Editor's note: Ahead of the Sept. 20 Federal Election, BradfordToday has contacted all of the candidates in the York-Simcoe riding with five questions related to the local opioid crisis, COVID-19 vaccine passports, Truth and Reconcilliation Commission recommendations, climate change, and affordable housing. The following answers were received from NDP Candidate, Benjamin Jenkins. More candidate Q-and-A's can be found on our Canada Votes 2021 page.
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1. For the past several years, Simcoe has had a devastating drug crisis, one of the worst in the province. How do you think the opioid problem should be addressed?
For the past 120 years, drug abuse has been treated as a criminal problem or moral failing, rather than a mental health issue. If doing so was effective at fixing the problem, we would not have a crisis. Addiction must be treated as a mental health issue, not a criminal one, which is why the NDP and I will:
• Declare a public health emergency to help unify a response across all levels of government.
• Adjust the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to decriminalize simple possession, allowing people fighting addiction to get their lives back on track without a criminal record.
• Provide provinces with the funding to open and maintain drug purity checks, needle exchanges, and safe use sites, reducing overdoses and disease transmission while creating points of contact with social services.
• Since most opiate addictions begin with prescription painkillers, we will investigate and hold accountable pharmaceutical companies responsible for inflaming this crisis.
• Increase support for agencies responsible for stemming the flow of illegal substances across our borders, halting it before it reaches our streets.
2. As we brace for a fourth wave of COVID-19 and a more aggressive delta variant, many are suggesting Canada should embrace a vaccine passport. What is your view on this?
Anyone who grew up in Ontario knows what it is to deal with a vaccine passport: The province demands anyone who attends an accredited school must provide proof of vaccination against nine diseases. This includes polio, an illness whose outbreaks once shuttered communities, and whose rare but severe outcomes left many paralyzed or dead. This spurred a mass vaccination campaign, which included the above vaccine mandates, that has seen the illness extirpated within Canada.
While outcomes vary by available care, COVID is at least as deadly as polio. It is also considerably more contagious, and thus represents a much greater threat to the public. For that reason, health experts have chosen to endorse vaccine passports to limit the spread of the virus and, where it does spread, to limit its damage. Unvaccinated people are not only more likely to suffer serious consequences from COVID, they are also going to have a more prolonged infection, increasing the risk of new variants evolving and of spreading it to others.
For these reasons, the NDP has chosen to adopt vaccine passports. This is not a thing to be done lightly, but it is neither unprecedented nor unwarranted given the circumstances.
3. We are a rich country in many ways, but many Indigenous reserves still don't have clean drinking water. The tragedy of residential schools has ripped open the hurt and trauma many of our Indigenous families have felt for generations. Many of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations remain unheeded. How would you address these issues and help heal these wounds?
Healing cannot begin until there is accountability, and accountability cannot begin until there is someone to hold accountable. Despite having known for decades that residential schools existed to destroy Indigenous cultures, the Canadian government let them operate until the 1990s. Despite knowing that Indigenous communities often lack decent quality housing or even clean water, and promises from both the Harper and Trudeau governments to fix these issues, still they go unfixed. If there is no way to hold the government – or anyone – accountable, greed and apathy will prevail. This is why I and the NDP promise to:
• Bring every child home; identifying and returning the remains of every child buried at a residential school to their families, and funding the building and maintenance of monuments.
• Appoint a special prosecutor to punish those who abused children in residential schools.
• Enshrine in law the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the T&RC’s 94 Calls to Action, creating a standard to which the government must legally comply and giving power for legal action should it fail in its responsibilities.
• Move from a consultation-based policy to consent-based, guaranteeing the rights of Indigenous peoples cannot be overridden.
4. Recently, a major scientific report warned of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts, and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade. Scientists say it’s a "code red for humanity." What tangible ways will your party address climate change in both the short- and long term?
The IPCC’s latest report on climate change was a big part of what spurred me to run for office. The NDP is the only major party whose platform will keep us below 1.5C of warming. While the Liberals build pipelines and the Conservatives complain that they restrict fossil fuels too much, the NDP and I promise to:
• End oil and gas subsidies – 18 billion dollars in 2020 alone – and use that money to invest in clean energy.
• Create the Canadian Climate Bank to fund the production of in-Canada clean energy technologies and invest in infrastructure upgrades within the provinces to give us a clean smart-grid.
• Electrify all public transit by 2030 by shifting federal funding flows to the provinces to emphasize zero-emission vehicles and support existing efforts to make that change.
• Help the provinces achieve fare-free public transit and assist in community planning to make active transport easier via bikes and walking.
• Make the federal government a major purchaser of electric vehicles by completely electrifying its fleet, jumpstarting Canadian production of EVs.
• Expand the federal EV incentive to $15,000 per family, and eliminate the federal sales tax for EV purchases.
5. Housing is a human right, but many people in the area are not able to afford a roof over their heads. The cost of living continues to rise while the price of housing and rent skyrockets well beyond affordability for the average person. What would your party do to address this?
Housing is in crisis in Canada, and in Ontario in particular. New housing is added slower than the rate of demand, and what is added contributes to an unhealthy sprawl that puts people further from the services they need, the jobs they work, and the communities they could help grow and improve. We are paving some of the best arable land and forest in the world to build expensive suburbs few can afford. To fix that, the NDP and I will:
• Build 500,000 new affordable housing units in the next ten years, with half of that in the next five.
• Cut the federal portion of HST on all new affordable housing units.
• Create a 20 per cent non-resident buyers’ tax to discourage foreign investors from using Canadian housing as a speculative commodity or a way to launder money.
• Create a fast-start fund to help co-ops, municipalities, and other not-for-profit groups get the funding they need to begin construction today, not tomorrow.
• Encourage the creation of denser housing around transit hubs, creating accessible, affordable, walkable communities, without furthering the sprawl that is destroying our greenbelt.
