Following Premier Andrew Furey’s unexpected resignation, was it hard not to run for the Liberal leadership?
Yes. Yeah. It was very difficult. When I made my decision to step back from federal politics it was done for a number of reasons, not because of my health and not because of family, but just because I felt like I wanted to do something different in my life. And I had been a politician for 30 years, what do I do next? I’m in my mid-50s; if I’m going to do something else now is the time. So when the job opened for premier I was overwhelmed with calls and emails and people were so supportive. And I felt I owed it to the province to have a good look at this and I did, we did some polling and it was really good, raising money was easy, the holdback for me is I’m still taking oral cancer drugs. And I have another year and a half, minimum. I have some side effects that affect my physical endurance. I knew I wasn’t operating at 100 per cent. I knew my body was probably at 75 per cent. And I gave it a lot of thought, I wanted to do it, mentally I was ready to do it, however I also knew that running a nomination meeting, bringing in a throne speech, a budget, organizing candidates, calling another election between now and October,  could my body stand up to all of that? I didn’t feel I had the physical endurance to do it. That’s what held me back from running. It wouldn’t have been fair to the people of the province or to myself. If it was two years out it would have been a very different decision from me.

Switching gears a little, I really enjoyed reading about your growing up in Labrador.
I had a lot of love in my life as a child. Despite the difficulties. I was always close with all my siblings. My mother was a force of nature, as a woman in her day, working, raising a family, having a husband who worked hard by had alcohol addictions. My father’s issues were not unlike a lot of Inuit descent I don’t want to stereotype but in his time a lot of Indigenous men had problems with alcohol addiction. My father was no different, he had suffered through a lot of trauma in his life. But a very loving family, we didn’t have much but we never knew the difference until we were older. A lot of good homemade food, a roof over our head, we celebrated everything in the home, Easter, Christmas. My mother if you did anything well went out of her way to make sure you knew she was proud of you. My grandfather on my dad’s side was an extremely ambitious man, he had to be the best at everything, if someone had two loads of wood the next day he had four. He felt hard work was how you made a name for yourself. We had to volunteer, my mother was a volunteer. Dad was a hunter and fisher and he took us everywhere.

Is there a message you hope people take from your book?
That it doesn’t matter where you grow up, it doesn’t matter how challenging life can be sometimes, there’s always hope, and with hope there’s always success. That’s how I fell. I dreamed, and I’m still a dreamer. I’m dreaming now about what my next projects is going to be, and what I’m going to do. And I want kids to feel that they can dream, and the bigger you can dream the more successful you can be. I firmly believe that we’re only limited by what we can see, feel, and understand.
I’m hoping it will open up a conversation about hard topics that we’re not always comfortable discussing. My parents taught me everything, they taught me how to survive on the land, but they never taught me about sexual abuse or violence of any kind, harassment or bullying.
People ate not comfortable to talk about it, they’re not comfortable to tell anyone, even if they’re older when something like this happens to them, for the victim it’s always a sense of embarrassment, it changes how you feel because you have a loss of innocence, and I felt that my entire life, I always felt, that I was not good enough, and I think a lot of things that happened in my life and my political life as well it came back to those thoughts. I’m not good enough. It has taken me a long time to realize I am good enough. And I really want to remove that stigmatism that victims feel, and I know I’m not going to do it by just writing my story and telling it but it’s a start, it’s a beginning. If we don’t have these conversations we don’t change what happens in society.

Is there a question I haven’t asked that you’d like to be asked?
I think I’d like you to ask me what it’s like as a woman when you’re dealing with political issues.

OK, what it’s like as a woman when you’re dealing with political issues?
In lots of cases you kind of feel you’re alone because in much of my career I’ve been the only woman at many of these tables. Sometimes you feel you have to express yourself firmly and you have to be repetitive in expressing yourself and your ideas, because sometimes you’re not always heard the first time around. I learned early on that I not only had to be firm, and loud, but I also had to substantiate why I felt we had to do things a certain way. And I never felt my male colleagues always had to do that. I would have to justify why I felt we had to to do it this way or that way. I learned early on it was more difficult to bring my message to any table or any forum, and I had to be more creative in how I did it. I do it using the analogies of people I know, how it affects real people in their lives, their communities, and I like to follow those ideas to the end so you can see where the end is, and promote the ending as a successful end. If you can present things in that way people are more receptive to them. That’s probably true for both men and women but for women, it’s not only true, it’s required, it necessary to get your ideas out there and moving.

The other thing is when I wouldn’t tell anyone I was having a child. That was very much isolating myself because I was a women, not taking the joy in my first child birth that most women do. And that was very much because when I was first elected, one of the things that was on the street that people said all the time was oh you watch she’ll be pregnant next thing. That was said so many time because belong the first women in Labrador ever elected and sent to the House of Assembly, it was unheard that a woman could be in the House of Assembly and have a baby. So all of a sudden I’m pregnant. How can I tell people, I’m going to open myself up to ridicule, I need this time to prove myself. I got elected in February, I was sworn in in March, and right after that I found out I was pregnant. I needed that window to prove myself as a woman, the first woman in politics, that women could do this job and do it well. So I didn’t feel I had the burden of Yvonne Jones, I had the burden of all women in society and if I screw this up I screw this up for everyone. So yes I kept it to myself, but I should have told my mother. When mom found out that I lost the baby, she found out that I was having the baby. It was devastating. And only a woman would have to do what I did.
The year I was first elected there were seven woman elected to the House of Assembly, the most ever. It’s still not an easy ride for women.

All proceeds from Just Around the Corner go towards the Labradorians of Distinction Award.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.