Ontario NDP unveils northern platform with a focus on health care, housing and highways
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles unveiled her party's northern Ontario platform in Sudbury on Thursday, with promises to hire more doctors, expand northern highways and build more affordable homes.
Stiles said an NDP government would double residency positions at NOSM University and would hire at least 350 doctors in northern Ontario, including 200 family physicians.
"Too many people in Ontario don't have a family doctor," she said while speaking to reporters at Science North.
"In Hearst, for example, it's three out of four who don't have a doctor. Well, I think northerners deserve better than what they've got from Doug Ford."
Before the election was called, Ontario Progressive Conservative Health Minister Sylvia Jones promised $1.8 billion to expand health teams across the province in order to connect two million people with family physicians by 2029.
Stiles said an NDP government would set up a "northern command centre" to co-ordinate a northern approach to the retention and recruitment of family doctors.
During her event in Sudbury, Stiles also addressed the opioid crisis, referencing a collection of more than 250 crosses on display in the city's downtown that are a memorial for people who have died due to overdoses.
"Those crosses are a stark reminder that we are failing those families and those individuals," she said.
Stiles attacked the Ford government's decision to close supervised consumption sites across the province and replace them with Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hubs that don't include harm reduction.
"Taking away services and resources without replacing them with something better, and bigger, and more immediate, is absolutely outrageous and more people will die as a result," she said.
On highways and transportation, Stiles said her party would widen highways 11, 17 and 69 while building the Cochrane bypass. She said an NDP government would also make sure truck drivers have the proper training to handle northern Ontario road conditions, especially in the winter.
"You shouldn't be scared for your life as you travel on northern highways," she said. "It's not rocket science to fix this problem."
On housing, Stiles said the NDP's strategy to build 300,000 "deeply affordable" homes across Ontario would include support for a "for-Indigenous, by-Indigenous" housing plan.
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