The day after her party unveiled its platform for the 2022 election campaign, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath visited Peterborough Tuesday afternoon (April 26) to welcome Jen Deck as the party’s candidate for Peterborough-Kawartha in the June 2nd election.
At an outdoor media conference at the Peterborough Lift Lock, Horwath introduced Deck as “somebody in the community who has worked hard for many years.”
“As somebody in the education sector, she just strengthens our team and strengthens our commitment to public education in Ontario,” Horwath said, referring to Deck’s experience as a teacher and the occasional teacher president of the Kawartha Pine Ridge Teachers’ local of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario.
“I know she has some experiences herself in terms of the education system and how we have to do better for kids and for education workers,” Horwath added. “She’s also a very active and passionate member of the community, fights for all public services to ensure that people get the kinds of things that they need to build a great life here in the Peterborough area. She’s also very passionate about climate justice and the environment, something that I know lots of people in Peterborough are concerned about.”
Deck, with her supporters and volunteers standing behind her, described her reasons for running as the NDP candidate.
“I’m running because I feel strongly that we need an NDP voice in Peterborough-Kawartha,” Deck said. “I wanted to vote NDP (in the upcoming election) and there was no candidate. I’m so pleased that I can step forward and take on this challenge. I’m excited, I’m looking forward to meeting the constituents and getting out canvassing, but bottom line — we need change now.”
“The system has failed us. COVID has taught us that we need to invest in our public services, in our health care, in our public education, so we can survive the bumps in the road. And COVID was a big bump, and I think we need to learn from that lesson. I’m looking forward to an NDP government that can help fix what is broken.”
In its election platform, the NDP promises to hire 20,000 teachers and education workers, cap class sizes for Grades 4 through 8 at 24 students, cap full-day kindergarten classes at 26 students, cancel EQAO standardized testing, and scrap the requirement for two online courses for high school graduation.
“Education was poorly funded going into the COVID pandemic,” Deck said. “Our classes are overcrowded. We don’t have enough support staff. We have students who struggle to regulate their behaviour, more so now after COVID, after two years of chaos. We need more teachers, we need more education staff, we need to fund public education and we can’t be playing with this idea of moving to vouchers or some kind of privatized education system because it will fail everyone.”
Deck said she is also concerned with health care workers “and how they’ve been pummelled over the last two years.”
“They too need more support,” she said. “They needed it going into COVID but they certainly have suffered — they’re exhausted, and they need support.”
The NDP election platform promises to hire 30,000 nurses and expedite recognition of nursing credentials of 15,000 internationally trained nurses.
Deck also spoke to the impact of the pandemic on local businesses.
“I think about the small and medium businesses, some of whom have already gone out of business. Let’s just make sure that we don’t lose them all, and we that can stimulate more business to come back — small and medium business.”
In its election platform, the NDP has committed to bring in two rounds of the Small Business Recovery Grant with two payments over the next two years, ensure commercial insurance is affordable, review the Commercial Tenancies Act and explore the creation of rent guidelines for small businesses, and allow small businessese to form employee ownership trusts.
Deck said her role in the Kawartha Pine Ridge Teachers ETFO local would help her fulfill the duties of an MPP.
“They call me when they have questions, when they have concerns, when they are in crisis, and I help them find solutions,” she said. “I also negotiate for improved working conditions and I do that by hearing from them, what they need, and making sure that those become priorities in the next bargaining round. That sounds an awful lot like an MPP, so in some ways I feel like I’ve been training for this job for the last seven years.”
Deck added that the most common concern she has heard from people is the privatization of public services, as well as the impact of the pandemic on students’ mental health and on learning.
“Every teacher that I’ve talked to says that most of their kids they see are behind where we’d normally expect them to be, so we have a lot of work to do to make up for the losses over the past two years,” she said.
When asked how she would deal differently with issues affecting the riding, Deck referred to the “most important takeaway” from her current job.
“It’s not so much about the policies, but it’s who’s in place making the decisions of how to get to where you want to get. So it’s not enough to say we want to stimulate the economy if you hire somebody whose interests are specialized to big business and rich people. That’s how they’re going to implement the changes.”
“To me, the most important thing that I hope to bring to this job is integrity and compassion, and a caring for the people of Peterborough-Kawartha,” Deck added.
For her part, Horwath outlined the party’s “Green New Democratic Deal” in its election platform to fight the climate crisis, while criticizing the Ford government’s “war” on the environment.
“We’re going to take our commitments seriously when it comes to climate change, and when it comes to ensuring that not only do we tackle the necessity to reduce our carbon footprint, to bring us to net zero by 2050, but by doing so also create hundreds of thousands of great jobs — put people back to work in jobs that pay the bills — while at the same time making sure that no community and no workers are left behind.”
Horwath also referred to her June 2019 visit to Peterborough to discuss the opioid crisis and the need for a consumption and treatment site, before outlining the NDP’s commitment to address the overdose crisis and other addictions, including by removing the cap the Ford government has placed on supervised consumption sites and bringing therapy and counselling services into OHIP.
Following her media conference, Horwath visited and toured the Peterborough Theatre Guild at an event closed to the media.
