THUNDER BAY – The legislature will resume sitting at Queen’s Park next Monday, and Lise Vaugeois, MPP for Thunder Bay-Superior North says she's been hard at work preparing for the trip down to Toronto.
“Lots of meetings with people and people coming to the office with concerns, so it's learning the issues as best as I can from people and then getting a sense of how best to use my role as a member of the opposition, and also representing our huge riding,” said Vaugeois.
“I would say the phone started ringing off the hook the day after the election, so we've been running as fast as we can from the from the word go. As you can imagine, there's just a lot of legwork involved in putting together an office and pulling together staff, and so on.”
Vaugeois identified several issues in the region that she’s very concerned about, particularly housing, a serious concern for many people in her riding.
“Housing... is an issue everywhere, whether you're talking Schreiber or Whitesand or Thunder Bay. Housing is a problem and it's a problem even to the extent that they can't always bring in professionals because there's nowhere to put them up, so we'll be looking at that,” she said.
"The throne speech and the budget are the big pieces in the first week, and if the budget is the same as the one that [was] brought in before the election, then we definitely have a lot of serious concerns [about] hidden cuts.”
Another concern for Vaugeois is health care, pointing to the increasingly common threat of emergency room closures across the region.
"Funding has been cut for such a long time. Nurses' wages have been frozen by Bill 124 at 1 per cent. And for people who have put themselves through the wringer to look after others during the pandemic to not have any acknowledgement, not any movement on their wages, and so on, and I'm sure that that is discouraging people from staying in the profession,” said Vaugeois.
“It needs to be attractive. It needs to be positive. It needs to be well supported. And we need to stop funnelling money into private enterprises that should be supporting public health care that every one of us can access.”
Vaugeois says that she takes her role as a member of the official opposition very seriously and she will use her time to make sure the people in Northwestern Ontario are heard.
“There's a regular rotation, and so that applies to everybody in our party, so I know that I will have frequent opportunities to speak, and I have questions ready to go,” she said.
“We get to do our inaugural speeches that will take place in the first week and I'm planning on making a case for why the rest of the province needs to pay attention to Northwestern Ontario and how much this part of the world contributes to the wealth of the rest of the province, because I don't think that's really appreciated or even noticed, and it needs to be.”
