Too many northerners have fallen on hard times and there needs to be a change.

That is the marquee message NDP candidates Beth Mairs in Sudbury and Stef Paquette in Nickel Belt have heard, time and again, while canvassing in advance of the Oct. 21 election.

“The biggest issues we’re facing that I’m hearing about at the door have to do with income,” Mairs said Monday. “We have almost half of Sudburians – 45 per cent – with combined family incomes of less than $50,000. People just can’t make ends meet.”

Mairs also said affordable housing is a major concern.

The social security net has been “ripped to shreds over the last 30 years,” Mairs said, which means people are working two or three jobs just to cover basic expenses.

“They’re paying out of pocket for things we would like to cover,” she added. “Dentistry is huge – it’s an out-of-pocket expense, which means people will go without rather than fixing their teeth. The same with drugs – people are not filling their prescriptions or they’re breaking their pills into bits to try to get by.”

Corporations and the wealthy elite are not paying their fair share of taxes, Mairs also noted.

“There’s a huge tax burden on the working class and middle class. There’s simply not enough money if we’re constantly letting the wealthy off the hook and they’re not paying their fair share,” she said. “There are so many loopholes in the system. … Every day I go canvassing, another story breaks my heart.”

Mairs stood in solidarity with her northern peers to reveal a new deal for Northern Ontario at a press conference on Monday.

NDP candidates Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay), Carol Hughes (Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing), Mairs (Sudbury), Stef Paquette (Nickel Belt) and Rob Boulet (Nipissing-Timiskaming) said Monday that northerners have been finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.

“Liberal and Conservative policies failed to address the significant challenges people face in the region, and the NDP knows it is time to do things differently,” the group said. “Northern families are struggling to make ends meet while the Liberals are looking out for their corporate friends. In a country as rich as Canada, we need to do better and we can do better. Liberals and Conservatives haven’t worked for us. Only Northern Ontario’s New Democrats have a plan to make life more affordable, advance reconciliation and create jobs for the region.”

Angus said the plan hinges on making FedNor a stand-alone agency. It is the only economic development body that is “just a project of Industry Canada,” he noted.

“We need a Northern Ontario stand-alone agency that addresses our needs,” Angus said. “We will end the under-funding of FedNor. We have seen massive cuts over the years under the Liberals and Conservatives and loss of frontline staff. It’s a key tool for economic diversification.”

Angus also said the NDP would like to promote immigration to the north, as well as retention strategies to keep university graduates in northern communities. The party would also like to see the re-establishment of rail travel throughout Northern Ontario, especially to communities in the far north, and it plans to support forestry and mining, as well as agriculture.

“We’ve got a lot of really interesting agricultural projects that are coming off the ground; we want to give them support to get them to market,” he said. “That’s going to be one of the growing areas.”

Angus said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has lost touch with the realities of northern voters. Arriving for a press conference by canoe was nothing more than a stunt designed to appeal to the elite, he argued.

“I found it really rude that Justin Trudeau showed up and said, ‘oh, we’ll sell camping’,” Angus said. “I looked at him and thought, what a rich doofus. We have people camping out in Timmins – it’s called homelessness. We have 2,000 homeless people in Timmins.”

The Liberals have made life more expensive. They have not adequately addressed the climate or the need to deliver better services to Indigenous communities, the NDP argued Monday. Conservative Andrew Scheer is just more of the same of what the north got from Stephen Harper and Doug Ford – cuts to the services people need.

‘We will not sit idly by while our economy slows down because of their bad decisions. The NDP will give the north its due by finally making FedNor a stand-alone regional economic development agency. That’s how we will pursue job growth, long-term development and support the growth of co-operative, Indigenous and community enterprises.’

“Both the Liberals and Conservatives have undermined the economic development of Northern Ontario by refusing to invest in FedNor and failing our people,” Angus said. “We will not sit idly by while our economy slows down because of their bad decisions. The NDP will give the north its due by finally making FedNor a stand-alone regional economic development agency. That’s how we will pursue job growth, long-term development and support the growth of co-operative, Indigenous and community enterprises.”

Creating jobs in the north, protecting the environment and setting the terms of a true nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous people are all part of the NDP’s new deal for Northern Ontario.

It is a plan whose time has come, Paquette said.

“People are tired, people are disappointed by the empty promises,” he said. “Electoral reform is a big one.”

The Liberals promised reform – Paquette said during the 2015 campaign, they promised to reform the electoral system more than 1,800 times – but they did not deliver.

“In Northern Ontario, we have these massive ridings – Nickel Belt is 30,490 square km – so for ridings that huge, proportional voting is so important,” he said. “(First) past-the-post is outdated and needs to change.”

Paquette said the NDP will also fight for universal pharmacare.

“It’s unacceptable that people are taking up beds in hospitals, which are about $1,500 per day, just because they couldn’t afford $100 in meds,” he said. “That’s unacceptable and needs to change.”

Paquette said “Northern Ontario and the NDP have always gone hand-in-hand, provincially and federally.”

Nickel Belt has always elected an NDP candidate provincially (France Gelinas is riding’s current MPP).

Federally, however, Nickel Belt has shifted between the Liberals and the NDP. Liberal Marc Serre, who is running to retain his seat, was elected in 2015. Before that, Claude Gravelle held the riding from 2008 to 2015. Liberal Ray Bonin held the seat from 1993 to 2008, when he retired.

Serre’s father, Gaetan Serre, won the riding in 1968 by beating NDP incumbent Norm Fawcett. However, he was defeated in 1972, when the riding shifted back to the NDP as John Rodriguez became Nickel Belt MP.

mkkeown@postmedia.com

Twitter: @marykkeown

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