THUNDER BAY – Dan Criger says the Ontario Party stands for family, freedom and faith.
The Cobden, Ont. resident, running as a parachute candidate in Thunder Bay-Atikokan, says he hopes to help restore those values at Queen’s Park and in the way the province is governed if his party is elected to run Ontario in the June 2 election.
Criger, who worked at a grocery store in Thunder Bay in the mid-1970s, says many of the problems that existed in the city 45 years ago still exist today. Nothing has been done and none of the parties that are routinely elected to run the show have a willingness to make change happen.
The Ontario Party will, said Criger, an independent federal candidate in 2019 in Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke who plans to move to the Northern Ontario riding should he be the winning candidate next month.
Health care tops his list of areas in need of rapid change.
“Back in 1976, the province of Ontario had 6.9 beds per 1,000 people in the province. Now the population of the province has increased dramatically from then to now, but right now there are only 2.3 beds per 1,000 people,” Criger said.
“The government is spending more and more money on health care, but they’re also decreasing and decreasing and decreasing the services available to people.”
Criger said too many people lack a family physician and far too much time is spent by patients waiting in hospital emergency rooms in order to get health care.
“That is no longer acceptable,” he said. “The people in the province deserve far better for the money that they’re paying.”
The other parties offer nothing but rhetoric on health-care and most, if not all, major issues.
“There’s a lot of talk, but no substance,” said Criger, a retired businessman, married to his wife Carolyn
“This has been happening for the past 45 years. They’ve used whatever the most popular divisive issue is at the time to divide the people of the province so they can go in and do what they want to do, with their ideology and just throw out the windows whatever they’ve said to people.”
Criger said there are all kinds of social issues in Thunder Bay that need attention, from homelessness and substance abuse, to name just two. They were issues four decades ago too, he said.
“It’s still there. There’s homelessness, there’s poverty, there’s low-income people looking for jobs who have basically just dropped off the radar, who have stopped looking for jobs because there are not enough there,” he said.
