Ontario 2025 candidate: Myriam Djilane
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 NDP candidate Myriam Djilane.
How do you view the call of an early election?
While I’m always happy to have the chance to fight to make things better for my friends and neighbours in Ottawa-Vanier, I’m pretty disappointed in Premier Ford’s reasons for calling this election, but not surprised.
Cynical, self-serving moves like this is what disillusions people from the political process. Ontarians elected Doug Ford’s PCs to serve a four-year mandate. He’s calling an election nearly a year-and-a-half early. This election is going to cost nearly 200 million taxpayer dollars, on top of the federal election slated for later this year which usually runs at about $500 million.
Elections aren’t cheap, so you better have a good reason for calling one early. The pretense for Ford is that he needs the mandate to respond to Trump’s threats. He has that mandate for nearly another year-and-a-half. That’s his job, to govern in the interest of Ontarians and navigate situations like this.
We can’t just call an election anytime we face a challenge as a province, or a country.
The real reason he’s calling an election is he wants people to vote before the RCMP’s criminal investigation into his government begins and before his numbers are negatively affected by the federal Conservatives who’ve been cozying up to Trump and Elon Musk.
That $200 million should be going to helping build up Ontario’s resilience to Trump’s tariffs, not towards advancing Doug Ford’s personal political agenda.
What do you view as the key issues/priorities in this election, both from a local and provincial perspective?
My eldest family members can’t remember a more difficult economic time in Ontario, or Canada. Nobody can remember seeing as many people unhoused, or struggling with opioids or just living in poverty.
Never has it been more difficult to buy a house, the cost of groceries have skyrocketed. People are turning to expensive private healthcare options as our public system continues to be starved. The quality of our schooling is crumbling due to chronic underfunding.
People are angry and don’t know who to trust to actually fix these problems because they’ve seen them just get worse and worse under both Liberal and Conservative governments.
Despite all of this, the Liberals and Conservatives are still using the same old playbook: get your campaigns funded by special wealthy interest groups like big developers, grocery store giants and so on. You promise to do all kinds of stuff to create jobs, make life more affordable, or maybe, like Ford, you cut people a $200 cheque before an election. But when you’re in power, you sellout Ontario to your wealthy buddies.
Doug Ford’s tried to do it with the Greenbelt, he’s doing it with our healthcare system, and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals did it with Hydro One.
How would you address these issues during your term as MPP?
Many of these issues are complex, and require knowledge and expertise to fix. But the solutions are there and the people who know how to fix them exist, and would like nothing more than to do just that.
The problem is that they’re not the ones being consulted. Wealthy stakeholders looking to maximize profits are the ones calling the shots. As an MPP I would work (hopefully with an NDP majority government) to find meaningful solutions to the issues we’re facing with people who know how to fix the problems and most importantly: people who don’t just see dollar signs, but actually want to fix problems.
Just to name a few things: the NDP has promised to recruit 3,500 new doctors, build 250,000 new homes and bring back rent control. An NDP government would bring in oversight over the cost of living. Corporations getting rich off our basic needs is simply unacceptable.
We can achieve so much better, but we need to get greed and personal advancement out of politics.
