As part of our coverage of the federal election, Investment Executive profiles candidates who are working or who have worked in the financial services industry.

Here we look at Eric Steedman, NDP candidate in the Quebec riding of Westmount – Ville-Marie.

Eric Steedman is the only NDP candidate in the current election campaign to have spent almost four years working at a major Wall Street financial company.

But Steedman’s background as a New York institutional investor becomes less surprising when one learns his job at mutual fund giant Dreyfus Corp. was co-managing about US$1.2 billion in socially responsible funds.

Since returning to Canada, the 38-year-old Steedman has continued to focus on finding ways to make business more socially and environmentally responsible in his professional career.

It’s a message he’s also pushing during the current election campaign in the central Montreal riding of Westmount – Ville-Marie, where many of Quebec’s business elite make their home.

“We favour sustainable economic growth that is more inclusive in terms of sharing the wealth and benefiting all sectors,” Steedman says.

He returned to Montreal from New York in 1998 to study in the MBA program at McGill University. He got his MBA in 2000 and since then has been working as a consultant for governments, non-governmental organizations and non-profit organizations in the area of social and environmental sustainability.

Among a wide variety of assignments as a consultant, he has worked for the Canadian Boreal Initiative, the Vancouver City Savings Credit Union and the watchdog agency for environmental performance in the North American Free Trade Agreement area.

Most recently, he has embarked on a joint venture with the Montreal-based management-consulting firm Universalia Management Group Ltd. to advise companies in the area of social responsibility, including code-of-conduct development and supply-chain monitoring.

“The idea is to help companies develop policies and evaluate the degree to which their corporate social responsibility commitments are actually having an impact,” Steedman says.

He is also involved in a series of volunteer activities including helping to found the Community Experience Initiative, an organization that places business school students in internships with community groups. He is also former board member of Santropol Roulant, a Montreal non-profit meals-on-wheels organization.

The January 23 election will be third time he has run as an NDP candidate and the second straight time he has represented the party in Westmount – Ville-Marie. In 1993, he was the NDP candidate in eastern Quebec riding of Gaspé.

Policy positions like favouring the taxation status quo may not go over too well in the ritzy upper reaches of Westmount, but Steedman doesn’t seem to mind. Although he was defeated handily 2004 by Liberal incumbent Lucienne Robillard, he managed to more than double the previous NDP share of the vote to 12%.

“Westmount – Ville-Marie is the wealthiest and best educated riding in Canada,” he says. “But there are still pockets of very serious poverty. I’m in favour of enabling those who drive the economy to continue to do so — create jobs and create value. But we have to make sure that everyone benefits.’

Steedman was critical of Finance Minister Ralph Goodale’s approach to income-trust taxation. He argued the playing field between income trusts and common-stock corporations should have been levelled with a tax on trusts, not with a cut to dividend taxes.

“That was not the way to fix too-low tax levels on income trusts,” he says.

He also notes that government should be focused on improving support for small business rather than handing out tax breaks that favour large corporations.

“More could be done to try to direct investor capital toward smaller businesses instead of making income trusts or larger entities even more attractive,” Steedman says.