HOUGHTON – Former Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lon Johnson laid out his priorities for what he would do if elected to Congress during a campaign meeting with local Democrats in Houghton Thursday.

Johnson, who lives near Grayling, was chair of the state party from 2013 until July, when he stepped down to run for Congress.

He faces 2012 Democratic House candidate Jerry Cannon, formerly Kalkaska County sheriff. On the Republican side, State Sen. Tom Casperson, R-Escanaba, has announced his candidacy.

Current U.S. Rep. Dan Benishek, R-Crystal Falls, is not running for re-election after three terms in office.

Johnson pointed to his 700 endorsements, as well as fundraising of $350,000 from more than 1,000 donors.

“District-wide, we’re building a campaign’s that’s getting ready to win,” he said.

Johnson said his priorities if he reaches Congress include pursuing an “honest and hard-working” government through issues such as campaign finance reform, as well as fair trade and tax policies.

“We’ve got a trade policy that just got passed out of this Congress that was enormously unfair for people who work for a living,” he said of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact among Pacific Rim countries that has received the support of president Barack Obama and is intended to lower barriers to trade. “We saw what NAFTA did to our economy. This is going to be worse.”

Johnson said tax policy is tilted toward wealthy people who have easy lines of communication to Washington. He said he would support tax cuts for the middle class.

Another priority, he said, is keeping the Upper Peninsula “both beautiful and profitable,” including sustainable use of resources.

He supports shutting down Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline, which carries oil across the Straits of Mackinac from Canada.

“It’s a 63-year-old pipeline that’s pumping a half a billion barrels a day, and they won’t allow anybody to independently inspect this,” he said. “I don’t trust a corporation to tell us, ‘Oh, it’s all fine. Don’t worry about it.'”

Johnson said he is not opposed to all pipelines, which he called the safest way to move oil. He said he has not taken a position on the proposed Keystone pipeline.

Keeping an economy where Upper Peninsula residents can stay in the area and prosper is another priority, Johnson said. To accomplish that, he said, requires protecting people, land and the Great Lakes.

One way Johnson proposed to accomplish that is by returning rail service to northern Michigan.

“Our forefathers laid those tracks,” he said. “We have the right of ways. We used those lines to haul value away from us – lumber. Now we need those same lines to bring value to us in the form of tourism. Imagine what it would do to the economy of the U.P. if we had a line all the way from the Soo to Duluth, with lines going up to Marquette, up to Houghton and down to Escanaba.”

Johnson also called for high-speed Internet and mobile cell phone service in “every corner of the U.P. and northern Michigan.”

His most long-term proposal is to create an institute for the study of use and protection of fresh water, which could eventually create long-term economic dividends for the area. In 20 years, if not sooner, he predicted, water would become a source of war between countries.

“I’m not talking about selling our water,” he said. “What I’m saying is, we need to show whole industries how to better use it.”

He likened it to the support given by leaders in California to Stanford in the 1970s for developments in computer science, which spurred the rise of Silicon Valley.

Asked about allowing Syrian refugees into the country, Johnson said a knee-jerk reaction to terrorist acts plays into the hands of terrorists, who are looking to create an intolerant, non-pluralistic world.

Johnson, who worked in Iraq in 2005 as a civilian to build a political and governmental infrastructure, said a common term among his team was “kia kaha,” a Maori term meaning “stay strong.” For them, that meant not taking out frustrations about things such as car bombs on the local population.

“What had just occurred, the person that lit that car bomb off or fired that mortar off, was long gone by then,” he said. “You had to have the discipline to understand what was happening … the minute we start to cave on our values, we start to lose this war.”

But Johnson said he still would have voted for a bill passed by the House Wednesday that would place new limits on bringing 10,000 Iraqi and Syrian refugees to the United States. The bill passed 289-137, with yes votes from 47 Democrats. President Obama has said he will veto it.

Right now, Americans don’t trust the government to do a good enough job to guard against the chance of a terrorist infiltrating refugees, Johnson said. However, he said the country still has a responsibility to aid and assist other countries handling refugees, and make sure the administration is hitting its benchmarks for accurately clearing the refugees.

Under the bill, the director of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence would have to clear each refugee following a background check.

“In my mind’s eye, what that’s saying is that our House of Representatives, our people, don’t trust that everything is being done to make sure terrorists don’t slip into this country,” he said. “That has to be addressed, so that we can maintain our values of being a welcoming society.”

Asked about women’s issues, Johnson began by saying he is “100 percent” pro-choice.

“In many ways, a lot of my social views are libertarian,” he said. “I don’t believe the government should be in the business of telling a woman or a doctor what they discuss or what they should do with their own bodies. I’m not going to run from that.”

The wage gap between genders is also “abysmal,” he said. Johnson said his views have been shaped in part by his wife, Julianna Smoot, a Smith College graduate who served as Obama’s deputy manager during the 2012 election. Through her, he said, he got more knowledge about challenges women face, such as systemic bias in the legal, government and business structures.

“That’s something that as a man, I was frankly blind to,” he said.

Increasing the federal minimum wage is essential, Johnson said. In 2014, Michigan approved a phased increase that will raise the state wage to $9.25 in 2018, and then rise with inflation. The national minimum wage has been at $7.25 an hour since 2009.

“Let’s not go for $9 here,” he said. “If we’re going to fight, let’s have it out, and get to $15.”

When a crowd member said that an increase would cause people to lose their food stamps and other government funding, Johnson replied that “any person on food stamps would rather have a job than be on food stamps.”

Instead of a balance between capital and labor, Johnson said, capital has obtained an upper hand through access through lawyers, campaign donations, public relations measures.

“We’re giving tax breaks to billionaires and millionaires, and guess where that money’s going?” he said. “It’s going to New York, it’s going to Chicago, it’s going to the Cayman Islands. It’s going everywhere but on downtown Main Streets of our country.”

Johnson said the roots of his decision to run go back to 1992, when as a student at Arizona State University, he worked on the successful Congressional campaign of Sam Coppersmith, who beat an better-funded Republican incumbent. The next two years saw numerous close votes, giving Johnson repeated demonstrations of the importance of his work.

“Here I was, coming from a family that was very apolitical, no money, no assets to speak of, and I was making a difference,” he said.