Editor's note: For the 2019 federal election, BarrieToday teamed up with a journalism student to provide extra coverage on important issues.
The interviews conducted during this Q-and-A series were done by Emily Hsueh from Algonquin College in Ottawa. The issues and topics of discussion focused mainly on youth and young adults in Canada and the Barrie-Innisfil riding. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.
This installment touches on the environment.
Conservative candidate John Brassard, who participated in the previous series of questions, had to end the interview due to time constraints.
Liberal candidate Lisa-Marie Wilson and People’s Party candidate Stephanie Robinson could not be reached after several attempts.
Youth, like all Ontarians, care about the environment. In your community what do you intend to do to support your local ecosystem?
NDP Pekka Reinio
I probably got into politics because of my concerns for the environment and the climate crisis and we need to have a bold, realistic plan to address climate change. We’ve got 10 years to make enormous changes and transform our communities and the NDP has a plan to do that. We have a plan to do that locally as well.
That’s another thing that students and young people in our riding are responding to. A couple of the first things would be to build walkable, high-density communities. Barrie-Innisfil, in the next 10 years, is going to grow to a population of 270,000 people; that’s 100,000 more than what we have currently.
If we’re going to have that many people, then that’s great, but we need to have plans in place so that we’re not having a huge impact on our watershed, on our lake and producing enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. We need to start looking at that now and making sure that we have in place plans to make sure that all communities going forward develop into an area that is smart planning. That is walkable, high-density communities near transportation hubs.
Green Bonnie North
One of the big problems that we have in this area is that we are seeing rampant development. The Greater Golden Horseshoe Plan, which is the provincial plan in this area that deals with where population growth is spread out across the province, it mandates that by the year 2030, the city of Barrie needs to absorb up to 270,000 people.
Right now, we’re about 140,000 people and what we’re seeing even now if incredibly horrific sprawl. We’re seeing wetland and farmland and forest just being razed to the ground, being filled in so that we can put up these great big houses. Some of them are what I would call ‘semi-intensified’ which are like townhomes, but they’re gigantic townhomes. And a lot of them are single-family dwellings and they’re huge.
We’re losing our farmland, we’re losing our wetlands, we’re losing our forest and all of those ecosystems not only provide beauty, but quality of life and should exist on their own because they deserve to exist on their own.
If we look at them economically, they are extremely important. Not only do they drive tourism – and tourism is a major job promoter in this area – but they also provide quality of life for ourselves and they do things like filter our water, filter our air, provides us with a biodiversity that keeps the climate crisis from getting worse than it is.
And when we bury it all under concrete forever, we lose those ecosystem services that provide millions and billions of dollars without us every having to put a penny in, but that’s what we get out of it. So definitely, we want to deal with this kind of rampant development and also dealing with the climate crisis will also help with these things.
For example, Lake Simcoe is a very important body of water in this area. It promotes tourism, it promotes psychological enjoyment of living here, it’s a major part of a watershed that helps buffer the shocks of extreme weather events and flooding.
The climate crisis is going to increase acidification in our lake. It’s also going to raise the temperature of our lake, so what we’ve been noticing over time is that Lake Simcoe is warming by about two degrees. There is about one day less of ice covering the lake overtime.
What that means is we get more open water exposed to the environment which then creates local weather patterns, rain events or snow squalls and those hit our area really hard. Then there’s flooding and streets need to be repaired and pipes need to be updated and all these things are being hit on us because of the climate crisis.
The Greens have a very aggressive climate program; our targets are double that of any other party. On our platform, anything that deals with the environment has been tied to our step-by-step plan of Mission Possible.
Unless we deal with the climate crisis, we’re not going to have a livable planet. We’re going to have food shortages, we’re going to have problems with extreme weather events, and even if we don’t care about the environment at all, it’s going to cost us all money in raised insurance rates and cost us all money in taxes paid to our municipality to help to repair the damages from extreme weather events.
We’re going to be in trouble as well because if we bury our farmlands under concrete, then what are we going to do? We’re going to ship food from across the world to feed ourselves. Canada is becoming increasingly more urbanized; I think I heard the last number was 80 per cent of Canadians are leaving in an urban situation. Simcoe County in particular has incredibly rich farmland, but it’s disappearing to urban sprawl. Climate change is right up there at the top of our list.
The City of Barrie, the city council, they had a thorough and very good climate adaptation strategy. But adaptation is a different other kettle of fish compared to mitigation. The City of Barrie is saying, "look, we need to deal with things as they happen and find a way to absorb the shocks when they happen." But they are kind of powerless to deal with mitigation.
All the other parties have targets towards reducing greenhouse gases, but the Greens are the only ones with the most aggressive targets. We want to reduce by 60 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2030, that way we can keep the global warming trend to no more than 1.5 degrees. A 1.5 degrees and beyond, catastrophic things start happening. Feedback loops start happening and, honestly, we can’t even predict what’s going to happen if we don’t do something to keep the levels at the Paris target which is 1.5 degrees.
What we can do at the municipal level: we can plant more trees, we can stop urban sprawl and keep as many green spaces as possible. We can install more electric vehicle chargers.
One of the craziest things that happened in Barrie in the last couple of years was Tesla went to the city and said, "Hey, we want to work with you and put in some chargers. Everyone can use them and we’ll handle the cost.” And the city said, "great."
Other topics in the Q&A series are: food distribution, homelessness, the youth job market, mental health and substance abuse, and LGBTQ issues.
The federal election is Oct. 21. More local coverage is available here.
