To ensure Sun Peaks has a voice in the federal election conversation, Sun Peaks Independent News (SPIN) surveyed readers to identify their top questions and concerns for candidates in the lead-up to the April 28 election.
SPIN took the most-asked questions on the survey and reached out to all of the candidates in the Kamloops-Thompson-Nicola riding. These candidates are Frank Caputo, Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), Iain Currie, Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), Miguel Godau, New Democratic Party (NDP), Jenna Lindley, Green Party of Canada (GPC) and Chris Enns, People’s Party of Canada (PPC). For more information about these candidates, visit our Sun Peaks federal election voter guide.
SPIN requested responses from all candidates for the Kamloops-Thompson-Nicola ridings. Despite multiple requests for comment via phone and email, candidates Frank Caputo and Jenna Lindley did not respond prior to publication. We will update the story if responses are provided.
Housing and healthcare accessibility for remote communities was among the top issues readers identified as key areas of concern. Below are the candidates’ responses, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What are your party’s tangible plans to address housing and healthcare accessibility for remote communities?
Iain Currie, LPC:
What the Liberal government is proposing, let’s go through a few of the platforms. One of the big ones is the Liberal housing initiative. The plan is to create a government agency called Build Canada Homes to get the federal government back into the business of building homes.
The idea is based on a successful program, after the Second World War there was a housing crisis due to returning servicemen and people returning from the war. The Canadian government built many homes, with a simple floor plan and a small footprint. They’re the sort of homes that are still around today, even though they were built in as little as 36 hours as opposed to 36 weeks or months.
Build Canada Homes will provide $10 billion in low cost financing and also capital to affordable home builders. 6 billion will go towards rapidly building deeply affordable housing and to support new housing for students and seniors but also to immediately develop homelessness reduction targets for every province and territory to inform housing first initiatives. That doesn’t directly account to addressing specifically the question about the opioid crisis but the idea is housing first to improve access to treatment, end encampment communities and do that on a community by community basis.
Housing is a big part and housing first initiative is a big part of the plan. In terms of continuing investments in mental health resources, continuing to work with the provinces who are on the front lines. For example, the work that the federal ministry of health has done with the province of British Columbia with respect to safe supply and decriminalization. That’s an ongoing project and there’s I believe yearly if not more frequent reporting to sort of glean how that’s going. That’s the sort of work that the federal government would propose to continue under a Mark Carney government.
Health of course is primarily a provincial jurisdiction, but maintaining the levels of health transfers to the provinces including the planned increases of transfers coming up, and continuing to work with the provinces to explore all the possible options including the one that’s being championed by the province of B.C.
Health is a provincial jurisdiction. We have limited tools at our disposal other than the transfer payments which are going to continue and the increases are going to continue. But there is a reasonable amount of physician recruitment. My wife is the chair of the Interior Health Medical Advisory Committee and we have personally been involved in recruiting doctors.
The federal government doesn’t have the same role as the province in terms of organizing the hospital and organizing the health system to recruit doctors. I think an important part of an MP’s job in this region is to facilitate that process and work closely with those things that we can do to improve this community. Explicitly to attract not just doctors but also all sorts of healthcare issues with health care involving recruitment and retention. There is also a specific liberal program that’s been announced to facilitate training and retention of people in one of those key industries which is super important here is healthcare. A mid-career grant of I believe it’s $15,000 is proposed for retention and retraining. I propose to work with for example TRU [Thompson Rivers University] programs, there’s a care aid program at NVIT which I would like to see some consideration to expanding the care aid program into other areas and federal funding can absolutely help with that.
I think there is a role as MP for advocating to bring some of those federal programs to bear on. For example, there’s training dollars for people in healthcare and the federal government probably doesn’t have the jurisdiction to link that geographically. But certainly has jurisdiction to partner with the provinces and piggyback on provincial. I know there are healthcare initiatives which essentially provide training or a fast track or credentialing of for example doctors trained out of the country based on a commitment to spend a certain amount of time in rural areas in the province.
I know there certainly are training programs for doctors and some programs at the University of Northern British Columbia that are directed at and have funding associated with yes we can train you but your commitment is to stay in this community for a year or two. Now, that primarily would be a provincial responsibility, but piggybacking federal dollars on top of those programs, I think, that would be something that I would pursue as an MP for this area.
Chris Enns, PPC:
The People’s Party realize that both housing scarcity and healthcare accessibility are issues of supply and demand. We cannot make meaningful progress to add housing units or fill healthcare positions while we are adding to our population through immigration. A temporary pause on immigration is the only way to stop fuelling this dual-crisis. Provincial labour barriers must be removed so that skilled Canadians can practically relocate and help to alleviate construction and healthcare shortages. Simultaneously, we must cut foreign and other unnecessary spending. Then we will have the budget to responsibly invest in temporary housing, and to incentivize skilled Canadians (and potentially foreigners) living abroad to return. These people have left because the economics of living outside of Canada have been making more sense.
Miguel Godau, NDP:
Three million homes in five years! New Democrats believe homes should be for people—not profit. Our plan doubles the Liberals’ with a reasonable plan to tackle the scope of the problem, replacing the Liberals’ temporary program with a permanent $16 billion national housing strategy, building homes and protecting good-paying jobs. We’ll also offer long-term, low-interest mortgages through CMHC reducing monthly costs and cut tens of thousands of dollars over the life of a mortgage —money people could use for groceries, childcare, or saving for their future. We’ll build rent-controlled homes on public land– to help people find homes they can afford. We’ll bring in national rent control: ban fixed-term leases, renovictions, and price-fixing and landlord collusion.
Approximately one third of Kamloops and region residents do not have a primary care physician. Across Canada an estimated 6.5 million Canadians don’t have access to that level of care – and those that do are saying it’s harder and harder to get an appointment. And Canada will be short nearly 20,000 doctors by 2031, on top of the existing nursing shortage of about 43,000 today.
Protecting public health in general means having the guts to defend it and coming up with solutions that will ensure that health care is there for you when and where you need it with your health card, not your credit card. The shortage of primary care medical practitioners will be addressed by New Democrats in Ottawa by strengthening the Canada Health Act by increasing federal health transfer payments to the provinces (payments significantly reduced by successive Liberal and Conservative governments). The result of those previous reductions has been the expansion of for-profit health care. Private health care does not meet the needs of British Columbians and has taken many primary care practitioners out of working the public system. Working with provinces and territories to recruit, retrain and retain more doctors and nurses to work across Canada; by improving the working conditions for health care professionals, which will both improve patient outcomes and reduce burnout among doctors and nurses; by making it easier for primary care practitioners (and all health care workers) to work in Canada by streamlining the licenses of workers from other countries and pan- Canadian licensing to work in Canada
Go straight to the source — here are links to the party platforms:
How do I vote?
Voting day is Monday, April 28. Visit SPIN’s voting guide for more information on where to go and what to bring.
Further reading
Candidates in this riding also answered questions for The Wren, our sibling publication in Kamloops. To view their responses on questions of healthcare, housing, affordability, the toxic drug crisis, climate change and sustainability and Truth and Reconciliation, visit our Kamloops election guide.
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