These three neighborhood members are amongst these working to be Peterborough-Kawartha’s subsequent MPP. Clockwise from top-left: Jen Deck, Adam Hopkins, and Lucas Graham.
Ontario is headed to the polls on February 27, 2025, after Premier Doug Ford known as a snap election 16 months sooner than scheduled.
In the course of the week of February 3, Peterborough Currents interviewed three of the 4 neighborhood members who had put their names ahead to develop into Peterborough-Kawartha’s subsequent MPP: Jen Deck, Lucas Graham, and Adam Hopkins. (Progressive Conservative Dave Smith didn’t reply to our invites and New Blue Occasion candidate Andrew Roudny had but to declare his candidacy on the time.)
We requested candidates to inform us about themselves and why they’re working, and we additionally requested how they’d handle two huge points dealing with our neighborhood proper now: a scarcity of housing and a scarcity of docs.
You possibly can take heed to the interviews within the audio gamers under, and you can even learn excerpts from the conversations. When you desire, you will discover these interviews in your most popular podcast app by trying to find “Peterborough Currents.”
Jen Deck, Ontario New Democratic Occasion
Who she is and why she’s working
Jen Deck, who additionally ran for the NDP within the 2022 provincial election, launched herself as a union chief for native provide academics and mentioned she’s working for MPP as a approach to handle among the struggles she’s seen her fellow academics undergo just lately.
“So much that my members are struggling with [is] because our Ontario government is just not doing its job, not doing its work,” she mentioned. “I ran last time, and I felt like I put in that investment, and people had a chance to start to get to know me. And really, if I want things to get better in Ontario, I need to step up and and be willing to be part of that change. You know, I’m five years from retirement. I am looking forward to having chickens. But I can’t sit by and watch while Ontario goes down this path that is not serving the people of Ontario.”
On the NDP
“The NDP stands for workers,” Deck mentioned. “The NDP is the reason that we have healthcare in Canada. The NDP has a track record of caring about people and wanting to provide people with the supports that can allow them to be successful in whatever way that they want to be successful. Clearly the Conservatives don’t have any regard for the working people of Ontario. And I don’t feel confident that the Liberals are really working for the working people either. I think they they can talk a good talk. They make promises, but then when they’re in power, they govern in a really similar way to the Conservatives. So to me, being an NDP supporter is kind of a no brainer.”
On vote-splitting with the Liberals
Currents requested Deck how she responds to criticisms that the NDP is vote-splitting with the Liberals, particularly in a driving that has traditionally flipped backwards and forwards between conservatives and Liberals.
Deck responded: “The NDP is in much better shape than the Liberals are right now, so if anyone is splitting the vote, it’s the Liberals.”
“It’s an unfair dynamic to create,” Deck continued. “People should be voting for the party that matters to them. We should have a fair election system. We have a flawed election system that disproportionately favours the Conservatives and the Liberals. I would say that the fact that we do as well as we do in an unfair voting system speaks volumes for how much appetite there is for what the NDP has to offer.”
On growing entry to household docs
Deck began by laying the blame for the native physician scarcity on the Ford authorities. The scarcity has “more than doubled in just two years,” she mentioned. “So we’re obviously heading in the wrong track.”
“How do you get more doctors? Well, first of all, you have to make more doctors. So we need to increase funding to medical schools,” she mentioned. “There’s all sorts of really innovative ideas out there for growing healthcare providers in-house. So rather than having to try and recruit from elsewhere, we should be encouraging people from the area to go and get trained.”
Deck additionally mentioned that non-public well being care “steals our health care professionals away from public service” and that “we have to stop trying to use private solutions for public service problems.”
On housing
“Part of the problem with housing is that it’s been downloaded, first federally to the province and then from the province to municipalities. And municipalities are just not in a good place to be funding big housing projects … You can see already that Peterborough city council is having to make pretty aggressive cuts to public services and yet our taxes are going up, and this is because we’re asking municipalities to take on roles that really are better suited to the province. So one of the NDP plans is to pull that responsibility back up to the provincial level, and that’s going to take a lot of pressure off of municipal government.”
Lucas Graham, Inexperienced Occasion of Ontario
Who he’s and why he’s working
Graham launched himself as an entrepreneur, Inexperienced Occasion organizer, and board member with the Fundamental Earnings Community Peterborough.
“The reason that I am running now is I don’t think that there’s enough progressive perspectives, and particularly youth perspectives, among some of the choices here,” he mentioned. He mentioned he hopes to convey “representation” and “hope” to residents who may be dissatisfied by politics proper now.
“If you don’t feel heard by some of the other candidates, it can be really difficult to want to get engaged in the political process,” Graham mentioned, noting Ontario’s “abysmal” turnout of 44 p.c within the 2022 election. “So I wanted to get involved, just to see if I could bring some of the energy that I bring to some of the local non-profits and volunteer opportunities that I work with.”
On the Inexperienced Occasion
“The Green Party tends to prioritize solutions over partisanship, so Green politicians are always working across party lines to get things done,” Graham mentioned. “The NDP, as a traditional party, is more focused on jostling for power with the Liberals and Conservatives, at least in my perspective. There’s also the fact that the NDP does support climate action, but the Green Party makes it a core of the platform.”
“The Greens push for stronger, faster climate policies, whereas the NDP often balances labour interests with climate policies, which can lead to slower action on phasing out fossil fuels.”
What’s the purpose of his marketing campaign?
Currents requested Graham what the function of a Inexperienced candidacy in Peterborough-Kawartha is, if it’s to not win the driving.
“Other parties tend to act only when they start to feel pressure,” Graham mentioned. “So when Green support grows, even if it doesn’t mean winning an election, some of the mainstream parties are forced to adopt stronger climate, housing and social policies.”
On docs
“Expanding public funding for family doctors and nurse practitioners is going to be really important,” Graham mentioned. Different methods will embody “hiring more nurses and personal support workers and hospital staff to ease the burden on our health care system [and] fast tracking licensing for internationally trained doctors and nurses.”
Graham additionally emphasised the necessity to prioritize public, fairly than personal, healthcare. “Right now, it’s better for [doctors] financially to try to move towards one of the privatized clinics, or to move somewhere else entirely, and that’s not what we want.”
On housing
“There should be more provincial investment in the municipality” for housing, Graham mentioned.
“The real key is going to be intensification rather than sprawling outwards, because that’s that’s one of the major reasons that it costs so much for the city to build new housing is because that comes along with roads. It comes along with infrastructure hookups and the farther from the downtown core, or some of the core parts of Peterborough that they get, the more expensive it is to service those bits of infrastructure.”
Adam Hopkins, Ontario Liberal Occasion
Who he’s and why he’s working
Hopkins mentioned he’s Lunapeew and Anishinaabe and grew up in Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit — also called the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, in southwestern Ontario. He mentioned he moved to Peterborough about twenty years in the past to attend Trent College after which stayed as he pursued a profession within the postsecondary sector. At the moment, he works on the First Nations Technical Institute, the place he develops educational programming that’s grounded in Indigenous methods of understanding, he defined.
Hopkins can also be a dad, and he mentioned that’s what drove him to run on this election. “I have not felt good about the direction the province has been taking,” he mentioned. “I have not felt good about what my children will be experiencing in this province in the near future. And specifically [I’m] very worried about our public education and healthcare system. That’s the main reason that I became involved.”
On the Liberal Occasion
“I’ve been a Liberal for a very long time,” Hopkins mentioned. “I have always thought of the Liberal Party as being a big-tent type party. We’re not driven by ideology. I think of the party as being responsive and nimble.”
“The folks that are supporting the [local] campaign are all really progressively minded people,” he mentioned. “They really are energized by Bonnie. They’re really energized by the fact that we’re kind of in this period where we’re rebuilding.”
Hopkins mentioned he doesn’t know a lot about Liberal chief Bonnie Crombie. However his native marketing campaign volunteers do, he mentioned. “What they tell me is that she’s a strong voice. She comes from pretty humble background. She’s got a diversity of perspective because of that.”
On the Liberals’ place on the political spectrum
Currents requested Hopkins if he agrees with Bonnie Crombie’s 2023 assertion that the Ontario Liberal Occasion moved “much too far to the left” below Kathleen Wynne and may as a substitute “govern from right of centre.”
“I’m not familiar with her making those comments,” he responded. The Liberals’ strategy on this election is to stay “hyper focused on what we all know are the issues that everyone [is] worried about, and that’s health care, that’s affordability, that’s housing. So we are hyper focused on those.”
On docs
“The [Liberal] plan is 3,100 doctors into the system at a cost of $3.1 billion,” Hopkins mentioned. “So that’s creating spaces for new doctors, that’s retaining doctors who are aging out of the system, that’s removing barriers for internationally trained doctors.”
Hopkins acknowledged it could be exhausting work to attach each Ontarian with a household physician inside 4 years, because the Liberals have promised to do.
“From time to time, I get people rolling their eyes at me,” he mentioned. “They say, ‘We’ve heard that before. That’s BS, man.’ And fair enough. But I think this can actually work. It’s going to take some hard work. It’s a big investment. It’s a big idea, but having come from post-secondary, I know it can work.”
Hopkins additionally mentioned he desires to discover the potential for increasing the usage of nurse practitioners. “Why don’t we have more nurse practitioners in the system?” he requested. “As I understand it, they’ve got a relatively wide scope of practice, and it seems to be one of those low hanging fruits.”
On housing
“We do have a plan so that builders, so that municipalities, will have more ability and more resources to build houses,” Hopkins mentioned.
Hopkins raised two different coverage proposals from the provincial Liberals: eliminating the land switch tax and eliminating improvement charges. “In some of the bigger centres, development charges are sometimes in the neighbourhood of 30 percent of the end price [of a home],” Hopkins mentioned. When requested if the Liberals would make municipalities entire for the misplaced income of improvement charges, Hopkins mentioned sure. “There is a plan for some of those costs to be recouped by the municipality.”
