Merge school boards to cut waste, pay for drug and dental coverage, Green Party candidate says

The local Green Party announced Thursday Kara Flannigan will fly the party’s colours in the Sault Ste. Marie riding in the next provincial election campaign.

The election will be held on or before June 7.

The Green Party’s environmental approach to policy is well known, but what, specifically, would a Green government do to create jobs for the Sault and Ontario?

As an example, Flannigan, speaking to SooToday, said “we can promote green retrofits for houses and businesses and that puts a lot of people to work at the retail stores and the tradespeople to do this, and those jobs would be local.”

“Another thing we can do…is (changing) the difficulty our local businesses have with the one size fits all approach. We have to sort out the mess of red tape and taxation they have, that’s very important and the Green Party has long been a proponent for local businesses and relieving those taxes. The other parties who have been in power for years and years have never sorted that out.”

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government released its budget March 28, with a big focus on deficit spending through to 2024 to fund drug and dental support for Ontarians without coverage, a new benefit to help keep seniors in their homes, make prescription drugs free for people over 65, expanding OHIP for people under 25, free preschool for children at two-and-a-half and older and faster access to mental health services.

“I love how the other parties steal our platform ideas,” Flannigan said.

“The Conservatives discussed carbon pricing, the Liberals have taken on a pharmacare program and the NDP has taken on dental care, and all of those things are fabulous things, but piecemeal, without a holistic and comprehensive approach which includes a plan on how you’re going to fund that is reckless, and can be seen as desperate to get peoples votes.”

The Green Party, at the federal and provincial levels, Flannigan said, always reveals its plans to fund its programs.

The party’s funding plan for the soon-to-come provincial election campaign, Flannigan said, should be officially released soon, but the candidate did offer some hints.

“If we collapse and eliminate the duplication of bureaucracies in the school boards, that frees up a whole bunch of money which you invest in the classrooms with the students and the teachers and getting rid of redundant bureaucracies.”

“Some of these decisions are very difficult but we need people brave enough to look at what can be done and make the hard choices,” Flannigan said.

Another source of funding for a Green Ontario’s programs, Flannigan said, would be extracting greater amounts of payment from companies who draw water and minerals from the province.

“Those are revenue streams as well…there are lots of opportunities.”

Flannigan, an Algoma Public Health (APH) public health inspector, has carried the Green Party’s banner in the Sault riding on three previous occasions (in the 2014 provincial election, 2015 federal election and the 2017 provincial byelection).

“I sense an extreme frustration in voters,” Flannigan said.

At the same time, she said “they’re scrambling to ‘vote out’ something (Wynne’s Liberals, and replace them with Doug Ford’s PCs or Andrea Horwath’s NDP) instead of ‘voting for’ something, and that kind of strategic voting was one of the reasons why I got off that hamster wheel (traditionally voting for one of the three main parties) in the first place.”

“The Green Party didn’t get a lot of coverage, but their values are consistent with mine and I want to ‘vote for’ something…we can do things differently. There are things that bring us together that will move us into a better society, protecting the people and places we love. There are other choices.”

Meanwhile, as the election campaign nears, the NDP will be holding its nomination meeting for the Sault riding April 26, a party spokesperson informed SooToday earlier Thursday.

Local Liberals were not available for comment.

Sault MPP Ross Romano has already received the official nod from the Progressive Conservatives to run for reelection.