Green Party
Gerald Romsa would bring a unique voice to Parliament, combining a life of academic work on community development and environmental issues with what he has learned working on these issues in Germany, Ireland, China, and Ukraine.
Romsa was born in Ukraine in 1942 and came to Canada as a refugee child with his mother and stepfather from a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1948. “Most of my family were wiped out during the war,” Romsa told the Cooperator in a phone interview. “My father was killed while I was in my mother’s womb. My mother remarried, and they eventually got a visa to come to Canada, to rural Manitoba. They worked first as farm laborers. My stepfather eventually got a full-time job with the Canadian National Railroad.”
Romsa saw education as a way out of rural Manitoba, earning a doctorate and joining the Department of Geography at the
University of Windsor in 1970, where he worked until 2003. His research focused on the comparative economic development of countries in Europe and Asia, as well as planning for retirees and the recreation sector. At Windsor, he became deeply involved in environmental issues, working on international research collaborations with universities in Germany, Ireland, China, and Ukraine. He has visited Ukraine 10 times, serving as an election observer in the country’s 2014 election.
This overseas work gave Romsa an international perspective on how well Canada was doing. “Over the years, I became more and more frustrated that this country with so much potential was just sliding sideways, shall we speak. not moving forward.” He said he was particularly struck by the models of the Nordic countries, which he thought had “a nice balance between the social environment, the physical environment, and the economic environment.”
Romsa and his wife moved to Nova Scotia in 2003 to her grandfather’s old farm and wood lot. He served on the board of the Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners and Operators. “They were an interesting group,” Romsa said. “They first began negotiating better prices for small woodlot owners, and they’re quite ecologically minded. They have the Otter Ponds Demonstration Forest where they’re showing that you can have an environmentally well-managed forest and still make money from it. While I was working with them, we were able to establish ourselves as providing good educational services and to get enough funding where we now have an office with staff.”
Romsa says he inherited a love of languages from his mother and did work with the Nova Scotia Gaelic Council. “We keep saying in Canada we believe in diversity,” Romsa said. “When I arrived in Nova Scotia, I heard all these stories from people saying their grandparents spoke Gaelic, but that it was discouraged. Every language has within it many components of perspective and so forth, so I learned a bit, and I worked on it hoping to get more Gaelic going in the schools of Nova Scotia.”
Romsa put his Gaelic to work when he was a guide at the Hector Museum celebrating the arrival of the Scots on the ship
Hector in 1773. “I was the only person that sort of knew Gaelic, so I would talk with people in Gaelic and ask them in Gaelic some questions where they came from, whether they were from Scotland and so forth. And I noticed that there were brochures in English and French, and maybe Spanish, but nothing in Gaelic, so I got one translated. And I got a sign for the museum which I paid for that said ‘Welcome’ in Gaelic.”
Romsa says it was encouragement from his younger son, Dr. Jonathan Romsa, who practices nuclear medicine in Ontario, that persuaded him to run. “He reminded me that we need to fight for democracy and vote, so we don’t end up like the United States where not enough people voted,” Romsa said. His only prior experience as a candidate was as a school board candidate in Ontario.
