Before entering politics, Germa was a labourer and union organizer in Sudbury, and served on Sudbury City Council.[1] In 1964, while serving on city council, he advocated for Northern Ontario to separate from Ontario to become its own province.[2]
Federal politics
Germa first ran as an NDP candidate in the 1965 election,[3] losing to Liberal incumbent Rodger Mitchell. Mitchell died in 1967, however, and in the resulting byelection, Germa won the seat.[4] The results were subject to a judicial recount, due to Germa's narrow margin of victory over Liberal candidate James Jerome, but the recount upheld Germa's victory.[5] Unusually, but legally at the time, he did not resign his city council seat while serving as an MP, but held both positions concurrently.[6]
However, in the national election the following year, Jerome defeated Germa to reclaim the seat for the Liberals.
In 1975, Ontario Progressive Conservative Party MPP Frank Drea was forced to apologize in the legislature after claiming in a speech on gun control that some members of the opposition caucuses were members of "Communist organizations"; although Drea did not publicly name on the record who he was talking about, he was overheard by journalists in the press gallery telling a colleague that he was referring to Germa.[9]
He was reelected in the 1975 election, in a closely watched three-way race against Liberal Elmer Sopha, his predecessor as MPP, and Conservative Joe Fabbro, at the time the city's mayor.[10] In this term, he served as chair of the legislature's standing committee on public accounts.[11] In 1976, he strongly opposed the government's plan to sell off the former Burwash Industrial Farm site near Sudbury,[12] although after a journalist from CKNC-TV interviewed him about the issue on the Burwash site,[13] Progressive Conservative MPP Margaret Scrivener accused him of illegal trespassing.[14]
In 1977, after a list of doctors' billing fees to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan was released to the media, the Tories attempted to have Germa deposed as chair of the public accounts committee, although the move failed.[15]
