In March 2020, the Ontario Liberal Party will select a new leader. In the coming weeks, iPolitics will be profiling candidates in the running about their visions for the party and their campaigns.

Two years after an electoral reform pledge was abandoned on Parliament Hill, flickers of a similar conversation are igniting at Queen’s Park — with Ontario Liberal leadership candidate Mitzie Hunter saying she would “absolutely” pursue the matter at the provincial level, if she assumes the helm of her party and it eventually forms government.

Hunter, a former cabinet minister and one of six in the running for the OLP’s top post, has pushed in the past for electoral reform at the most local level, introducing a private member’s bill as an MPP that focused on allowing municipalities to conduct elections using a ranked-ballot system. (The idea later became a government bill, and the City of London, Ont., became the first to use ranked ballots for its local vote in 2018.)

“I believe that it’s better. I believe that it provides a more inclusive form of electing leaders,” Hunter told iPolitics in a recent interview, during which she confirmed that electoral reform was something she would pursue provincially if successful in the ongoing leadership race. “Also, it forces candidates in the race to be more respectful of each other and focus on the issues rather than the personalities, and that’s probably something that would be welcome at this stage in our political process,” she added.

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Hunter currently has no intention of reconsidering the voting age in Ontario, but she would consider a move to register teenagers for the vote while they’re still in their high school years — in order to cut down on the potential of young people becoming lost in the shuffle between high school and any post-secondary education they might pursue.

But before any of that comes a rebuild, the primary task facing whomever is selected as leader of the OLP in early March. Hunter currently sits as one of just five Liberal MPPs at Queen’s Park, representing the Toronto riding of Scarborough—Guildwood since a byelection in 2013. (Another member of the diminutive caucus, Don Valley East’s Michael Coteau, also has his hat in the leadership ring.) Hunter is pitching her role at Queen’s Park, having survived the 2018 race, as a favourable position for a party leader to be in.

“I think Liberals, members, will want to have someone that can fight in the legislature, go toe-to-toe with Doug Ford and his ministers,” Hunter opined. She rebuts the suggestion that past political titles like hers come with records that can be picked apart by opponents, to their detriment — an idea floated by other candidates like Kate Graham, who positioned herself in a recent interview with iPolitics as a strategically wise choice due, in part, to a lack of “baggage” from past provincial political roles.

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“Experience matters,” Hunter replied. Still, the Scarborough MPP’s last race was not a decisive victory, as she scraped out a win with 11,972 votes against Progressive Conservative challenger Roshan Nallaratnam’s 11,898 — a difference of 74 votes in a race that saw 35,905 ballots cast.

Despite the provincial Liberals’ pulverizing results in 2018, Hunter maintains that the party still has “a tremendous amount of support” across the province, attributing that faith to ridings she’s visited in her bid for the leadership. The current fundraising total for her leadership campaign, according to her team’s numbers, is about $200,000.

“What I see from our party is a party that has learned from the 2018 election, and the fact is, people were pretty clear that we had stopped listening,” Hunter said.

Though she conceded to that flaw in the party, she repeatedly evaded a question from iPolitics about what her greatest personal challenge would be as Liberal party leader, or potentially as premier.

“There are many challenges,” Hunter replied, when quizzed. “I’m really driven like that, though. Before I entered the race, I was very thoughtful about it, going to places like Sarnia and the far north to talk to people, to talk about what is needed. And it actually opened a degree of excitement for me that someone with my background, my experiences, could add value to our party and our province.

“For my whole career, it has been in changing times,” Hunter added, minutes later. “So I’ve learned to adapt.”

One of the big pushes of Hunter’s campaign concerns the proliferation of gun violence, which particularly affects the Greater Toronto Area. She plans to push forward on a bill introduced earlier this year that would declare gun violence a public health issue, ensure hospital-based violence intervention programs paid for by OHIP, and allow boards of health to develop programs and services for reducing gun violence and assisting any affected individuals left in its wake.

Though it’s a large component of her current platform, Hunter said she’d welcome the current government taking components of the legislation, making it a government bill and pursuing it under its own banner.

Additionally, Hunter told iPolitics that she supports a move to ban handguns, a measure that Premier Doug Ford has opposed. While the federal Liberals committed during the recent federal election to allowing municipalities the power to implement bans locally, steering clear of a federal prohibition, Hunter backs the idea of banning such weapons countrywide — with a catch.

“I support a national ban on handguns with some sort of mechanism built in, for municipalities at the local level to have an exemption,” she said, describing a system where municipalities would have to opt out of the ban rather than decide to opt in. “I recognize that there are regional differences,” she added.

(The same idea was floated by Toronto Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith in an interview with iPolitics this past fall. “It would put the onus, politically, on municipalities. Not to face the difficulties of opting in, but municipalities should face the difficulty of opting out,” he suggested at the time, while endorsing a complete ban.)

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When it comes to other policies, Hunter is proposing a few new taxes: a “housing crisis tax” on short-term rentals, which would be five per cent per booking on a first listing and 15 per cent per booking on any subsequent listings; and a new two per cent vacancy tax on residential properties worth more than $2 million in the Greater Golden Horseshoe area, with exceptions for primary residences and long-term rentals.

She would also move to increase Ontario’s non-resident speculation tax from 15 per cent to 25 per cent.

In health care, Hunter has pitched covering mental health services for patients under the age of 30 through OHIP+, a decision that prompted some backlash online for its age cut-off. When asked what kind of therapies she envisioned the province paying for, she said that it would be “the care that the individual needs”; asked if her team had conducted a cost analysis for the pitch, she replied that they’d need to proceed in “a way that we can afford.” The first step, in her view, was building up capacity within the care system.

“My concern, primarily, in putting this policy forward is the loss in potential — and when people don’t get early support and intervention, that leads to actually a greater cost later on for the health-care system,” Hunter told iPolitics. “That’s why I’m focusing in on 30. That’s when that kind of support is needed.”

The Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention is scheduled to take place March 6 and 7, 2020.