YourVote 2025: Peterborough–Kawartha Provincial Election Debate

Thank you, Jay, and thank you to everyone who’s tuning in. My name is Lucas Graham. I am the Green Party candidate running for Peterborough–Kawartha.

The reason I’m running is because I think we need strong leadership that focuses not just on the next election cycle, but truly into the future. Health care, housing, affordable housing, the cost of living — they’ve all just been going out of control over the past many years.

I’m trying to kind of represent my generation, I suppose. My generation does not have the luxury of waiting around, because we’re going to have to live with some of the decisions that are being made right now, and those decisions currently are failing us. So that’s my position, and I’m looking forward to the debate.

There’s a couple things, actually. Over the last 32 months, if that’s the timeframe, I was a founding board member on Volunteer Peterborough, which is a kind of new startup nonprofit that connects organizations with volunteers. I’ve served as the communications chair for the Basic Income Peterborough Network. I got heavily involved in the Green Party, obviously, so that does take up part of my time as well.

And I’m growing my own business. It’s a digital marketing agency that works with nonprofits and sustainable small businesses, specifically anything that kind of has a bit more of a mission behind it. So, yeah, I’m pretty proud of all of that, and that’s where I’m coming from.

I spent my first week out canvassing with a generic pamphlet, really just trying to ask what was important face to face. I can look at the stats, but what really came out of that face-to-face contact was housing and affordability. Homelessness, of course, is a tangential sort of part of that.

I think those are the most important parts. We have a homelessness crisis in all of Ontario, but it’s particularly bad in Peterborough. We’ve got people being priced out of homes, of ever being able to own homes, and we’ve got seniors that are being priced out of the homes that they’ve lived in for a long time and are no longer able to afford it.

Shelter is a basic human right. Housing is a basic human right, and I think that’s the most important issue.

I guess what I can say about Mike Schreiner is that — maybe this isn’t the right word — but he’s scrappy. He’s got very limited resources and he’s still able to make a huge impact in Queen’s Park. He got in in 2018. We just got Aislinn Clancy in very recently as well. So the Greens are making headway; we’re making progress.

The thing about Mike is he has to work hard. He’s a hard worker because he doesn’t have the comfortability to just sit back in his seat and hide behind strategic voting or something like that. He has to actually work for his constituents. And we’re not whipped on our votes either, so he can actually represent his constituents, and so can other MPPs of the Greens.

He’s a hard worker, and he needs to be, and he proves it every day.

As I said earlier, I’m heavily involved with Volunteer Peterborough on their strategic board and also in the Basic Income Peterborough Network, so I imagine that I would devote more of my time to those two missions.

The reason I’m running, or one of the reasons, is that both of those initiatives really align very well with the Green platform. Basic income makes economic sense; it makes social sense. So instead of pushing it solely on the nonprofit front, I’m trying to push it from the political angle as well.

If I weren’t running for MPP, I would be continuing with my original mission of pushing it from a different direction.

If you haven’t seen it yet, our fully costed platform just came out this morning. I’m hearing a lot of similarities in what some of the NDP and Liberal platforms are all about, very notably what Adam’s been saying about getting internationally trained doctors. You said, I think, 1,600 spots; we’re proposing 3,500 of those.

We’re also going to be getting 25,200 new nurses through school. We’re trying to increase enrollment by 10% year over year, and we’re going to be getting those 25,200 by 2030 — that’s the goal there.

So it sounds like we’re on the same page; we’re just pushing at it at different levels.

It is a very interconnected issue, so we’re going to be working on a couple different fronts. We’re looking at getting 60,000 units across the province of supportive housing — housing that has guaranteed access to addiction and mental health care.

We’ve got the safe injection sites, but those are not a solution in and of themselves. They keep people alive, and that is very good. We can’t condone anything else, but we also need to have other measures to help people with every stage of their addiction journey: rehabilitation and addiction supports from nurse-led clinics and everything like that.

I think we can sum it up by saying that connection is really the most important thing: having connection between the supports, but also having connection between the supports and the individuals who are experiencing addiction. I’ve said before that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it is connection.

I think you said the word holistic. I think that is a really good word. Comprehensive is another word. We’re going to take it on on a lot of different fronts.

First of all, we can’t really lie down to Trump’s tariff tantrums. We need to prioritize trade happening and business happening within our own communities, within our own province, within our own country. So that does mean taking down barriers of trade between the different provinces, but it also means trying to keep things as local as possible, trying to create circular economy systems where things that you purchase and consume are made right there in your neighbourhood. You’re keeping the money in your own local economy instead of sending it out to some conglomerate, usually a U.S. one as well.

So there’s definitely a sense of national pride in trying to buy Canadian-made. In the short and the long term, I think the strategy is the same, just at different levels. We need to stop with the trend of trying to export all of the cost and all of the negative externalities and everything like that — trying to globalize at the expense of our local communities.

In line with a lot of what you said, including the very first thing, which was I didn’t want Donald Trump to win either. In terms of job creation, I think it’s a multifaceted approach. We’ve got heavy investment in green industry, the green economy; trying to support local small businesses and local entrepreneurs, not just providing tax breaks for large corporations and hoping that it trickles down or something like that.

We’re going to invest in infrastructure to help connect people with jobs: transit, broadband internet out to rural regions that might not have very fast internet yet, which is crazy in this year. And there will be a lot of investment in the retrofitting of homes and construction of homes that utilize green practices, and so those will create a lot of jobs as well.

We’re talking about not having a whole bunch of land, and yet we are still sprawling outwards in terms of single-family residential zones because that’s all we have zoning for. We’ve got about 85 to 90% of our residential land zoned for single-family dwellings, and then the remaining 10% is for multifamily dwellings, which get bought up by luxury condos. So there’s no other types of multifamily dwelling that can really compete with that.

So I guess I’m going to say we have the land, or we had the land, but we insist on spreading out. We insist on stretching our municipal taxes very thinly because we need to stretch our roads out there, our sewers, our electrical lines and other utilities. It ends up being the case that anyone who lives out there might not necessarily be kind of paying their own way in terms of their property taxes. They’re getting subsidized by downtown cores, which have business hubs, and those are the main revenue generators for the city.

If we are spreading out, then we need more cars. There’s more need for road maintenance. We need more parking downtown. Parking lots are not financially — they don’t make any money compared to a business.

So we had the land, and we’ve decided to spread it out because that is the most profitable model for developers, instead of intensifying land that’s already zoned within the city limits for residential development. We just need to change the type of zoning, and that is not something that the provincial government currently allows, and it’s something that we would change.

I think Jen said it very well: re-uploading a lot of the costs that have been downloaded over the past seven, even 15 years, to the municipalities. They are having their focus drawn in so many different directions; they’re having their budget drawn in so many different directions because there’s so many things that used to be under the provincial government’s purview that are being downloaded onto the municipality, and social services is a big one there.

I do also want to echo the police situation. I think it’s the role of the provincial government to make life easier on our police force because, as Jen said, people don’t commit crimes if they are well supported. If they don’t have addictions because they are well supported, if they don’t have mental health issues because they are recovering because they are well supported, if they have a roof over their head and food to eat, then they’re not going to commit crimes that are going to require police intervention.

So what we would do instead is fund alternatives to police, like a mental health crisis team, an addiction crisis team, other things that could be sent out in response to any of those crisis calls, because it’s not fair to the people that are experiencing those crises and it’s not fair to our police force either. They’re not trained to respond to those sorts of issues.

I think I can sum it up by saying the role of the MPP will be a listener, and just to really be a present voice in the community and a present ear in the community as well. We want to hear from the city councillors, but also the citizens themselves, so that we can make the best judgments.

If you have a sec, I’m going to pop up downtown and ask some people whether those targets are working for them. I would say no, they’re not. They are not ambitious enough. There’s people — real people — outside right now in the cold, and any sort of numbers on the page, that’s not going to be sufficient for someone who doesn’t have a roof tonight.

So I think we need to immediately work on supportive housing initiatives. Convert any unused municipal buildings into temporary shelters, or even long-term shelters over the long run. Any provincially owned land could be leased interest-free to nonprofits or co-ops or anything like that.

You know, the PATH network, the Peterborough Action for Tiny Homes, that’s a good small-scale example of something that could be a lot bigger. And it’s another example of a responsibility of the government that has been downloaded onto a nonprofit in this case.

So no, I don’t think that they are sufficient.

I guess I’ll start off by posing the question: what are we transporting? Are we transporting people or goods? Because for transporting people, highways — even this highway — are not a very efficient way of doing that.

I think, and this might be more relevant to the second question about the other highway, but if we take all the money that we’re trying to spend on creating new highways and put it towards something like a train, like high-speed rail down the Windsor–Quebec City corridor, where 90% of the population lives anyway in a straight line, then I think that’s going to be much more efficient in getting people where they need to go quickly, more comfortably as well. They can have a bathroom break; they can read a book while they’re moving at 200 kilometres an hour or whatever.

And that would also solve all of the problems with any sort of gridlock on the 401. That would be pretty much just two demographics: it’d be truck drivers and people who enjoy driving. And the people who enjoy driving, they should love trains because it takes people who hate driving off the road.

It would really take down congestion because the more highways you make, the more lanes you make, there’s a phenomenon where there’s just going to be more people who travel on those, and you get congestion again in very short order.

So I’m going to kind of sidestep the question a little bit in that case, because I don’t think that it’s necessary to be investing in new highways, or we don’t really need to change anything about the ones that we have, because they’re already suitable if we take down the number of people travelling on them with an alternative that’s more efficient.

No.

Sure. I’ll just try to keep it brief; a lot has been said that I have on my docket here.

I think you’re completely right in that the situation is kind of like a Catch-22 for the postsecondary educational institutions. They weren’t getting adequate funding. Their tuition was frozen, which — yes, if they had allowed the tuition to keep going up, that would have put a burden on students for sure. But that is kind of ignoring the fact that the provincial government can still provide additional funding to help with that.

We’ve entered a situation where there are several Conservative premiers around the country, and for the longest time they were pushing for lower barriers to immigration and higher thresholds for international students coming in because, you know, corporate donors, they like those sorts of people to come in. They like that labour that doesn’t know some of the labour laws locally, that are limited to a certain number of hours that they are allowed to work. And, yeah, there’s a reason that conglomerates like Tim Hortons or whatever, you see a lot of an overrepresentation of international students working there.

I think that it’s unfortunate for the international students. It’s unfortunate for the domestic students. Nobody’s really winning. The international students are feeling tricked, that they have been sold this idea that Canada is a fantastic place to better themselves. And it can be, and it is, but that’s not the reality of it right now because there’s not enough housing, there’s not enough supports to support all those people.

Then, of course, the federal government does have to step in. They have to put limits. I think the number of international students before the [unclear] government was about 80,000. It went up to, I think, 230,000 international students, and then is now blocked at 180,000, so it’s still a very significant increase in the number of students who are here. So there’s that component.

I kind of ignored my comment about being brief, but I guess I will also, just because that has been largely covered, say that we are here to help with student loans. And I think something that would be very helpful with students as they’re graduating out is to just invest in local economies like Peterborough, get jobs to actually keep students here. You called our two educational institutions gems, but unfortunately a lot of students — ourselves not included, I guess — they go to metropolitan hubs like Toronto or Ottawa because they are looking for jobs, because we are not able to accommodate that. We don’t have the support and we don’t have the housing.

So I think it needs to be a comprehensive approach so that we can keep youth talent in areas like Peterborough, university towns, because otherwise there is a brain drain. There’s an exodus of talent and educated individuals, and that’s unfortunate.