With Mark Carney now the leader of the federal Liberal Party and Canada’s next Prime Minister and with a national election looming, local eyes have turned towards the status of a Liberal candidate for Peterborough.

Carney won the first ballot for the leadership on Sunday (March 9) in a landslide, receiving almost 86 per cent of the vote, compared to eight per cent for former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, 3.2 per cent for former house leader Karina Gould, and three percent for Frank Baylis.

An economist and former governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, the 59-year-old Carney has never been elected to political office and does not hold a seat in the House of Commons.

This has raised speculation that a federal election will be called sooner than later — possibly even before Parliament is scheduled to return on March 25.

First, however, Carney needs to be sworn in as prime minister by Governor General Mary Simon, and then he needs to appoint a cabinet.

With a federal election likely imminent, people are asking who the federal Liberals will run in the new Peterborough riding (formerly Peterborough-Kawartha) to take on Conservative incumbent Michelle Ferreri.

kawarthaNOW reached out to the Peterborough Federal Liberal Association, which provided the following statement:

“Our Peterborough Federal Liberal Association has seen a significant surge of interest in supporting a local Liberal candidate and volunteering for the next election campaign since the leadership process began. Now with the proven and steady leadership of Mark Carney, we are excited to help deliver change for our community and our country.”

“The Liberal Party of Canada is still in the process of reviewing and approving a local Liberal candidate, and they are the ones who determine the call of a nomination meeting. The local association looks forward to a nomination meeting being called shortly.”

As for the other two major parties, Heather Ray was chosen as the federal NDP candidate for Peterborough in January. The federal Green Party has also not yet selected a nominee for Peterborough.

Registered nurse psychotherapist Sheena Howard is not only changing the lives of her clients through her services at Acceptance Nurse Psychotherapy, but she is also changing the lives of nurses in Ontario by inspiring and supporting them as they launch their own independent practices.

Her goal is to change how we see nursing.

“I’m always shocked when people are surprised that I don’t work in a hospital,” Howard says. “Ideally, I would love it if eventually it got to the point where people saw nurses as being able to (work) across all fields and in all places and spaces.”

Located in Peterborough’s The Be Well Centre at 459 George Street North, Acceptance Nurse Psychotherapy is, according to Howard, the only psychotherapy clinic in Canada owned and staffed exclusively by nurses.

The clinic offers in-person and virtual sessions to clients, with a specialization in ADHD, trauma, anxiety, and depression, as well as practitioner services including gender-affirming care, and perimenopausal and menopausal care.

“My professors (in school) all said things like ‘You shouldn’t go into public health or primary care because you’ll lose all your skills if you don’t go into the hospital right away’,” she says, noting that path didn’t appeal to her. “It wasn’t where my heart was. My heart was in public health and primary care.”

Howard found a job that allowed for both in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. However, when she moved her family back to Ontario, she was no longer able to do similar work due to how “siloed” Ontario’s nursing is. Instead, she worked in primary care and as a mental health nurse clinician at Lakefield College School.

After being laid off during the pandemic and then hired in a role that did not appeal to her, she took a risk and established her own psychotherapy practice in 2023.

“Part of the reason why I started my private practice was in order to fill some gaps in the mental health (care) system because there was a mental health crisis,” Howard says.

“Nurses are the original therapists. If we think about nursing from a historical context … nurses did everything, and that included mental health, so it made a lot of sense to me that nurses could be able to provide the heart of nursing and the art of psychotherapy and blend it together.”

Howard notes that other nurses were questioning her idea at first — not because they weren’t supportive, but because entrepreneurship in nursing is not common.

“Nurses don’t generally, in Ontario anyways, own their own businesses or work in independent practices,” she says. “They’re usually associated with an institution.”

As of 2023, there were reportedly 1,787 registered nurses in independent practice and 79 active health professional corporations registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO). That totals a small fraction of the more than 180,000 nurses registered with the CNO.

“Nurse business owners are so rare and there isn’t a lot of support in the nursing community, simply from a concerned perspective,” Howard says. “Nurses are always worried about losing their job. We’re taught not to make mistakes because we’re impacting people’s lives, so going out and taking a risk to own or start your own business or your own private practice gets a lot of concerned statements from people.”

“Any nurse will tell you that their biggest fear is having somebody take their license,” Howard says, before adding she has no doubt nurses have the skillset to run their own businesses if they take the risk.

“Nurses innovate in all areas of practice. We see it from the professors who educate us, all the way to the nurses that are on the street working with our unhoused folks. They’ve innovating all the time. The difficult thing is for nurses to move beyond their small sphere.”

Howard was booked up within four months of launching her private practice. While she attributes this in part to long waitlists for mental health care, she also felt she was able to support clients who were being told by other psychotherapists that their care was too “complex.”

“Nurses have this really amazing capacity to sit with people during their most joyful moments and their most difficult moments,” she says.

“We’ve seen everything, we’ve heard everything … so we have a really unique opportunity to use all of that skill, and you can’t buy that kind of education of sitting with people in those moments. Blending in psychotherapy along with all that extra knowledge gives us a real capacity to provide holistic mental health care.”

With the high demand for her services, Howard says that having to turn down clients or being unable to see them for several months was “creating a lot of moral injury” for her.

That’s when she brought in her first associate, and now there are six psychotherapists practising out of Acceptance Nurse Psychotherapy. Howard has also recently enlisted three nurse practitioners to support assessment, diagnosis, and treatment for mental health and hopes to soon have a pediatric nurse practitioner serving children as young as eight years old.

“At Acceptance, they’re doing their job on their own terms and that feels really good,” Howard says. “Everybody is really happy being able to have their own hours, do the work they love, be valued for the work they love, and being on a team who wants them to work to their fullest scope and capacity.”

Howard hopes that Acceptance can expand across Canada to help support nurse psychotherapists who are starting up their own independent psychotherapy practices.

In summer 2024, she launched BizNurse Saavy, which works to support nurse entrepreneurs as they establish and grow their own independent practices, whether it’s foot care, home care, or any other specialization.

“Nurses just need the role modelling to see that it’s possible, and then they also need the business acumen and entrepreneurial guidance to be able to look at a stepwise way of starting,” Howard says. “We’ve been trained to be really skeptical and it’s just part of our training to ask questions, so we can talk ourselves right out of any innovation or any thoughts about owning our own business — and that is a real shame.”

Howard’s hope is that, by supporting nurses as entrepreneurs, fewer will decide to leave nursing and pursue other careers.

“There are nurses that are leaving the profession earlier than they ever wanted to, which means we’ve lost a huge amount of skilled knowledge and social capital,” Howard explains. “We also have seen brand new nurses just decide that they don’t even want to do it after three years.”

“It would be a terrible loss for Ontarians to lose that expertise. If we can create a pathway for nurses to be able to continue to share their expertise — and do it in a way that is in line with our regulations but also gives them an income and gives them a good work-life balance — why wouldn’t we do that?”

Through Howard received the Nurse Innovation Award from the Registered Nurses’ Foundation of Ontario in 2023 for Acceptance Nurse Psychotherapy, perhaps the greatest measure of success for her is that she has never found anything but joy in her job by doing it her way.

“Following my heart, taking a risk, and going outside the traditional rules of nursing has allowed me to keep loving my job, loving my role, loving the profession, and wanting to help more people do the same.”

For more information about Acceptance Nurse Psychotherapy, visit www.acceptanceclinic.ca.

While the demand for pet care services for residents on social assistance is not slowing down, Peterborough Veterinary Outreach remains committed to supporting as many vulnerable citizens as they can.

The volunteer-run initiative does so by hosting free monthly pet wellness clinics for dogs and cats through One City Peterborough at the Trinity Community Centre at 360 Reid Street.

The clinic is available for anyone on Ontario Works (OW) or Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), residing in the city of Peterborough, and who has not had an ongoing relationship with a vet clinic within the past 12 months.

As most clinics are held on the second Tuesday of the month, the next clinic is scheduled for Tuesday (March 11) from 1:30 to 4 p.m.

The project has been running in Peterborough since 2018. After many trips to provide pro bono clinics in Central America for severely underserviced areas, Dr. Maggie Himann of Buckhorn Veterinary Services wanting to offer similar supports to residents in need in Peterborough. She connected with Jan van der Eyk, now the administrator of the initiative, who, at the time, was also thinking about a similar project.

“When we started talking to each other, we realized that we were both looking for ways to help people that are on limited incomes, in marginalized housing, or homeless and who needed some help with their pets,” says Himann.

When it first launched, Peterborough Veterinary Outreach served the closed community at The Mount Community Centre in Peterborough. They offered free medical services, with clients paying a minimal fee to cover the cost of vaccines.

Himann says the appreciation for the services was immediately felt, with most clients deciding to pay even more than they were required to in support of the service.

“These are people that did not have a lot of money, and were so thankful that we were coming to help their pets that they wanted to pass it on,” she says. “It just broke our hearts to see that.”

For Himann, this is proof of just how essential it is for people in vulnerable situations to have pets and to be able to stay with them.

“The human-animal bond is enormous,” she says. “For a lot of homeless people, having a dog is protection, as well as warmth, as well as mental health (support), and that’s a big thing. A lot of these people struggle and, for them, their animals are their touchstones that gets them up in the morning, gives them someone to take care of, and a reason for them to go to work.”

Feeling there was a larger community that would benefit from the services, Peterborough Veterinary Outreach partnered with One City Peterborough in 2020, which gave them a community space to operate out of. It also allowed the initiative to get more financial support as a program opening under One City, which is a registered charity.

Today, the clinic offers wellness care including examinations, deworming, vaccinations, flea and tick prevention, and heartworm prevention. They also offer advice on pet food and grooming, and most clinics will have food, treats, litter, dog coats, leashes, collars, and other products available for clients.

To limit the barriers to those needing support, sign-ups for the monthly clinics happen in-person at One City Peterborough the day before clinic, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. or until all the spots are filled.

To sign up, pet owners or their representatives must show a current proof of OW or ODSP payments, as well as a piece of photo ID with an address that matches the payment. Walk-ins on the day of the clinic are not accepted.

While the hope is to one day support residents outside the city, as well as others who might need support to get to vet services — like seniors, those with disabilities, or those who are not on social assistance though are still low income — Himann explains that it’s not currently possible.

“We don’t ever run out of people in this group, so expanding geographically or expanding to other groups of people financially with the number of volunteers that we have, we just cannot do that yet.”

In 2018, Peterborough Veterinary Outreach began with three volunteers serving 31 patients (from 17 clients, as some had multiple pets) and, at the end of 2024, they were serving 434 patients from 281 clients.

“Our costs have gone up quite a bit because we’re not just spending it on vaccinations,” Himann says.

“We’re spending it on antibiotics and pain medications, and all kinds of other treatments as well. Sometimes we end up having to manage (a pet’s) health for another month or two before they’re healthy enough to actually have vaccines in a medically competent way.”

Still, she prioritizes keeping the pets with their human companions as she’s seen “time and time again” the affect the animals have on their owners. She shares a story of one unhoused man whose dog needed critical surgery for an infection.

“When one of our volunteers drove the dog to the clinic to have the surgery done, the dog stared out the back window until she could not see her owner anymore, which was heartbreaking,” Himann recalls.

“When he came to the clinic the next month to do a follow-up with her, he walked in completely sober, completely straight, and he was so emotional and hugged everybody and thanked them,” she says. “He was so much more connected with the world around him because his dog was okay.”

Himann hopes that one day Peterborough Veterinary Outreach will have the means to help even more individuals stay with their pets.

“Our hope for the future is that we can continue to service the people that we are right now, but also ultimately expand,” Himann says. “But our reality is that we’re realizing that’s going to take a lot longer, and more financial support is needed in order to make that happen.”

For more information, follow Peterborough Veterinary Outreach on Facebook.

To donate to Peterborough Veterinary Outreach, visit www.onecityptbo.ca/donate and select Peterborough Veterinary Outreach from the dropdown menu.

Police have arrested and charged a 21-year-old Peterborough man in connection with a bomb threat at Lansdowne Place Mall in February.

On the afternoon of February 19, the mall received a bomb threat call. Peterborough police responded and evacuated and closed the mall, blocking all entrances.

Members of the York Regional Police Service’s bomb squad, including their bomb-sniffing police dog, were called in to check the property. No bomb was located and, by early evening, the mall was returned to the care of the property owner. There were no injuries during the incident.

Through an investigation, officers with the Peterborough Police Service’s Major Crime Unit identified a suspect and took him into custody without incident on Thursday (March 6).

As a result, a 21-year-old Peterborough man was arrested and charged with false information and public mischief. He was released on an undertaking and is scheduled to appear in court on April 15.

“This event caused a lot of disruption in our community, not to mention the impact on local businesses,” said Peterborough police chief Stuart Betts in a statement. “These types of incidents strike at the core of safety in our public spaces, and we take them seriously. For our officers in the Major Crime Unit to quickly identify and secure an arrest in this case within weeks of this incident, is outstanding.”

Chief Betts thanked members of the public who were in the mall for evacuating safely and Lansdowne Place management for their cooperation, as well as the York Regional Police for their assistance.