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 the issue of jobs for local youth.
Liberal candidate Lisa-Marie Wilson and People’s Party candidate Stephanie Robinson could not be reached after several attempts.
What do you intend to do to help youth in your community get access to jobs?
Green Bonnie North
We want to make sure that when youth have jobs, they’re not working in precarious working situations. We want to have college and university education to be free for everyone.
We believe education is a human right, just like we believe housing is a human right. If you can go to school and upgrade your skills through training and education then you should be able to get a job that is more secure and less precarious as opposed to work a bunch of part-time jobs or contracts that don’t have benefits.
We also want to offer a universal health-care program. If you don’t have to worry about paying for medications, then you can use that money for something else like food or rent.
Barrie is doing very well when it comes to jobs in IT and manufacturing. But that is a very small subset of jobs, right? A large proportion of jobs in our community are often part-time, they’re often contract, they’re minimum wage.
We want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and even in Barrie, I don’t think $15 goes far enough. I’d like to see us go far beyond that, but we have to start there.
We also want to help the municipalities identify ways that they might be able to provide employment. We have to work with the Canadian government to find out what Barrie feels is jurisdictionally appropriate for them.
We believe that green jobs are really important because of the way that the future is going. Inevitably, we will stop having jobs in oil and gas.
There are a couple of automotive manufacture plants in and around Barrie. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our government incentivized more electric vehicle production? We could bring that to Barrie.
We Greens also want to help people renovate their homes so that they use less electricity, and all of this reduces greenhouses gas emissions. But what it does is it uniquely employs people at the local level. If you’re renovating your home, you’re not going to have offshore people doing it; you’re going to have tradespeople in your community that are going to be doing it.
Conservative John Brassard
I think the approach we should all take, particularly in Simcoe County, is a regionalized approach to economic development. We’ve got large employers here who are generally located in an area.
I use Honda as an example; thousands of employees there.
The significance of regionalized economic development and making sure that we first and foremost attract employers in this area is that they do provide stability and good-paying jobs to not just young people but people that live in the area.
You know, the Honda plant, for example, in Alliston employs many, many people from Barrie and they have an opportunity close to home to work. That should always be the priority of all levels of government: to make sure that that hope and opportunity is there and regionalized economic development provides that.
We also can encourage small businesses to grow by creating an environment where they can grow and be competitive for hire and hire people of all ages, not just young people.
NDP Pekka Reinio
We really want to invest more in the renewable-energy sector. We know that climate change is a big concern, not only for young people. We need to have old action.
What we’re going to do is pull money from the fossil-fuel industry, so no more subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry. We’re going to be putting it all into the very quickly growing sector of renewable energy.
That will help young people in our area because we are a hoping to bring jobs and industry to our area with the renewable-energy sector. We know that every dollar spent on renewable energy nets seven times as many jobs as in the fossil-fuel industry.
We hope, with these kinds of new investments, we will be creating jobs for young people.
Other topics in the Q&A series are: food distribution, homeless and housing affordability, crime, LGBTQ issues and the environment.
The federal election is Oct. 21. More local coverage is available here.
