For Malcolm Age Is No Thing
By John Swartz
SUNonline/Orillia profiles candidates from each party in the forthcoming provincial election. Each candidate was asked the same set of questions. All candidates were invited to participate, however Jill Dunlop of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario did not make arrangements to meet with SUNonline/Orillia.
Jordi Malcolm is perhaps the youngest candidate at just 19 years old to run for provincial office in Simcoe North .
“There’s other candidates who are 19 as well,” Malcolm said of NDP candidates in other ridings.
From Orillia, she is attending the University of Ottawa and works at Zehrs. Her brother and sister no longer live at home with her parents and Malcolm isn’t sure if they have being paying attention.
“I don’t think they know,” Malcolm is running.
Why did she decide to run, and why for the NDP?
“My friend who works in the central area of the party had reached out to me and asked if I wanted to run in this riding,” Malcolm said.
“I went for my party’s nomination. We needed a progressive voice on the ballot. The people here deserve to have someone they can put their faith in. The NDP specifically? Protecting health care, doubling ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program), support for education workers and making our schools better,” are the reasons she said she is attracted to the party.
What would she change about the NDP to make the party better?
“Valuing new voices. Obviously the youth wing of the party has been active in pretty much every riding. We started some of our own riding associations. We’ve opened up campus clubs on nearly every Ontario university campus and just a few years ago there was only one. I think a lot of the critical passion this party needs is going to lie with youth and they have the energy to do it.”
One wonders if young people are aware of the party’s union roots. How do they learn about the fundamentals of being in the NDP?
“A lot of the people in the youth wing are from their own unions; university staff unions, I’m from the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) and I’ve worked with them. I do think I want to see more of a move toward focusing on labour because ultimately it’s the working class who built this province. I don’t think the party has strayed that much from that. You don’t see liberals or conservatives at picket lines, you see people from the NDP.”
An important aspect of being a politician is saying, “I don’t know.” Too often a politician will get in front of a microphone and feel they have to answer a question or make a statement, while people listening who have expertise can tell they don’t have a clue. SUNonline/Orillia wants to know how candidates educate themselves when confronted with subjects they know little about.
“Because I’m in university I have access to the databases the university paid for, so a lot of my research when I can’t rely on the news to give me an unbiased perspective I can turn to article in the databases. Just in this election alone Elizabeth (Van Houtte) has been a great help, and people from the central party have been helpful to me,” Malcolm said.
Healthcare
SUNonline/Orillia wanted to know what candidates views were about the privatization of healthcare and how much the public can take before the system breaks down.
“The system is already broken because 65,000 people in this riding already don’t have a family doctor. It’s shocking, really, and there’s 2.5 million across the province right now who don’t have a family doctor and that number is only going to go up is we don’t make a change.”
“We already are throwing a lot of money at it. I think it’s just changing the approach we are taking. For example, there are 13,000 internationally trained doctors in Ontario who are being prevented from practising. If we could let these people practice and clear the way and ensure they can do their job the family doctor situation would be significantly decreased.”
But what about privatization of service?
“We are paying so much OHIP for private facilities when we could just be paying that money into the health centers. But it would put less money in the pockets of corporations.”
Recently Orillia council approved striking a committee to look into creating a City-owned clinic which would employ doctors, perhaps as many as ten, to ease the pressure people have finding a doctor. But, is this a municipal responsibility?
“It’s a dangerous precedent that the province who is responsible for healthcare can offload to municipalities. Municipalities are already dealing with enough. Having to deal with providing healthcare as well when it shouldn’t be your responsibility in the first place is a problem,” Malcolm said.
Climate Change
Days after Doug Ford took office in 2018 he cancelled 758 solar, wind, and in Orillia’s case, hydro generation projects at a cost of $231 million. Recently we have witnessed the gutting of environmental and natural habitat agencies in the U.S. Industry rebels against any kind of environmental regulation and all around the world conservative politicians are not taking climate change seriously. SUNonline/Orillia wants to know if candidates think this is a good idea, or a bad idea.
“It’s critical and for someone like Ford, who is not going to be around when the climate gets really bad and it becomes unlivable, but I might and if I‘m not my children might be, so I think this is the most important issue on the plate right now. Not just in this election, but period, in every aspect of our lives,” she said.
“What I’m thinking of is more of a move toward renewable energy. We’ve pushed back on that to protect the fossil fuel industry, but I think we have to move to renewable energy that allows people to transition and to keep jobs. Supporting people through the transition would be essential. Once we’ve done that.”
The conservative government is pushing to build a tunnel under Highway 401 for one reason, to alleviate traffic congestion, which comes with its own environmental concerns and won’t solve any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
“I think the tunnel project is so ambitious if you were to actually start it, it would never be finished. It would be just like the Elginton Line, how long has it been, 20 years? That money could be better spent investing in public transportation, or into building housing around transit so people are actually using it.”
Housing
SUNonline/Orillia contends a major cause of the rising cost of housing are two things, Real Estate Investment Trusts, of which some are buying up whole neighbourhoods to turn family homes into rental units, and Airbnb, which incentivizes smaller landlords to take rentals out of the market to turn into quasi hotels. It seems the mainstream media and politicians think speaking about their role is Kryptonite. What, if anything can the provincial government do to halt, or roll back the high cost of housing?
“Implementing real rent control again and not just on building would significantly lower the cost of rentals. It was done to incentivize building more units to fix the housing crisis, but the units it incentivized are luxury, unaffordable units. I’m seeing it Ottawa and I’m starting to see it here now, these new builds are not affordable.”
“Then there’s also our plan to build affordable housing units with co-op and non-profit designations to ensure the people we are giving this money to are not going to be taking advantage of Ontario,” Malcolm said.
Immigration
This is mostly a federal issue, experienced at the local level. There are many ramifications of too many immigrants coming in too short a time. It seems those who prey on and take advantage of the influx of new residents can do what they want. From immigration lawyers, to employers and landlords, immigrants are being taken advantage of. Does the province have a role in immigration?
“I think it would be great for the province to start to help fund community groups, especially because what we are seeing right now is immigrant communities are relying on themselves and they are relying on each other and it’s causing them to cluster in big cities.”
“I think if we were to have more funding and support for these community groups they (immigrants) would be more spread out in the province. Initially, clearing the path for people who are internationally trained to work in the healthcare sector, or education or any other career area we need people in would help a lot,”
We have accepted refugees from war zones, but are overlooking refugees from climate disasters, an occurrence likely to increase as time passes. What about those immigrant refugees showing up on our shores?
“I have a human caring perspective on that. We are basically helping people who don’t have access to the things we have, we should be helping refugees from, not just war but climate disasters. Right now we are facing this issue of, are we putting Canadians first? I think working with the federal government on immigration, to limit it just to the point we need to, not too much because obviously I do want to help people, but to limit it to the point where it’s not going to greatly affect the Canadian population.”
What They Say And Do
There is a growing concern among the electorate about the Americanization of Canadian politics. It’s an attitude, a say anything, blame anyone (or you more figuratively and specifically) and creating issues where none exists, or are so small it hardly warrants National headlines. There is a normalization of false talking points based on air.
Do we not have enough of our own problems without importing them? How much responsibility does media bear for this?
“I’m not too sure. I’ve kind of gotten use to relying on independent journals. If there is any way to support independent journalism, rather than develop a national prescription. We can both agree it’s heavily biased and untruthful.”
What about making off shore ownership of our media a thing of the past? And returning to a standard which penalizes lying in media?
“I think a tax on corporations meddling in our news, I would advocate for something like that. But in terms of my personal solutions, improving education on media literacy,” Malcolm said.
“People of all ages at this point, especially with the rise of AI, no one really knows what’s real. This is a problem I don’t even think educators would know how to deal with. The photos you are seeing online may have been generated by a computer.”
“I think regulations are important, but also taking it down to the individual level and ensuring people know there is a problem and they know what to trust, or how to figure out what to trust,”
Speaking of AI, just in the last year, several large media outlets have fired thousands journalists and replaced them with machines. People are not writing the news, or at least we aren’t sure if people are writing the news. Is this a bad thing?
“I wouldn’t remove the human oversight of the dissemination of news. I know as a student you can’t trust AI to do your homework for you. It will give you the wrong answers. I’ve seen students get in trouble at school, or fail their assignments because they used AI and it gave them the wrong answers.”
The Last Word
Each candidate was invited to speak about an issue important to them that may not have been covered already. For Malcolm it’s the election process.
“Go vote. Low voter turnout is a real issue for me in this election. Last election 18% of Ontario’s population voted in the majority Ford government.”
“Also, electoral reform is something I wanted to mention, that shouldn’t be able to happen. We shouldn’t have one out of five people choosing the majority government, it should be the majority of the population. We can debate over which kind of electoral reform you go with, but ultimately there are so many options that are better than what we have right now.”
(Photos by Swartz – SUNonline/Orillia) Main: Jordi Malcolm is the NDP Simcoe North candidate.
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