by Brandon Wright
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many young adults have dealt with school closures, unemployment and social distancing. For 22-year-old Eric Melillo, things are just a little different.
Melillo is the member of Parliament for Kenora, Ont. He was elected last fall and, just five months into his role, he’s facing the kind of challenge even veteran politicians are finding difficult.
I spoke to Melillo about his time in office so far and how rural Indigenous communities in his riding are handling COVID-19.
How has COVID-19 impacted you on a personal level?
Luckily, I was able to get back to Kenora from Ottawa, before things started to shut down in terms of airlines and business closures, things like that. So, a typical day for me is a lot of calls, a lot of conferences, things like this. It feels like it takes more time, you know than traditional meetings. I don't know if it really does, but it feels like it does just because it's sort of just one to the next. You're not leaving, walking down a hallway to another room necessarily…It's very, very busy in that sense, but for me, I like to be out and about and moving around. So it's been a bit of a challenge.
What’s it like being so young in office, specifically during a global pandemic?
I would say, outside of the pandemic, being a new MP, being a young MP, it's more of just I guess, an optics thing. There would be a lot of people saying, you know, you can't do this because you're 22…Then once they start seeing things happen, once they see committee questions and results in the riding, then maybe that starts to turn around a bit.
I think a crisis like this, it’s sort of stopped a lot of that. People, they don't care who the MP is. They don't care about the party. They don't care about the age or some of those superficial things. It's just about people. It's about helping people.
What struggles do rural Indigenous communities in your riding face because of COVID-19?
I mean, there's many challenges that Indigenous communities face during normal times. I think a lot of those problems are exacerbated during a situation like this. I would say that there are maybe three main issues, so to speak, in a lot of these communities, and the first one is probably just the remoteness itself. There are a lot of people who live very far away from medical services and from healthcare. So, it might be difficult to test someone. It might be difficult to provide the health care services if it's required.
The second one I would say is the overcrowding. It's tough to social distance for a lot of people with housing shortages. The fact that there is a lot of people living in relatively small homes.
Third, depending on the community, and this isn't as necessarily as big of an issue in my riding as some others…there's a lot of unsafe water. Tough to wash your hands if you can't do so with the water. And that, again, depends on the community. There's a lot of boil-water advisories in my riding, but that's water that is usually safe enough to wash with but in a lot of communities across the country, they're actually ‘do not consume’ or ‘do not use’ advisories so, you can't use the water for any purposes. That would pose some challenges in trying to maintain that healthy hygiene as well.
What has the Liberal government been doing well in response to COVID-19?
I really appreciate that the government has done a lot of communications, a lot of advertising campaigns, things like that…I mean, the prime minister is giving an address every single day, and they're just kind of keeping up to date with Canadians. I think that's really, really important this time people can know that their government is sort of actively working on this.
I would say that kind of flows into a second thing that they've been doing really well. I would say, obviously, none of these programs are going to be perfect. There's always going to be people that maybe don't qualify for this or this doesn't quite add up to exactly what they need. But from what I can tell so far, the government has been recognizing a lot of that and, you know, we've been bringing forward some suggestions that some of which have been taken.
What are some areas where you would have handled things differently?
Yeah, there's a couple I would say, in terms of the emergency response benefit. There's something our party's been calling for and something I've been very strongly supportive of is broadening it out to people who have lost income, but not necessarily have lost their job.
I would say the second thing that for me is very important as well during this time, is support for university students or college students that are going back to school in the fall. I was happy to see if the government put on an additional six-month grace period for student loans but if you're returning to school, that won’t help you obviously, because you won't be paying off your student loans. There's a lot of people that will be finding it difficult to potentially find summer work. They're going to need some income; they're going to need help covering the cost of next year's tuition and books and a whole number of things.
Note: Since my interview with Melillo, the Canadian government has released plans for a $1,250 student relief fund, called the Canadian Emergency Student Benefit (CESB).
What inspired your decision to donate your legislated pay raise to local businesses around your community?
For me, I think that this is not a time for MPs to be taking a pay raise. Obviously, people are facing hardships across the country, and we should be sensitive to that. But Parliament had been suspended and we didn't actually have the opportunity to pass a motion to change that. So, as an individual MP, I couldn't change that by voting against it, but I could decide what to do with it.
I'll be continuing to do things like that throughout the course of the year to make sure that I'm putting that pay increase to the best use possible.
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