Bruce Anderson  Fundraiser

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“Every year, we have an event to raise money for a Parliamentary internship. Peter Mansbridge is the co-chair and our MC for the evening. He gives a kind of roast of the people in media and politics who usually come out. It’s pretty funny.

That year, instead of our regular party, we decided to do something to support the refugees and the people who would sponsor them. We built the event around music, and we were extremely fortunate to have Monkey Junk, a well-known and talented band, to play. Whitney Rose, a singer and songwriter from PEI, joined us. And Lynn Miles, who is kind of a heroine for a lot of people in Ottawa, performed too. She had written a song called ‘What if you were a refugee?’ It’s beautiful, and she volunteered to donate all the proceeds from the sale of the song to the cause that we were supporting. She performed it live and it was one of the highlights of the evening.

We feel that Canada is a very fortunate place; a place that was built by welcoming immigrants and refugees.

We were motivated the same way that many people were, by the families that we were seeing on the news every night. There was also an active debate in Canada at the time, as to whether we should do more for refugees. My family and I wanted to not just raise money to help people but to also show that we feel that this is a very fortunate place, a place that was built by welcoming immigrants and refugees, and we need to keep doing everything we can to tilt that debate in the direction of those values.”

The event at The Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield raised $200,000.