Shelley Martel

Shelley Martel (born April 8, 1963 in Sudbury, Ontario) is a politician in Ontario, Canada. She is currently a member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, representing the riding of Nickel Belt for the Ontario New Democratic Party.

Contents

1 Early career 2 In cabinet 3 Dodds controversy 4 Re-elections

Early career

Before entering political life, Martel studied International Politics at the University of Toronto and French at the Sorbonne. She then worked as a claims adjudicator with the Ontario Workers' Compensation Board in Sudbury and Toronto.

Martel first represented the riding of Sudbury East, which was eliminated when the Mike Harris government redrew the boundaries of the provincial ridings in 1996 to match the federal boundaries. Sudbury East had been represented by Martel's father, Elie Martel, from its creation in 1967 until his retirement in 1987. Martel's mother is the daughter of another area politician, Norman Fawcett, who served as mayor of Capreol, Ontario and as Nickel Belt's federal MP from 1965 to 1968.

Shelley Martel sought and won the NDP nomination vacated by her father, and easily won the seat in the 1987 provincial election. She was re-elected in the 1990 provincial election, in which the NDP won an unexpected majority government.

In cabinet

On October 1, 1990, she was named Minister of Northern Development and Government House Leader in the cabinet of Bob Rae. On July 31, 1991, her title was changed to Minister of Northern Development and Mines.

Like her father, Martel represented the left-wing of the NDP and often had a fractious relationship with Rae. During her first year in office, she oversaw a government bailout plan for industry in the northern community of Kapuskasing; Rae rejected the plan, but incorporated its basic framework into a later deal which he negotiated himself. Like Howard Hampton and Peter Kormos, Martel also opposed Rae's decision to retreat from an election pledge to introduce public automobile insurance in the province.

Martel's time in office proved unexpectedly controversial, and was nearly ended by two separate controversies in 1991. The first occurred June of that year, when Martel wrote a letter to a quasi-judicial body concerning the billing practices of a doctor in northern Ontario. This was regarded by some as undue political influence, and Rae considered dismissing Martel before being advised by Liberal leader Robert Nixon that the offense was too minor to warrant punishment.

Dodds controversy

The second incident was more serious, at least in terms of its ramifications. On December 5, 1991, Martel became involved in a heated argument with Evelyn Dodds, a Thunder Bay municipal councillor and former Progressive Conservative candidate, after an official government function. Martel ended the conversation by claiming that her government was considering legal action against Jean-Pierre Donahue, a Sudbury doctor working, on the grounds that his billing practices were excessive and illegal. According to Dodds, Martel also claimed to have seen a confidential government file on Donahue.

Dodds took her story to the media the next day, accusing Martel of slandering a medical professional and having illegal access to privileged information. Martel, in response, claimed that she had misled Dodds in their private conversation -- her comments after Donahue were unfounded, and were invented on the spot in a moment of anger. She also denied having seen the confidential file. Martel nonetheless offered her resignation to Rae, which he rejected.

Martel later took a lie detector to prove that she had made up her accusations about Donahue while talking to Dodds, and did not have prior knowledge of a secret file. A parliamentary commission in early 1992 verified her version of the story.

The incident itself may have been minor, but the resulting controversy did considerable damage to Martel's reputation and that of the provincial NDP. Many voters remembered nothing of the controversy except that Martel admited to being caught in a lie, took a lie detector test to prove she had lied, and was kept in cabinet regardless. Some have argued that public confidence in the Rae government was irreparably damaged by this controversy.

Evelyn Dodds ran again for the Progressive Conservatives in the 1995 provincial election, and the Progressive Conservatives had always opposed the NDP's efforts to reform the billing practices of Ontario doctors.

Martel's continued presence in cabinet was an ongoing source of controversy for the government, and her influence after 1992 was limited. She finally resigned from her portfolio on October 7, 1994, towards the end of Rae's mandate.

Her resignation occurred after the Ontario Privacy Commissioner found that she had passed on privileged and damaging information about Ottawa consultant Charles Ficner to Liberal MPP Frank Miclash. Some questioned the Privacy Commissioner's decision, noting that almost all of the disputed information was already available in the public domain.

Re-elections

The controversies did not dim Martel's personal electoral prospects, as the voters in Sudbury East returned her to Queen's Park in the 1995 provincial election, electing her over Liberal Paul Menard by a narrow margin.

When the riding of Sudbury East was eliminated for the 1999 election, she was re-elected again in the redistributed Nickel Belt constituency. (Nickel Belt's previous MPP, Blain Morin, declined to challenge Martel for the nomination.) In the 2003 election, she defeated Liberal Alex McCauley by fewer than 3,000 votes to win a fifth term in the legislature.

Martel and Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton were married in 1994, and have two children. In 2003, both Martel and Hampton supported Bill Blaikie's campaign to become leader of the federal New Democratic Party.