Every election campaign in recent years has had a pattern – candidates strive to “define” themselves, and stop their opponents from doing it for them.
They and their team try to direct the tone of the campaign, and focus attention on issues that will do the candidate the most good, and opponents the most harm. This results in obviously prepared answers that are often out of synch with the questions, as candidates try to stay on script.
The only problem is the issues selected by campaign teams are not necessarily the ones that the voters consider to be of prime importance.
Take, for example, the proposed 52-kilometre Highway 413 to connect the regions of York, Peel and Halton. The major parties have all made strong statements either for or against it. The problem is, people in most of the Province of Ontario do not give a hoot about it one way or the other.
The roads we care about are the ones on which we travel daily, be they gravel, asphalt or a bit of both – assuming the pot holes are not too bad and we can afford to fill up the gas tank.
The fact is, some people cannot. The cost of fuel has doubled in the past few months, along with what we pay for housing and food, but wages have not. This is a major issue for a lot of voters.
So is health care. We have had a barrage of numbers thrown at us over the past couple of weeks, but what we really want to know is how those numbers will translate into being able to see a health-care professional when we need to.
Campaign teams have been cranking out plans for a billion dollars here and several million dollars there, when what we need are warm bodies.
We have health-care professionals with excellent, although foreign credentials, driving taxis and working in fast food restaurants – a horrendous waste of expertise at a time when our education system is producing too few doctors and nurses.
Most university medical programs accept only applicants with the highest marks, leaving a lot of people-oriented, caring individuals who would make excellent family physicians out of the running.
We also have a system that pays staff in long-term care facilities substantially less than their hospital counterparts. No one who has ever worked in long-term care questions why nursing homes have a critical staff shortage.
That said, we have a phenomenally low unemployment rate in this area that affects every sector. Not included in the numbers are people who have stopped looking for work but would like to be employed – people with physical and intellectual challenges who might need certain small adjustments to the workplace; parents unable to find dependable, affordable child care; retirees who might choose to remain in the workforce if offered part-time hours and extra days off.
And what about recent immigrants who might choose to seek jobs in areas outside larger cities if they knew there were community supports to assist them?
We, the voters in this community, speculate that attracting desperately needed workers to fill jobs at coffee shops and retail stores, and in child care, agriculture and tourism, might require a look at where these workers are supposed to live, and how they will be able to get to and from their jobs. Housing and transit cannot be relegated to individual silos – they have a vital role to play in industry and job creation.
Voters ask why high school tech programs have been cut back over the past several years while industry has been desperate for tradespeople, and why there are only sporadic, localized efforts at education and industry partnering to ensure high school and college programs meet the needs of the marketplace.
This election campaign is our chance to insist candidates hear the voters’ list of priorities and issues, not the other way around. The candidates we want to vote for are the ones who can stop defining themselves long enough to pay attention to our concerns.
