinet. Besides representing his electoral district in the House of Commons and Minister of Veterans Affairs, he is the Secretary of State for Science and Research. "He has departments to run and he's expected to be the voice of Manitoba."

He's been the voice of his constituency since 1988. He was a professor of pediatrics and child health at the University of Manitoba and a children lung specialist when he decided to enter politics. Says Pagtakhan of the change in careers, "I thought I could apply myself, having achieved a career in medicine, to the bigger issues of the nation." He considers medicine an excellent background for government. "Politics is about people, medicine is about people, so the two are congruent."

Unfair as it may sound, the question that comes to mind is whether his political success rides on the immigrant or Filipino votes in his multi-ethnic district. Thomas finds that thinking "too narrow an interpretation" of Pagtakhan's success in Manitoba. He does not discount the strong support of the Filipino and other ethnic communities in Pagtakhan's success; however, he says, "he needs to get votes from all sectors of his community." Pagtakhan has the same perspective. The 68-year-old MP acknowledges the support of his kababayan, but at the same time points to the fact that the vast majority of voters are not Filipino.

The four-time MP immigrated to Canada in 1968 to pursue further training in children's lung diseases at the University of Manitoba. Since then, he has been on the rise. He didn't start at the bottom of the ladder as most immigrants presently do. "I did not face the difficulty," he admits. After his fellowship at the university, he was automatically invited to join the faculty and licensed to practice medicine. He later became the director of the Manitoba Cystic Fibrosis Centre and president of the Manitoba Pediatric Society.

The ease with which he entered Canadian life must have been the reward for a difficult life in the Philippines. He almost didn't finish high school because his parents were strapped for cash. "There were periods in the life of our family when our parents would tell us that we were really on subsistence," he says. "It was very tough."

He credits his aunt for seeing them through tough times and the community for helping him finish medicine at the University of the Philippines. "I would take a loan from friends in the community, friends of the family," he says. "I was always in arrears." He wore second-hand pairs of socks, which he shared with his brothers.

The humble pan de sal and guava jelly stand out in his memory; they powered him through the most part of his pre-medical studies. He brought them with him from home in Cavite to his boarding house on a Saturday or Sunday, and ate them for breakfast until Thursday. "They would get hard," he says, because he was "too shy to put them in the fridge." On Fridays, he would get one decent breakfast. Up to the day that the medical board exams were released, he was selling bread in his mother's little bakery. Today he is helping shape the policies and future of his adopted country.

Maclean's Magazine recounts that in 1992, at the height of the controversy over Canada's admission of a former Iraqi Ambassador to the US into the country, Pagtakhan stood up in the House of Commons. The sister of a constituent from India wanted to come to Canada to attend the cremation of a family member. She was refused a visa because the Canadian government feared that she might stay in Canada. Pagtakhan, impassioned by the incident, asked his colleagues in parliament, "We allow the mouthpiece of a murderer to be hastily ushered into Canada as an immigrant without delay -- does this government have no heart?" The woman received a permit to enter Canada for the funeral.

A query from a constituent about the meaning of letters and numbers on a jar of tomato sauce prompted Pagtakhan to introduce a 1994 bill that required food and beverage manufacturers to print clearly and legibly "best before'' and expiration dates on the labels of canned and frozen foods.

In May this year, he introduced legislation that extended housekeeping services for surviving spouses of veterans to a lifetime, including improving health programs and compensation benefits.

However, not everyone is a fan. A 76-year-old widow of a WW II veteran recently told a national paper in Canada that she has collected a petition, but "the Minister of Veterans Affairs never even acknowledged it."

Criticisms don't appear to ruffle Pagtakhan much. The kind that stings most, however, comes from fellow Filipinos who think that he has not done much to forward their cause. "I feel proud that he's a Filipino and doing a lot of things on the national level," says one Filipino-Canadian community leader, "but I haven't seen anything yet on specific Filipino requests."

When told about this perception, the normally calm Minister's voice tightens. "It's not for me to go to the media and say, 'Oh, I've done this.'" He recalls helping a Filipino in Edmonton, Alberta, who was about to be deported by the Canadian immigration. He was able to arrange for her to attend her hearing without fear of being arrested by the authorities. He set the condition that if she loses the case, she returns to the Philippines. The woman lost the case, but instead of leaving the country she sought refuge in a church basement, where she is protected from the authorities under the law. The members of the Filipino community, says Pagtakhan, were ready to rally from Montreal to Vancouver. He asked them pointblank, "What will you achieve? Do you want to help her, or do you want publicity?"

How strong a voice Pagtakhan will be in pushing this cause forward may depend on how he will fare under the new leadership of the Liberal Party. Paul Martin, the new leader, was the nemesis of Prime Minister Chretien in the party's leadership race.

The other decisive factor of his political future may be his position on the same-sex marriage issue, which has divided the nation. In June 2003, the Ontario Court of Appeal changed the traditional definition of marriage from union between man and woman to union between two persons, thus allowing marriage between two people of the same gender. Instead of appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada, Chretien and his Cabinet supported the court's decision. They plan to introduce legislation in the near future that will recognize homosexual union. This decision has outraged Christians, Muslims, and people from other faiths who uphold the traditional definition of marriage.

Pagtakhan approaches this political quicksand cautiously. "My view is that the two principles must be allowed to prevail-the right to equality, which is about the right of people to do as they please as long as they don't harm others, and the principle of freedom, the freedom of religion."

Whatever results from the Paul Martin leadership or the same-sex issue, Pagtakhan does not appear anxious about the prognosis of his political future. He has written his own prescription for it: Serve as best he can. "I feel I can still do things for the community and to the best of my ability," he says. If only we could bring him back home to the Philippines.