Ahead of the upcoming Ontario election, the Carleton NDP hosted a town hall event at Carleton University’s Southam Hall with local progressive candidates and leaders on Feb. 12.
Ottawa federal candidate Joel Harden, Ottawa Centre provincial candidate Catherine McKenney and Ottawa’s Somerset Ward Coun. Ariel Troster attended as guest speakers.
Each outlined their perspectives on key student issues and answered students’ questions.
Speakers’ platforms
Organizers prompted discussions on four key issues – the housing crisis, transit, climate action and health care.
“An actually affordable home is something that is 30 per cent or less of your income,” Harden said. “In the NDP, we believe housing is a human right.”
“We are never, ever going to end this without stopping people from falling into homelessness,” McKenney said.“We have to build deeply affordable housing. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.”
“We can as a city invest in the type of housing we need, whether it’s supportive housing buildings, or Housing First. We’ve got supportive housing organizations in this city that house people… We just need to scale it up.”
On transit, the speakers highlighted the need for affordable transportation with the shortcomings of Ottawa’s transit system.
“How do we stop the transit death spiral? We invest in reliability, we invest in frequency and we make transit free for students, seniors and people living in poverty,” Troster said.
She also said public transit should be reliable enough to encourage everyone to use it, not just those who cannot afford other means of transportation.
However, the costs associated with a transition to better transit systems may pose a significant barrier.
“They want to cut shiny ribbons on capital projects and they don’t want to fund the operation of transit as a public service,” Troster said. “I am in support of anything that provides more federal or provincial funding to transit systems.”
McKenney said funding transit at the provincial level is a necessary cost for future gains.
“If we’re going to operate a system and make it run, we’ve got to reduce fares, increase service [and] do all the things that you need for your bus and train to show up,” McKenney said.
Harden referenced the green transportation infrastructure and renewable energy of European countries as an ideal for Canada. On climate action, he emphasized the need for Canada’s economy to transition toward sustainability.
“We need to take all the manufacturing brilliance that exists here, the workers, the industrial partners and bring them together with smart policy to create a green new deal on our terms, not on the terms of the fossil fuel industry.”
On the issue of health care, Harden said Canada needs to provide better funding to improve services. He pointed to the Canadian Dental Care Plan as a federal NDP victory that the Liberals initially resisted and eventually took credit for.
“Our leadership compelled them to sign an agreement with us where we now have a million Canadians enrolled in a dental care program,” he said.
Both Harden and McKenney underscored the increasing shift from public to private health care as contributing to lower quality of service for Canadians.
“It’s been 20, 25 years that we’ve been removing that funding,” McKenney said. “And the scarcity [of funding] just continues to grow until we are in a place now when someone says to you, ‘I waited 18 hours in an ER.’ That’s not an anomaly.”
‘Never lose your sense of outrage’
After the discussion concluded, the Charlatan spoke to students to recount their thoughts on the event.
“Coming here really energized my thoughts,” said Jozeef Vijayaratnam, a Carleton student in the NDP club.
“I’ve always known that I want to vote NDP in this election and all future elections, but I hadn’t really gotten involved until now in terms of coming to events, especially with the Carleton NDP,” said William Morrison, another student in the club.
Among issues discussed at the town hall, students highlighted transit and affordability as the most important platform points heading into the election.
Vijayaratnam said the town hall outlined many important issues from a student lens that will be important to consider before voting.
“The three major ones that affect me are transit, health care and housing,” Vijayaratnam said. “Because as a student, it’s getting really hard to find affordable housing.”
Some students said there were some important issues they thought were left untouched during the town hall.
“In current times, inflation and the cost of living, I feel like that was something that wasn’t discussed as I would have liked,” said Jeevandeep Kaur, another student in the NDP club.
Carleton NDP co-chair Gabriel Trozzi Stamou highlighted the importance of turning students’ energy and support into political action.
“There’s a quote by Bernie Sanders that I really like, and it’s ‘never lose your sense of outrage.’ And I think that’s true, and a lot of us feel really outraged by a lot of things that we see going on,” Stamou said.
“But we also can’t lose our sense of hope. And if you want to direct your outrage into a channel, into something that you can actually see change made, I truly believe that the NDP is a good way to do that.”
Featured image by Brendon Poste.
