Percy Mockler on his career and next passion

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He’s the son of a single mother, grounded by an upbringing on social assistance while living in a self-described shack in Saint-Léonard.

Looking back, Percy Mockler says it’s ultimately what shaped his career.

And in an interview with Brunswick News as he departed Ottawa, driving home for a final time to northwestern New Brunswick, Mockler says it will again take prominence in what he has decided to do next.

On Sunday, Mockler, one of New Brunswick’s longest-serving politicians, reached the Senate’s mandatory retirement age.

It caps off a career that includes 24 years in the provincial legislature as a Progressive Conservative MLA, a half decade in Ottawa as part of Brian Mulroney’s administration, and, most recently, 15 years as a senator.

What’s next, Mockler said, is that he wants to dedicate his efforts to growing the capacity of food banks in New Brunswick, across Atlantic Canada, and potentially the country, aiding used clothing depots, as well as building school food programs.

That’s as he recalled as a kid relying on them.

“For the first 18 years of my life, my sister and I always received boxes of food at Christmas and often at Easter. Our family was very grateful for the generosity of our small town of Saint-Léonard toward the most vulnerable,” Mockler said.

But while his family scraped by, Mockler said that his mother and grandmother told him and his sister Shirley “to give back to our community what we received from it.”

“This message was instilled in us growing up and I have no doubt in my mind that this became the starting point of my political and parliamentary roadmap,” Mockler said.

The messages from his childhood are ever present.

“Only God can take away what you put between your ears and to get off of welfare, you need to get an education,” Mockler recalled his mother telling him and his sister as a child.

So Mockler enrolled at l’Université de Moncton, and eventually graduated with a political science minor and an MBA.

But he didn’t forget about home when he got his first student loan cheque.

“Yes, I will admit that I used my first student loan to put water and sewer in our little house,” Mockler said in his final speech in the Senate last week of the 26-feet-by-28-feet house his grandfather built.

In an interview, Mockler added: “My mother was mad at me: ‘You (cheated) the system.’

“I said, ‘Mom, before a civil servant finds out what I did with that money, I’ll be in a position to pay them back.’”

He worked as a tree planter to do so, before heading to school.

There’s stories like that dotting his career.

When he was a student at UdeM, he would drive the three hours home to Saint-Léonard on weekends to do income tax returns, charging $5 for people who were low-income, and nothing for people living on welfare.

His political career was largely launched after he put together an action committee in the early 1970s to save the local high school in Saint-Léonard from being moved to another town.

His ability to organize turned heads.

He was then elected to the local school board and served as chair.

Mockler served two stints in New Brunswick’s provincial legislature, first elected in 1982 at age 33, at the time becoming the youngest MLA in the province’s history.

After his election defeat in 1987, Mockler worked as an organizer for the federal Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election and then part of the Brian Mulroney administration in Ottawa until its dying days in 1993.

That ended up working out as he returned home to New Brunswick where his former MLA seat was now vacant. Pierrette Ringuette, the Liberal who had defeated him in 1987, had been elected to the House of Commons.

Mockler then won a byelection, and was elected again in 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2006.

In 1999, he told Premier Bernard Lord that he would love the role of minister for welfare, but only if he could change the name of the department.

“I had lived that portfolio,” Mockler said. “We changed it to family and community services.”

As minister, he once sat in the waiting room of a social services office in Moncton to speak with the people.

Meanwhile, there’s a scholarship in Mockler’s name at l’Université de Moncton that’s existed since 2002 specifically for children of single mothers, after the university held a roast of local politicians and Percy requested the funds be directed specifically to that cause.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper then appointed Mockler as a senator in 2009.

In the upper chamber, he was the long-time chair of the national finance committee, a long way from the $140 welfare cheques his family would collect monthly.

Mockler said it was difficult driving away from Ottawa, leaving that work behind.

“I don’t have dry eyes,” he said.

“We made a lot of inroads to showcase where we came from, we made a lot of people realize that Canada is bigger than just one region, and we also made a lot of good friends.”

Mockler said he wants the takeaway from his political career to be about hard work and determination, but also about the importance of getting involved in the community, and listening to others.

“People don’t care who you are until they know what you care for,” he said.

“And then you need to walk the talk.”

Mockler added that there needs to be a greater focus in schools on participation and what it really means to live in a free country, believing that democracy, at its core, is about any citizen’s ability to make things better.

“This is where I get sad,” he said. “Too often I hear that the generation of people now in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, they’re distanced from taking responsibility for their communities.

“If we want better communities where we can raise a family, where we can reach out to the most vulnerable, we need people to take responsibility.

“I’ve always tried to do that.”