When Raj Pannu looks back at over 10 years as an MLA in Alberta’s legislature, his most vivid memories involve the fight against healthcare privatization.

He remembers the thousands of people who gathered outside the Legislature building every night, holding candlelit vigils in defence of public healthcare. 

Every hour or so, he would leave the Legislature and join the crowds. He remembers feeling a sense of awe, both at the people who were standing up to the government to protect a public institution and at the thought that he was at the heart of the debate during such a historic time for Alberta.

There were many moments like that one during his time as MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona and leader of the NDP. 

“He was a vocal and courageous critic who never shied away from important issues,” says David Taras, politics and communication professor at the University of Calgary. Pannu also kept the NDP on the map at a time when Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservatives dominated the province.

Politics was a second career for Pannu, who for 27 years taught sociology and education at the University of Alberta. The 75-year-old has decided not to seek re-election, and come March 3, will once again be a civilian.

NDP members recognize him for rebuilding the party after the defeat in 1993 of all 16 NDP MLAs. But whether that internal growth will continue in Pannu’s absence is very uncertain, and ultimately has little to do with Pannu’s legacy, says Taras.

The Rise Of Raj

Although Pannu came to politics late in life, as a child in India during the de-colonization struggle, his father Ajit Singh Pannu impressed on him the importance of political engagement. 

“As little kids, we used to lurk around these sessions that he had,” Pannu says. “He used to host all kinds of politicians at our home. My dad was very intellectually engaged and he used to challenge them in terms of theory and practice. And, without being able to understand everything, I found the debates very stimulating.”

Pannu was a political activist in his university years, pushing for social services and public institutions. He moved to Whitecourt, Alberta with his wife Swinder in 1962, to take on a job as a high school teacher. Tommy Douglas, the Saskatchewan premier and champion of public healthcare, had just moved from provincial to federal politics when Pannu arrived. The doctor strikes against public healthcare erupted around that time and Pannu watched events in Saskatchewan very closely.

“I was very impressed with the NDP here in western Canada,” he says. “You couldn’t avoid being captivated by the political challenge the NDP was facing and the goals it had set for themselves.”

After a few years in Whitecourt, he moved to Edmonton for graduate studies at the University of Alberta, and taught there for 27 years. By the time Pannu retired from the university, the Klein revolution had swept though Alberta. After studying neo-liberal trade practices and the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the United States, Pannu knew that under the Klein government, regular Albertans were headed for bad times. 

He decided to run for the NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona. Swinder was a little uneasy about the idea, as she wasn’t sure he’d win. Nor were the NDP.

Rachel Notley, who has replaced Pannu as the NDP candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona, worked as a volunteer on Pannu’s first run in 1997. She remembers how calm Pannu was on election night. “It was back and forth all night long,” she recalls. “At one point, we had all the results except one in, and I think he was five or six votes behind at that point. It was really tight.... I grew up in politics, and my dad went though this process, but he never watched the results in front of 20 people. But Raj did, and he was calm and kept this smile on his face.”

Pannu won the Edmonton-Strathcona seat by 37 votes. He was the first South Asian ever elected to the Alberta legislature and, along with party leader Pam Barrett, was one of only two NDP candidates to win a seat that year.

Raj In Charge

For the next three years, Pannu and Barrett were the only NDP MLAs in the legislature. (At the dissolution of the last Alberta legislature, there were only four NDP MLAs.)

“We always felt overwhelmed and inundated with the amount of work we had to do,” Pannu says. “Not having enough members in our caucus has always been a huge challenge. I’ve always felt that our interventions in the house could have been far more effective.... We simply could not analyze every issue in detail that it deserved.”

But his ability to take a step back and analyze the situation as an academic helped him immensely. He kept a diary in his pocket and on his bedside table, often scribbling down notes on sleepless nights. 

He remembers the fall of 1999 as a particularly tense time. In March, while Pannu was asking a question in the house during a debate, Conservative MLA Ivan Strang shouted at him to “go back to India.” At the scrum after the incident, reporters asked if he was going to press charges, but Pannu felt Strang had acted “honourably” in apologizing, and dropped the issue. But it’s not an incident Pannu likes to dwell on, nor does he think of it as his biggest challenge. 

Barrett resigned in 2000 and as the only NDP MLA remaining, Pannu ended up leading the party for the next four years. 

“I think he had planned his career as a dutiful lieutenant MLA, with Pam as the leader,” says Notley. “I think he was thrust into a position that he hadn’t necessarily chosen.” Still, Pannu took on the job, and worked the corridors of the legislature as best he could. 

Despite his natural earnestness, he kept a sense of humour. 

“He’s always willing to go along with the fun,” says Sandra Huston, provincial secretary for the NDP. “Given his age, given that he didn’t grow up here, sometimes there’s a bit of a pop-culture gap, and yet he was always wiling to go along with some kind of joke or skit that was being done at the legislature.” (For instance, he once took part in a video that showed him and Brian Mason arm wrestling over who would not be leader.)

Indeed, he trusted his staff implicitly. During the 2001 campaign, his staff had come up with the slogan “Raj Against the Machine.” Pannu had never heard of the band Rage Against the Machine, so NDP staffer John Kolkman brought in a CD. Pannu listened to it, and quipped that he preferred Mozart or Beethoven. Nevertheless, he went along with the slogan, winning by more than 2,000 votes that election.

Raj In Winter

Pannu won’t comment on what he sees as his legacy to either Alberta or the NDP. However, he did say he was thinking about doing some writing about his time in provincial politics.

For their part, NDPers give him credit for rebuilding the party. “When we lost in 1993, it was very difficult for a lot of people in the party,” says Notley. “When Raj came in, I don’t know ultimately if he was positioned to expand our base, [but] I think he brought a lot of people back to the party who might have been tired, who might have been burnt out and cynical because he just was none of those things.”

Pannu kept the NDP on the map for the last decade, but that doesn’t mean that growth will continue, says Taras, adding that the NDP is caught ideologically between the Liberals and the Green Party. “The pincer movement could take them out eventually,” he says. “And that will have nothing to do with the quality of the people in the NDP; it’s just that they are caught in larger events.”

Although the most important statistics for any provincial political party are level of popular support and the number of seats they occupy in the legislature, Notley notes that you need to create an internally healthy party first. And Pannu performed that function admirably. “He made us all happy to be New Democrats again.”