On the first day of his first job out of his undergraduate degree, David Landry went to work at Queen’s Park.
Landry, newly graduated from McMaster’s Arts & Science program, has just started a 10-month nonpartisan internship, where he’ll be immersed in the work at the provincial legislature through the Ontario Legislature Internship Programme.
“The main component of the program is that I’ll spend half of my time there working for an MPP in the Government, so someone from the Progressive Conservative Party; and the other half of the time I’ll spend there will be with a member from the opposition, so either the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, or an independent,” Landry said.
“The idea is to have us experience work on both sides of the aisle.”
The program also offers opportunities to meet prominent Canadians, work on subcommittees within the internship program, and travel to other legislatures in Canada for study tours — and one trip at the end to London, U.K. — to learn more about parliamentary democracy.
The program — which is celebrating its 50th year — is highly competitive and accepts just 10 interns each year. Landry’s cohort has two other McMaster grads: Social Sciences grad Noor Akrawi and Kewan Perera, who did his undergraduate degree at McMaster before going to grad school at Johns Hopkins University.
“There seems to be someone from Mac almost every year if I look at the history,” Landry said.
Through the internship, Landry is excited to work with great colleagues, meet new people, and most of all, “learn about how governance works in Ontario first-hand – to be there in the room as it happens.”
“Provincial politics are so close to home for every single Ontarian,” he said, noting the provincial government has a strong effect on people’s day-to-day lives.
He’s looking forward to building his understanding of the legislative process. “Learning how the opposition operates in response to the Government, to make sure that they’re keeping the Government in check, for example, and ensuring that they’re serving Ontarians the best way possible.”
Landry at McMaster.
Landry is no stranger to policy and governance: While at Mac, he was part of the team that successfully advocated for a bike share pass for undergraduate students; he was involved in the CityLAB Semester in Residence program, where he got to work in partnership with the City of Hamilton on a project redesigning the Open Streets program; and he spent an exchange semester in France at the Sciences Po Lille, where his courses focused on politics and international relations.
The biggest lesson he’s taken away from his experiences at McMaster is “to always be curious.”
“Always be open to more than one perspective,” Landry said. “What’s so important about nonpartisan work is understanding people, [and] everybody’s perspective, both at work and in everyday life.”
It’s one of the core components of the Arts & Science program: “Broadening your horizons, broadening your perspectives, trying to get an understanding of the way that other people think to build a better solution to bigger problems.”
Future interests
After the 10-month internship, Landry plans to continue his education, pursuing either law school or a graduate program in international relations.
He’s spent a lot of time around the water — he was born in Halifax, his dad was in the Royal Canadian Navy for almost 30 years, and he spent his summers as a teenager on multi-week backcountry canoe trips through northern Quebec — and he’s particularly interested in the Arctic and how climate change is going to impact the global economy.
The Arctic has a “complicated tapestry of history,” he said, including the exploration of the Northwest Passage and Inuit relocations by the federal government in the north.
Now, climate change is melting Arctic ice and opening up time-saving shipping routes. Canada has a claim to these waters, but others around the world wants to see the waters declared international, so that they don’t necessarily have to follow Canadian law and environmental regulations, Landry said.
“What really fascinates me is the politics of it all,” Landry said. “Building solutions for a future that will probably involve Arctic shipping is very complicated, because you have the interests of the Canadian Government. You have the impacts on the Inuit who live in these territories and have lived there for thousands of years, [and who] absolutely need to be a part of the plan. And then you have the superpowers of the world — China, the United States, Europe — who all want access quite probably to the shipping lanes.”
For now, though, Landry is focused on the learning experience ahead of him.
Between moving to Toronto, starting the job and taking the Law School Admissions Test, Landry has been pretty busy.
“But I’m fortunate to be in this position. These are good problems to have.”