Four of the eight candidates vying to represent Perth-Wellington in the provincial legislature following the June 7 election answered questions on topics ranging from deficits to day care at a meeting at the Alma Community Centre on May 17.
On hand for the meeting, organized by the Optimist Club of Alma, were: Conservative MPP Randy Pettapiece, Liberal candidate Brendan Knight, NDP candidate Michael O’Brien and Libertarian Scott Marshall.
Not present were Green Party candidate Lisa Olsen, Paul McKendrick of the Consensus Ontario party, Rob Smeenk of the Freedom Party of Ontario and Andrew Stanton of the Alliance party.
In brief opening statements, Pettapiece stressed his record as an incumbent MPP, representing Perth-Wellington residents since 2011. “I’ve worked hard to represent their interests and values. I’ve spoken up for rural and small town Ontario, I’ve initiated debates on the rural urban divide and the need to protect municipalities from higher insurance rates and the need for fair and equal consideration on infrastructure funding and the need to save our long-term care beds,” he said.
Knight stated, “I’m running in this election for the educational system for my kids to have and health care that my family can rely on.” He told the crowd that over the past four years the Liberal government has created 400,000 new jobs and “a million since the last recession.” Citing investments by the governing Liberals in all-day Kindergarten, child care, mental health, hospitals and education, Knight stated, “These investments and growth in our community are in jeopardy with Ford, a future Ford government. So far, we have yet to see a costed plan from Mr. Ford and bumper sticker slogans are not the same as a costed platform.”
O’Brien said an NDP government would halt closures of rural schools, repair “crumbling buildings” change the school’s funding formula and facilitate an increase in the number of educational assistants and teachers in schools. Ensuring children with mental health issues “are treated in a timely fashion,” more funding for hospitals and reducing hydro rates would also be a priority, he said.
Marshall said he travelled across Ontario in the course of duties as his party’s campaign director. “I heard loud and clear what the problems are here, not that it’s a big surprise to anybody: waiting lines for health care, the energy costs.” Marshall indicated he believes health care dollars are poorly spent by the current government. “I think they budgeted $56 billion this year and of that over 50 per cent, and this is not an exaggeration, 50 per cent goes into bureaucracy and administration.”
Health care
One question from the audience of about 50 people asked specifically where money will come from for more frontline health care, “given the kind of bureaucracy were dealing with.”
McKnight said the Liberal government has promised the hiring of 3,500 “frontline workers – nurses.” He also said, “We’ve made significant investments in hiring doctors and nurses since 2003 and so we will continue to make the needed investments in our hospitals, whether it be infrastructure or frontline workers or services for mental health.”
Marshall insisted, “all the money” is being spent on the health care bureaucracy.
“We don’t need more money for health care, we just need the money for health care going to patient services … going to the frontline, going to doctors, nurses,” Marshall stated. “There are so many levels of highly-paid bureaucrats in the health care industry it is mind boggling.”
O’Brien was optimistic, if not specific, stating only, “It is a problem and I’m hopeful the NDP, when they come into power, will deal with it.”
Pettapiece said he has spoken to nurses who tell him they spend two or three hours a shift doing paperwork when they could be working with patients.
“It seems to me that the bureaucracy in Toronto, that for every new job they want, all they need is a piece of paper for it and that costs money so we need to get some of the red tape out of the system,” he said. Pettapiece added the PC party is also looking at changes to Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs).
“It seems to me there’s just a lot of people there, so we want to have a look at this and get that bunch of bureaucracy pared down a little bit.”
Day care
Candidates were called on to outline their stance on day care.
“Our platform is to roll out a $7,500 tax credit to parents and they’d be able to choose where they’d want their children to go to, whether it’s a licensed day care centre or a person who looks after somebody else’s children,” said Pettapiece.
“I think day care and these types of programs are certainly necessary and we want to offer those who need it relief from the costs because it is very expensive.” After the meeting, Pettapiece clarified in an email to the Community News the PC plan is actually a 75 percent rebate of child care expenses, up to $6,750 per child under age 15.
Knight said, “The Liberal government has already committed. All-day kindergarten has provided relief for parents and provided opportunities for our children and we are putting forward an expanded day care program for two-and-a-half and up in 2020.
“What that will do over time is build the capacity within the system to hire the … teachers and early childhood educators and (build) facilities to make more opportunities within our communities for different kinds of child care so people can choose what’s best for them.”
“That’s right: all-day kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, free day care, money grows on trees,” said Marshall. “Look, you know the only thing we’re teaching people is a lack of responsibility. If you’re going to have children, you need to be responsible for those children … Why does everything have to be the government’s problem? Why does the government have to always be the one with the solution for the problem? Why can’t we go back about 30 or 40 years and be responsible for ourselves and, oh, our neighbours?”
O’Brien said he is in favour of day care programs because they “allow lower income, single-parent families to get additional training so they can get into the workforce … it gives them a chance to go out and work … and look after their families without extra assistance.”
The deficit
Candidates were asked to explain how their party would handle Ontario’s debt and deficit.
“I wish I had my magic wand with me to give you a clear answer on this. Our leader, Mr. Ford, has said that we are going to spend our money better, wiser. He has proposed looking at inefficiencies or efficiencies of running the government and hopefully save something around four cents of every dollar spent running the government and that money can be used for other things,” said Pettapiece.
“We need to get our heads on straight here and tackle this thing and again, I can’t really give you a good answer on that one, it’s just looking at efficiencies and looking at how you want to run government is one of the ways that we want to do this.”
Knight stated, “When the Liberal government come to office they came to balance and after the Great Recession government also brought the books back to balance and at this point we are choosing to have a small deficit in order to invest in people so they also have a fair chance of contributing to our economy so that we can continue to grow the investments that we have, so that we can pay for the things that we rely on, the services that we need, and then to reduce the deficit again. Also if we go for massive cuts, that will stall our growth and we will have less revenue to pay down any kind of debt we have going forward.”
“The leader of the Ontario Libertarian party is Mr. Small and, I kid you not, the objective of the exercise is to make government a little bit smaller,” said Marshall. “You don’t have to do that by going out and slashing and burning the programs that the people are looking at to be delivered … We could stop with the corporate handouts. We could stop with subsidizing green energy.”
Marshall pointed to a joint $220 million federal/provincial contribution to Toyota for upgrading facilities in Cambridge and Woodstock.
“Toyota makes 25 billion dollars a year and if they want to build a plant there they can do it themselves. You don’t need to pay for it,” Marshall added.
O’Brien agreed eliminating corporate welfare and reducing bureaucracy would contribute to reducing Ontario’s deficit. But, he added, “We have to grow the economy. If we do all three, then things should start to improve slowly.”
Sex education
Another questioner noted that during the PC leadership convention, winning candidate Doug Ford promised to “repeal” the current sex education curriculum in Ontario schools. Candidates were asked their party’s position on the topic.
“It’s not the government’s role. It’s not bureaucrats’ role to determine what’s the best education, necessarily, for your children,” said Marshall. “Yeah, we should have a basic curriculum and they need to learn to read, they need to learn to write, You know, do some basic math. Basic math would be nice …
“The power needs to be put back into the parents’ hands … the money needs to follow the student. So the [parent] doesn’t believe in what the curriculum is at the public school? Then they can take the child to a private school or they can home school and the home school still gets the share of the revenue.”
Marshall said such an approach would force both public and private schools to “get their act together, because now they’re competing for customers.”
O’Brien asked, “When it comes to sex ed how many of us actually teach our children the facts of life?”
“I did,” responded a woman in the audience.
“You may well, but a lot of people don’t,” O’Brien continued. “I listen to CBC radio and I’ve heard people calling in saying that if it hadn’t been for the sex ed curriculum they wouldn’t have known that a family member was molesting their child.”
“Do you think that’s appropriate that they’re teaching that?” the same woman interjected, prompting the moderator, Optimist Jim deBock, to ask her to wait until after the meeting for discussions with individual candidates.
“I’m’ just saying it has benefits,” O’Brien concluded.
“This is a difficult subject. It’s certainly a difficult topic for anybody to talk about I’m sure,” said Pettapiece. “We believe, in fact we know, the parents were not consulted in the first place as much as they should have been.”
Pettapiece said committee meetings on the curriculum were rushed and “parents that were against it, or at least wanting to testify at committee meetings, just didn’t get the chance to do that.”
Pettapiece said a PC government would re-open the process and have “fair and good consultations” with all parents who want to get involved “and if changes are needed to what’s there we make them and if people are happy with it we leave it alone.”
Knight stated, “The sex ed bill did have consultation from parents, teachers and experts.” He added the health curriculum was subject of more consultation than any other area of the overall curriculum.
“I understand it’s controversial, but to repeal it would take us back to the 1998 version. At that time the internet was not as prevalent, we didn’t have social media. And as we all see now, both online and in conventional News, it seems to be something of great concern. And so I believe in the sex education (curriculum), how it’s currently constructed. I know that parents can remove their students if they feel it’s not appropriate for them.”
Climate Change
The final question of the evening asked for the candidates’ views on climate change policy.
“Well we brought in the cap and trade system,” said Knight. “That is a free market system that will guarantee the reduction of emissions as the amount of emissions is reduced over time and these funds will go into other programs like small businesses that are researching energy efficiencies, making homes and hospitals more energy efficient, into infrastructure like transit, like bike lanes to reduce our overall emission system.”
Knight added, “We believe in taking responsibility for our part in climate change and to have a system that will benefit our overall economy.”
Marshall said, “Canada is a carbon sink … We absorb more carbon in this country than we produce, all day, all night. China, India, you know countries over in Asia, the U.S., in some spots still, they pollute. They pollute a lot. But I don’t understand how ordinary Ontarians are supposed to be responsible economically for the future of the planet to the point where it becomes a burden,”
Marshall continued, “The climate changes. It has been doing that for four billion years, five billion years. I think it’s naive to think that we can just spend money and solve that.”
O’Brien said, “NDP policy is to continue the cap and trade system.” However, he added, “I’d like to see some figures to see how fast our greenhouse gasses are actually decreasing because then we can study if there’s better ways of doing it.”
Noting a large portion of emissions come from cars, O’Brien said the NDP would concentrate on public transit “so we can get some cars off the road.”
Pettapiece stated, “Something that I think should be encouraged is technology. I think technology can help solve this problem quicker … and I would like government to encourage companies that are interested in this type of thing to get on with the technology.
“But I think we have to also encourage countries like India and China to do a lot better job than what they’re doing right now .. This is a worldwide problem. I don’t think we’re just going to solve it in Canada.”
