THUNDER BAY – Kathy Suutari is a big believer in individual freedoms.
She also wants to see big reforms in health-care and education, particularly when it comes to making it easier for parents who want to home-school their children to do so.
It’s why she’s found a home in the New Blue Party, an upstart political party that formed when former Conservative MPP Belinda Karahailos was dumped from caucus and decided to sit as an independent.
The party has vowed to put an end to all COVID-19 mandates and reform education, promising to remove “critical race theory and gender identity theory” from Ontario classrooms.
Rights and freedoms for all are important to everyone said Suutari, who nevertheless isn’t quite as anti-mandate as Karahailos and her husband, Jim Karahailos, the New Blue leader.
“I don’t necessarily mean taking away COVID mandates. Mandates are not laws, they’re just guidelines,’ said Suutari, running for the New Blue Party in Thunder Bay-Superior North.
“But I do believe that people have a choice with their own bodies and the right to religion, the right to protest. What the current government did with our protests on the border to me was just over the top. Federally what they did with the Emergencies Act was even more over the top.”
She also wants to push the provincial government to stand up to federal rules restricting the non-vaccinated from most commercial travel.
Suutari is also worried about transparency when it comes to hospital finances.
“There’s no accountability. Where are the detailed statements about where this money is going?”
Suutari said the best attribute of the New Blue Party is its candidates and leadership actually take the time to not only listen to people and their concerns, but to actually hear them.
“Representation for Thunder Bay, there’s none. People don’t have a voice. I’ve got houses on either side of me and of those two houses, people haven’t voted for a long time, because they don’t trust the system. I believe in order to have a change in the system, the people have got to have a voice,” Suutari said.
