Tomorrow – Thursday October 6 – is the Ontario provincial election day. Why does this concern MGCI?

While only a small fraction of the student body is eligible to vote, the outcome of the provincial election will affect everyone in the school. Education , like transportation and healthcare, is controlled primarily at the provincial level of government.

Marc Garneau CI is in the Don Valley West riding, which stretches north-south from Highway 401 to roughly the East branch of the Don River, and east-west from roughly Don Mills Road to Yonge Street. Seven candidates are running to be the region’s MPP, and I thought it might be beneficial to give a brief profile of each runner and their platform:

Kathleen Wynne is the liberal candidate and incumbent. She has been the Don Valley West representative since 2003. She served as Minister of Education from 2003-2010, when she became minister of Transportation. So she’s super convenient to contact about school issues. She stands for general liberal things, and will hopefully challenge Rob Ford about public transit issues.

Andrea Mandel-Campbell is the conservative candidate. I’m not going to pretend that I know anything else about her. She’s pretty much a minion for Hudak, and seems reluctant to present a clear platform. But generally, education is an important issue for her. I assume she wants to cut social programmes and taxes.

Khalid Ahmed is the candidate for the NDP. He grew up in Flemo, and wants to resolve youth exposure to crime, improve community services, increase the job market, and fight discrimination against women. The NDP typically have only around five percent of support in this riding, so it is not very likely that Ahmed will actually win the seat. But hey, it’s nice to have a candidate who’s actually from Flemingdon Park!

Louis Fliss is running for the Green Party. He is interested primarily in family health issues, environmental issues, and connecting the two.

Soumen Deb represents the Freedom Party of Ontario. They are libertarians. Which means they want severely limited government. Basically, libertarians are to anarchists as nudists are to naked people. They’re middle class & organized so they appear less crazy.

Dimitris Kabitsis is the Communist Party candidate. He would like to expand universal medicare, make quality universal public and post-secondary education available to all, and switch the voting system from first past the post to proportional representation. Also, he’s communist.

Rosemary Waigh is one of only three members of the Vegan/Environmentalist Party of Canada. No kidding. The party has 126 fans on facebook. They want to eliminate government funding for all animal-based agriculture. Which is ironic because all three candidates are running in the GTA, where there is no agriculture. Other than that, they have a really solid platform: increasing preventative healthcare, subsidizing post-secondary education, and advocating rights for trans-people.