Ontario 2025 candidate: Christian Proulx
With the provincial election just around the corner, the Manor Park Chronicle reached out to candidates, asking for answers to three key questions. The following are the responses from Green Party of Ontario candidate Christian Proulx.
How do you view the call of an early election?
It’s wasteful. This unwanted election is costing Ontario taxpayers nearly $200 million dollars, funds which could have been better spent.
What do you view as the key issues/priorities in this election, both from a local and provincial perspective? How would you address these issues during your term as MPP?
Access to primary Healthcare:
Ontario used to have a world class healthcare system. It’s now a system on the brink of collapse, with the lowest healthcare funding per capita of any province in Canada. Emergency departments are overflowing, and health professionals are burning out.
Early access to primary care enables early support and treatment, which prevents more costly problems later, but far too many people in Ottawa-Vanier don’t have family doctors.
I’ll support the recruitment and training of more doctors, finding ways to reduce the administrative demands on doctors, support funding for family health teams, and expand access to public 24/7 clinics to reduce pressure on emergency rooms.
Housing Affordability:
Housing affordability is the greatest challenge facing our province. Many people have given up hope of ever owning their home, and renters face surging rental costs.
I’ll address this by putting people first. Housing security is preventative medicine, it reduces stress and anxiety and is the first step to any solution on affordability. As MPP, I will work to renew existing community and co-op housing, and provide stability and security for renters through increased supply, and protecting the current supply in Ottawa-Vanier from renovictions and investor profit-only focused development. Other measures to increase housing supply include helping people add secondary units to their homes through grants and zero interest loans, and allowing conversions of large homes to be subdivided into condominiums. I’ll support Green legislation with an extensive number of practical measures to effectively increase housing supply, including programs to make homes more affordable for first-time buyers.
Transit:
In the ’80s and ’90s, Ottawa was reputed to have one of the best transit systems in North America. Over time, downloading the responsibility locally has led to chronic underfunding and a system that is now expensive, unreliable and too often just doesn’t bring people where they need to go.
Increasing ridership for transit is the best way to make transit effective and reliable. We can start with a neighborhood or area, do transit really well there to attract the ridership, then apply the findings to the different areas. Not all transit needs are the same. By making incremental changes, we can adapt and retain the solutions that increase ridership.
